ABSTRACT
By any reckoning, the search for causal relations is one of the major preoccupations of many political scientists. Paradoxically, this concern is often masked by less demanding words—“correlate,” “factor,” “independent variable,” “precondition,” “contributor”—but at base, much empirical work appears to aim at the construal of cause-effect relationships. This goal, it should be noted, is not uncontroversial. Considerable debate exists among philosophers of social science as to whether genuinely causal relations do or can exist among social interactions (see, e.g., Bhaskar 1979; von Wright 1971). While acknowledging the importance of these issues, we wish in this chapter to bypass that dispute, and to focus instead on some of the more immediate difficulties in the analysis of causality—difficulties that may occasion some of the circumlocutions referred to above.
