Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method

As a result of a recent and highly prominent methodological debate (King, Keohane, and Verba, 1994; Tarrow, 1995; Brady and Collier, 2004; George and Bennett, 2005) a widespread consensus has emerged about the necessity of es-tablishing bridges between the quantitative and the qualitative approaches to empirical research in political science. In this article, we discuss the use of the synthetic control method (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003; Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller, 2010) as a way to bridge the quantitative/qualitative divide in comparative politics. The synthetic control method provides a systematic way to chose comparison units in comparative case studies. This systemati-zation (advocated by King, Keohane, and Verba, 1994, among others) opens the door to precise quantitative inference in small-sample comparative studies, without precluding the application of qualitative approaches. That is, bor- rowing a colorful expression from Tarrow (1995), the synthetic control method allows researchers to put qualitative esh on quantitative bones". We illus-trate the main ideas behind the synthetic control method with an application where we study the economic impact of the 1990 German reuni_cation in West Germany.

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