No offense at all - you are exactly right

Research transparency has become even more important with the growing role of AI in research, which is leading journals to require AI transparency statements.

Thanks Ajay for your attention to these issues (even us dinosaurs can meme).

The other important development is the move toward analytic transparency and data access transparency, led by Moravcsik, Elman, Büthe, Jacobs, and many others. See the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations in Perspectives on Politics 2021.

My best treatment of typological theorizing is in the 2024 open access Handbook of Institutional Economics, here:

researchgate.net/publication/389911180_New_Developments_in_Case_Study_Methods_for_Institutional_Economics

It has not received as much attention as our discussion of process tracing, but students find it very useful when I teach it.

Part of the problem is that we did not lay it out as clearly and fully as I have in recent years.

I would add two important innovations to those Ajay discusses, in addition to formal Bayesian process tracing.

One is typological theorizing, which Alex George and I outlined in our book, and which clarifies high order interactions and helps in case selection.

Moving from these issues being misunderstood and contested to being taken for granted was huge progress.

Clearing up those misconceptions paved the way for innovative work on qualitative methods that did not have to revisit those earlier debates.

For example, most now understand that there is a clear logic to qualitative methods, and it is Bayesian, not frequentist.

Seems pretty basic now, but lots of people misunderstood this into the early 2000s.

This included not just my work with Alex George, but also work by Collier and Brady, Mahoney, Gerring, Goertz, Seawright, Elman, and many others.

As a result, both quant and qual methodologists now have a better understanding of qualitative methods.

Ajay is absolutely right that the recent work has been able to sidestep a lot of foundational debates and get right to the business of outlining new qualitative methods.

Those of us who engaged on these issues in 1990 -2005 had to clear up a lot of misconceptions on qualitative methods.

That didn’t take long:

Politico:

‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,’ Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social”

Exactly - Vietnam and Thailand are two of the big winners here