Mediações: Revista de Ciências Sociais (Dec 2013)
Casuality and mechanisms in political science
Abstract
This paper stands that Political Science empirical research designs should be crafted in order to produce falsifiable causal inferences. Infer as a process of using available information to know about unavailable data. Causal in the sense that the occurrence of x should changes the probability of occurrence of y. And falsifiable in order that at any moment the inference could be demonstrated wrong by a concurring research design. In addition, explanations should identify the causal mechanism that links explanans and explanandum.
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