The design-based revolution in comparative politics

Is aerial bombardment an effective counter-insurgency tactic? Do immigrants depress local wages? Does the presence of natural resources harm democratic consolidation? Answering questions such as these requires the uncovering of general patterns of cause and effect. Social scientists have been attempting to put this search for causal inference on a sure philosophical and methodological footing at least since Émile Durkheim’s pioneering research on suicide in the nineteenth century, but progress has been slow, coming in fits and starts. Even the diffusion of computing technology and the modelling revolution it brought about did not solve the problem. However, the last decade or so has seen one of the most exciting developments in the history of causal inference in the social sciences for generations.