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This chapter examines how translation problems are manifested across the qualitative and quantitative cultures for issues related to concepts and measurement. In the quantitative research paradigm, one speaks of variables and indicators. X and Y are normally latent, unobserved variables for which one needs (quantitative) indicators. In practice, quantitative scholars might fuse the variable and the indicator into one entity. Qualitative researchers, on the other hand, tend to use the variable-indicator language which causes a translation problem and does not capture research practices in the qualitative culture. The chapter first considers the notion of “membership function,” which is important in the fuzzy-set approach to concepts, before discussing a fundamental principle of semantic transformations in the qualitative culture: the Principle of Unimportant Variation. It also explains the relationship between scale types and membership functions in fuzzy-set analysis.

Chapter 2 presents a fuzzy-set analysis (fs/QCA) of fourteen West European countries during the 1990s. Comparing the extent of government involvement and the policy scope of social pacts, the chapter measures variation in the degree to which these countries relied on concertation as a mechanism of economic adjustment. The analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for pacts helps answer two key questions: why were pacts struck in some countries but not others; and second, is there more than one causal pathway behind these concerted agreements? The analysis reveals three pathways to pacts and demonstrates that a high economic problem load generates pacts only when combined with particular political and institutional conditions, namely the prevalence of electorally weak governments and moderately strong unions.

Chapter 7 analyzes the external validity of the argument by using a large-N cross-national analysis combining fuzzy-set analyses with simple econometric models. The descriptive and explanatory framework is extended to four comparative vignettes, testing the framework’s suitability for cases lacking the structural and historical conditions found in Chile and Uruguay. This exercise complements the most-similar systems design applied in the book with a most-different systems exploration, analyzing the segmentation of electoral appeals in the following cases: the PT(Brazil), the MAS in Bolivia, ARENA in El Salvador, and the BJP in India. In addition to permitting the testing of specific propositions identified in Chapter 6, the four shadow cases also support a crucial causal claim made in the book: in unequal societies, parties can prosper by simultaneously segmenting and strategically harmonizing diversified appeals to socially distinct constituencies.

The chapter presents a new framework for categorizing economic growth models and applies it to twenty-eight OECD countries from 1995 to 2016. The framework draws on three fundamental ways in which economies can benefit from additional demand: the private sector (households and companies) can spend more than its income, the public sector can spend more than its revenues, or the economy sells more abroad than it imports. The empirical section uses fuzzy-set ideal type analysis to identify the combinations in which advanced economies used these three ways of boosting demand in three subperiods between 1995 and 2016. The results show that most economies use at least one of the three sources of extra demand to tackle the era of low growth. At the same time, there are clear differences in growth models between groups of countries. These are in line with clusters that the literature commonly identifies due to their institutional similarities. The growth models in this chapter are therefore outcomes of differences in growth regimes.

A new development in the welfare regime literature is the attempt to move from inductive welfare regime typologies to purely analytical regime ideal types. However, empirical analyses involving welfare regime ideal types are still rare. This chapter offers a methodological discussion of the applicability of an ideal-typical welfare regime approach in empirical research. Using the example of activation, it is shown how welfare regime ideal types can enrich social policy research in at least three areas: comparative analyses of welfare systems/programmes, the tracing of regime shifts over time, and the identification of regime-inherent frictions as potential sources of regime change. The chapter concludes that an ideal-typical welfare regime conception is able to mitigate a number of shortcomings afflicting traditional comparative research in the social policy domain, such as a distorting influence of outliers and inductively derived regime boundaries.

This chapter looks at another technique that has grown in popularity – qualitative comparative analysis – in the social sciences to analyse situations with comparative rigour through access to medium-N. In this, the author explores the logic of Boolean and fuzzy set analysis and then explores any applications to policy learning identified. This chapter will offer an assessment of the limitations to the technique but also the enormous potential it holds.

This chapter provides a case study of the most common and particularly successful cash transfer programme, ‘social’ (non-contributory) pensions, based on a unique database that covers all social pensions in all countries of the global South, with differentiated variables. The chapter charts the massive spread of social pensions since the 1990s, and investigates if and how social pensions have created social citizenship rights for older persons. While ‘universal’ (non-means-tested) social pensions are often seen as embodying social citizenship rights, in this chapter a more complex social citizenship index is constructed. Using this index, a fuzzy set analysis reveals that the contribution of social pensions to social citizenship cuts across the distinction ‘universal’ vs. means-tested. Moreover, social pensions are located in the overall arrangement of old-age security in a country, giving rise to four models of social citizenship in old age.