govern-research-design

Research Design (govern-research-design)

Governance welcomes any rigorous approach but is demanding about each. The design must credibly connect the argument (govern-theory-building) to comparative/institutional evidence and rule out the strongest rival institutional explanation. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that matches your work. (For the conceptual contribution, this is the empirical-design variant.)

When to trigger

• Specifying identification, case selection, or comparative design
• A reviewer questioned causal claims, case choice, country selection, or an institutional confound
• Choosing governance/institutions measures (V-Dem, QoG, WGI, etc.) and defending them
• Justifying why the design adjudicates the rival account from govern-literature-positioning

(a) Comparative / causal designs (governance & institutions)

• Identification first. State the estimand and the assumptions that license a causal reading (parallel trends, exclusion, continuity, ignorability). Defend them; don't assert them.
• Reform DiD / event study. When a reform rolls out across units/countries over time, use modern staggered-adoption estimators (Callaway–Sant'Anna, Sun–Abraham, de Chaisemartin–D'Haultfœuille, Borusyak et al.) — not naive TWFE, which is biased under heterogeneous/dynamic effects. Show pre-trends and event-study leads/lags.
• Cross-national panels. Justify fixed effects (country, year), the level of clustering, and what is identified off within-country vs. between-country variation.
• IV / RDD where applicable. IV: first-stage strength, exclusion, weak-IV-robust inference. RDD (e.g., electoral or threshold-based reform rules): density/manipulation tests, bandwidth robustness.

(b) Qualitative / comparative-historical

• Case selection by design logic (most/least likely, typical, deviant, paired comparison) — not convenience. Say what each case is a case of, and how the selection adjudicates the argument.
• Process tracing with explicit tests (hoop, smoking-gun, straw-in-the-wind, doubly-decisive); state what evidence would have disconfirmed the argument in each case.
• QCA where used. Justify calibration of set membership, the truth table, and consistency/coverage thresholds; report and interpret limited diversity, not just the solution formula.
• Source transparency. Archives, interviews, fieldnotes — plan how they will be documented and cited (see govern-transparency-and-data).

(c) Mixed methods

• State the integration logic up front: does the qualitative work generate, test, or explain the quantitative result (or vice versa)? Sequencing and the role of each strand must be deliberate.
• Show where the strands converge and own where they diverge — divergence is informative, not a flaw to bury.

(d) Measuring governance & institutions (caveats)

• V-Dem, QoG, WGI, Bertelsmann, ICRG, etc. are estimates, not facts. Report the version, the construct each index actually captures, and the measurement model's uncertainty (e.g., V-Dem posterior credible intervals). Do not treat composite indices as ground truth.
• WGI in particular aggregates perceptions and is endogenous to outcomes — flag this when it sits near the dependent or treatment variable.
• Show results are not an artifact of one index: triangulate across measures where the concept allows.

The rival-institutional adjudication move (Governance-specific)

For the strongest rival institutional explanation, write one sentence: "If the rival were true rather than my argument, the cases/data would look like ___; instead they look like ___." A design that cannot distinguish your account of governing from the leading institutional alternative has not yet identified the contribution.

Anti-patterns

• Naive TWFE on a staggered reform; clustering below the level of treatment assignment
• "Causal" language on a cross-national correlation the design only supports as association
• Convenience country selection dressed up as theory-driven case logic
• Treating V-Dem/WGI/QoG scores as exact, ignoring index uncertainty and construct mismatch
• A design that cannot rule out the leading rival institutional account

Output format

【Mode】comparative-causal / qualitative / comparative-historical / mixed
【Estimand or claim】what is being identified/shown
【Key assumption(s)】and how each is defended
【Governance measures】index + version + uncertainty/construct caveat
【Rival ruled out】the rival-institutional adjudication sentence
【Robustness/sensitivity】planned checks
【Next】govern-data-analysis

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — staggered-DiD/IV/RDD packages, QCA/process-tracing tools, governance indices
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — pre-analysis plan as supplementary material; transparency notes