The idea of social causation is a difficult one, as we dig more deeply into it. What does it mean to say that "poor education causes increased risk of delinquency" or "population growth causes technology change" or "the existence of paramilitary organizations contributed to the rise of German fascism"? What sorts of things can function …
Problems with causal mechanisms
There are a couple of problems with the theory of causal mechanisms that will be difficult to address. Jim Mahoney raises a general concern in "Beyond Correlational Analysis" -- there is no consensus about how to define a mechanism. But there are more specific problems as well. One is the issue raised by Johannes Persson …
Meso powers and causal mechanisms
I've argued in earlier posts for several ideas: Meso-level social structures have causal powers. Meso-level social structures must have microfoundations. Causal relations are carried out by causal mechanisms. Are these claims consistent with each other? An earlier post argues for the consistency of (1) and (2). Here I will address the relation between (1) and (3): what …
Are there meso-level social causes?
Social structures and other social "things" are ontologically peculiar in some ways. Most especially, they are abstract, distributed, and non-material. We can't put a culturally dominant food aversion or a group prejudice in a box and weigh it. And yet many of us want to say that social structures are "real", not merely theoretical constructs. …
Macro causes of European fascism
Michael Mann's book Fascists makes use of causal claims at a range of levels, from the macro to the micro, to explain the emergence of European fascism. Here is a passage that highlights four macro-level causes of fascism: The interwar period in Europe was the setting that threw up most of the self-avowed fascists and saw them …
Are mechanisms complex?
Source: D. Little, "Causal explanation in the social sciences" (link) A causal mechanism is (i) a particular configuration of conditions and processes that (ii) always or normally leads from one set of conditions to an outcome (iii) through the properties and powers of the events and entities in the domain of concern. This captures the …
Microfoundations and meso causation
I take the view that social causation requires microfoundations. And I hold that meso causal explanations are legitimate. How are these two views compatible? The key is the role that we expect reasoning about micro-level events to play in the explanation itself. The various versions of methodological individualism -- microeconomics, analytical sociology, Elster's theories of …
Recent thinking about scientific explanation
What do we want from a scientific explanation? Is there a single answer to this question, or is the field of explanation fundamentally heterogeneous, perhaps by discipline or by research community? Do biologists explain outcomes differently from physicists or sociologists? Is a good explanation within the Anglo-American traditions of science also a good explanation in …
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More on meso causation
A recent post considered the question, do organizations have causal powers? There I argued that they do, in a number of ways. Here I'd like to return to these claims and see how they disaggregate onto subvening circumstances, including especially patterns of individual and group activity. The italicized phrases are extracted from the earlier post. First, the …
Causal narratives about historical actors
A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome …
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