Literature Reviews

1. Literature Reviews And all that entails…

2. Purpose(It’s that little flame that lights a fire under your…) • There are two questions we should be able to answer after reading your lit review: • Framing: What is the existing debate surrounding your research question? • Critical Engagement: Where do you stand in that debate (i.e. Who are you arguing against)? • In other words, a lit review frames your argument by placing you in the middle of a disagreement with other academics.

3. Framing a Debate • The No-no’s • Avoid laundry list reviews: “Person A said this, person B said this, then person C said that…” • Avoid train-of-thought reviews: “To explain how Indian politicians mobilized voters, I first explored the ontology of what it means to be a ‘politician’” • Avoid mapping-the-history reviews: “To understand the causes of suicide terrorism, we must first explore the history behind suicide attacks”

4. Framing a Debate Which sources are relevant to framing a debate? Which sources are in conversation with your project? • If the author is asking the same research question, then that is a relevant source to include in your lit review. • Ex: Both of you are talking about how natural resources influence violence levels in civil war

5. Framing a Debate • Both of you are talking about the same Dependent Variable (or functionally similar dependent variables). Ex: Your question: “What are the causes of democratization in post-Communist European states?” • Source 1: “The impact of the Cold War on democratization in post-Communist Poland” • Source 2: “How labor unions brought about the collapse of Communism in Europe.” • Source 3: “Types of funding strategies of right-wing parties in post-Communist Europe.” Sources 1 and 2 would be included in the lit review.

6. Framing a Debate • Your research question: What explains the rise of drug cartels in Mexico? • Source 1: “Drug cartel X became prominent in Colombia because of reason A” • Source 2: “Drug cartel Y uses extra-lethal violence against civilians because of reason B” • Source 3: “Drug cartel Z is better than other cartels at fighting the Mexican government because of reason C” Sources 1 and 3 would be included in the lit review.

7. Framing a Debate • Aim for synthesis over summary • Categorize authors’ works into separate schools of thought. • Consider how authors categorize each other. This is often a good guideline for how you should be framing a debate. • Briefly describe what a school of thought is arguing for in a general sense and move on. It is okay to summarize one or two prominent works in each school of thought if it helps illustrate the argument better. See: Ziblatt

8. Critical Engagement Your literature review is a synthesis of a debate which YOU are participating in. Therefore, you WILL be disagreeing with someone. • Which categories of scholars are you disagreeing with? And WHY???? • “Who are you going to make cry at the end of your argument?”

9. Types of Engagement • The Trump Policy: “Everyone else is wrong. I am the only person who is right.” • VERY difficult to pull off and usually directed towards niche literatures that were never particularly influential in academic circles. • Also more common with “new” topics that have not been studied for very long.

10. Example Dara Kay Cohen: “There is little agreement about why [wartime sexual violence] occurs. Some scholars argue that rape occurs in all or most armed conflicts, whereas others contend that it is limited in some conflicts and widespread in others… The evidence does not support much of the conventional wisdom about the causes of wartime rape: it is not more likely to occur during ethnic wars, genocides, or in countries with greater gender inequality.” Cohen, “Explaining Rape During Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980-2009)” American Political Science Review, vol. 107, 3 (2013)

11. Types of Engagement • The Arrow to the Heart: “Recently published influential study was wrong all along!” • Like the Trump policy, but more narrowly focused. • Timing matters, the older and more obsolete the study, the less people care if it’s wrong. • Potentially an avenue for offending some powerful people.

12. Example Robert Pape: “Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott’s study is seriously flawed. Practically none of the claimed 40 successes of economic sanctions stands up to examination. Eighteen were actually settled by direct or indirect uses of force; in 8 cases there is no evidence that the target made the demanded concessions; 6 do not qualify as instances of economic sanctions; and 3 are indeterminate. Of HSE’s 115 cases, only 5 are appropriately considered successes.” Pape, “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work” International Security, vol. 22, 2 (1997)

13. Types of Engagement • The Bad Data: “Previous authors have relied on dataset X which is fundamentally flawed; my better data resolves this measurement problem” • More common in quantitative studies • Be sure to tease out the theoretical implications behind the use of flawed data.

14. Example Andreas Wimmer, Lars Erik-Cederman, Brian Min: “[Past studies of ethnic conflict] use a linguistic fractionalization index… This is a poor indicator for capturing the political dynamics associated with ethnic conflict. First, not all ethnic groups matter for politics. Second, ethnic conflicts are not the outcome of everyday encounters between individuals; they are the result of interactions between the state and ethnopolitical movements that challenge state authority” Wimmeret al. “Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Dataset” American Sociological Review, vol. 74, 2 (2009)

15. Types of Engagement • The Empirical Puzzle: “Previous literatures have been unable to explain this unique case; MY theory can explain it” • More common in qualitative studies, but also seen regularly in quantitative studies • Usually leads to a theory-building exercise; less common in studies that engage in hypothesis-testing

16. Example Daniel Ziblatt: “The expectations of [power-centered theories] are clear: the militarily stronger the political center vis a vis the regions, the less likely a federal structure, and conversely, the militarily weaker the center vis a vis the regions, the more likely a federal structure. But in Germany and Italy, we have a set of cases that runs directly counter to these theoretical expectations… Why did the militarily powerful state of Prussia […] establish a federal system while the less militarily powerful state of Piedmont […] established a unitary system?” Ziblatt, Structuring the State, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006)

17. Types of Engagement • The Flawed Assumption: “The previous literature assumes X, which is logically flawed” • Very common, although not always phrased in the same way. • ALL theories have to make simplifying assumptions about the world, which means there will ALWAYS be some falsifying evidence that does not conform to a theoretical assumption.

18. Example Barbara Geddes: “Discussions of the state usually assume that states behave as unitary actors. In reality, they often do not… Some parts of the state may express independent preferences while others, often the larger parts, reflect societal interests. Discussions of ‘the’ state offer little theoretical leverage for understanding the sources of the competing interests of different actors within the state.” Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

19. Types of Engagement • The Flawed Causal Logic: “Past theories argue that mechanism X is explaining variation in phenomenon A; I argue that it is actually mechanism Y which explains variation in phenomenon A” • Very common and the basis of most engagements with literatures • Almost always paired in conjunction with one of the previous methods of critical engagement.

20. Example Brian Lai & Dan Slater: “Our institutional logic also departs from the intuitive normative argument for why military-backed regimes might be more belligerent than party-backed regimes: Soldiers in power must be keen to resolve diplomatic disputes through armed means. Yet what defines a military regime in institutional terms is not the personal background of its leadership, but the absence of any effective party institutions to help manage elite factionalism and curb mass dissent… This suggests that military regimes are not more aggressive because they exhibit a “cult of the offensive,” but institutions of the offensive.” Lai & Slater, “Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes” AJPS vol. 50, 1 (2006)

21. Type of Engagement • The Overlooked Phenomenon: “Other arguments do not pay enough attention to this important political dynamic.” • Obviously, this “overlooked phenomenon” needs to be justified as worth studying. No one cares about the correlation between Mario Kart sales and counterinsurgency success. • Oftentimes, an overlooked phenomenon is also presented as an empirical puzzle. • Conversely, an overlooked phenomenon can also be presented as a solution to an empirical puzzle.

22. Example Catherine Boone: “Africa’s rising tide of land-related conflict is a phenomenon that is very poorly understood… Much discussion of land conflict conveys the impression that natural-resource disputes in Africa stems from the weakness (or absence) of state intervention in rural property relations… Yet in many cases, this is clearly not so… Highly politicized land conflict has been central in recent political histories of some of the richest and most intensively governed regions of Africa’s strongest states.” Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

23. Etiquette • Avoid “straw-manning” another person’s argument • Straw-manning is very easy to do especially when trying to criticize another person. • Imagine yourself in the shoes of the author you are criticizing, would you think you had been given a fair reading from your own critique?

24. Etiquette • Be polite (even when the other person doesn’t deserve it) • Academics are vain people who hold perennial grudges over the most minute offenses (especially if they have tenure). • Avoid offending those who stand above you in the hierarchy and pay due deference to the works that everybody cites. Missing a single prominent citation can kill the funding prospects of a research proposal. • When you become a tenured professor, you can be as snarky as you want in your lit reviews.

25. Etiquette • Be constructive in your critiques • Do not criticize another author for doing something that your project is not fixing. (Ex: “So-and-so does not look at China as a case study; my project will focus on Japan as a case study) • Remember that in the end you are providing a SOLUTION to a problem with the existing literature. Simply diagnosing an illness is not going to be sufficient; you are expected to provide a treatment as well!

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