Welcome to my personal homepage! I am Professor for Methods of Comparative Political Research at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics at the University of Cologne. My research interests are social science methods with an emphasis on case studies, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), and multimethod research. Substantively, I work on political parties.
New
2-week course on case studies and process tracing at ECPR Summer School 2019
I am offering course on single-case and comparative case studies and process tracing at the ECPR Summer School in Budapest this year (July 29-August 9). The course takes a comprehensive approach toward case studies and covers matters of causation, case selection, case comparison, the use and interpretation of sources and how to give your study a Bayesian spin (if you like). Registration is open, early bird discount until April 17. [course webpage and plan]
3-day workshop on QCA at the ICSPR Summer Program 2019
I am offering a course on Qualitative Comparative Analysis from June 17-19 (Mon-Wed) at the ICSPR Summer Program 2019. It covers the main elements of a QCA study and shows how to implement empirical QCA research in RStudio. Prior knowledge of QCA or RStudio is useful, but not required. [course information]
Published: “Clarifying the relationship between theories of causation and social science methods for causal inference”
The article is co-authored with Christina Zuber and advance access Sociological Methods & Research. [accepted preprint; replication material]
Updated working paper on relationship between crisp ses, fuzzy sets and consistency in QCA
I have written a working paper on the relationship between the choice of crisp and fuzzy sets and the consequences for finding a consistent set relation. Contrary to a commonly held view (I think it is a commonly held view), consistency values are not necessarily more conservative for fuzzy sets than crisp sets.
