Fewer Procedures, More Reflection: A Rejoinder to Duşa and Marx

Abstract

We thank Adrian Dus ¸a and Axel Marx for their comment on our evaluation of Marx and Dus ¸a (2011; hereafter MD). We believe that such exchanges are indispensable for developing a full understanding of many procedures in qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) that have for too long remained entirely unquestioned. We welcome this exchange, but we will also demonstrate in our rejoinder why Dus ¸a and Marx's comment once more underlines the urgent need for more reflection on QCA, all the more so because QCA's algorithmic core-Boolean optimization-has been swiftly imported in the 1980s from electrical engineering without much reflection at all. 1 Contrary to our expectations, Dus ¸a and Marx do not take issue with the core part of Thiem and Mkrtchyan (2023): the extensive simulations we have carried out and their results that have been summarized in Figure 2. Instead, their comment focuses on: (1) our failure to propose an enhancement of their benchmarks; (2) our use of constants in QCA; (3) our neglect of logical remainders; and (4) our reanalysis of the applied study by Muriaas et al. (2022). We successively address each of these points.(1) "[T]heir paper does not present any replacement solution over MD, nor do they somehow improve on MD."If your doctor tells you that smoking is unhealthy, the best thing to do is to quit, not to replace cigarettes with cigars or to "improve" your cigarettes with