Qualitative comparative analysis, shaming, and international regime effectiveness

The article presents and applies a set-theoretic comparative technique, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), to a string of case studies on shaming as a strategy for improving the effectiveness of international regimes for resource management. This technique is particularly attractive when the number of cases available is greater than what the researcher can reliably handle by narrative comparison, yet too low to support statistical procedures. QCA can capture causal conjunctions, even in small-to-intermediate-N situations, primarily because it permits the introduction of simplifying assumptions in a way that maintains a clear connection to the underlying cases — thus allowing substantive evaluation of their plausibility. A more recent fuzzy-set version lifts two limitations of the crisp-set version of QCA examined here (i.e., that variables must be dichotomous, and that the analysis makes no allowance for measurement error and non-modeled causality).