ABSTRACT
Fortunately, over the last decade or so, the importance and intricacies of concept formation in the social sciences have received growing interest. Based on the seminal writings by Giovanni Sartori (1970, 1984), this debate has been considerably infl uenced by David Collier and his collaborators.1 Researchers can now make use of a coherent set of tools and a reasonably unifi ed language that go well beyond Humpty Dumpty’s a posteriori rules (Gerring 1999: 361) of concept formation. Key to understanding concept formation à la Sartori, Collier, and collaborators is that it is taking place at different ‘levels of abstraction’ (Sartori 1970, 1984), or ‘levels of generality’ (Collier and Mahon 1993). Crudely summarizing this sophisticated literature, these levels are: (1) the background concept at the highest level of generality, comprising the task of choosing one of the different basic meanings of the term to be conceptualized; (2) the systematized concept for which the task is to choose the realm(s) of social reality one must look at in order to fi nd the most appropriate indicators for the background concept; and (3) further down on the ladder of generality the systematized concept is operationalized by empirically measurable indicators. Throughout the following discussion, I use these tools in order to form the concepts of CoD.
