Using Sequences to Model Crises

Abstract

The logic of historical explanation obliges one to understand temporality as a moderator of various effects on political outcomes. Temporal problems remain in the empirical analysis of political phenomena, however, especially as it pertains to categorical data and long-term time dependence. Many theories in political science assert that sequencing matters or that political outcomes are path dependent, but they remain untested (or improperly tested) assertions for which sequence analysis may be valuable. This article briefly reviews the disciplinary origins of sequence analysis and applies the method in order to understand bargaining between actors during national crises. Finally, it explores the robustness of a commonly used sequence analysis metric. The ability to demonstrate and separate sequential effects from accumulative effects—made possible through sequence analysis—constitutes a major step in political science toward analyses that are truly time sensitive.

Multinational Corporations and Political Violence: Trends and Forecasts

“…Following Marineau et al (2018), future research might disaggregate the analysis spatially, perhaps with event-level geocoding (Lee et al, 2018;Gunasekaran et al, 2018). With firm and group level data, one promising approach is to model interactions using sequence analysis methods (Casper and Wilson, 2015;D'Orazio and Yonamine, 2015). Substantive research has been conducted at this level, for example petroleum companies operating in Nigeria (Akporiaye, 2014) and mining operations in Africa (Christensen, 2019).…”

Women's rights in democratic transitions: A global sequence analysis, 1900–2012

“…More or less inspired by comparable analyses in biology, scholars in the social sciences have developed several approaches to identify and test sequences of events in time‐series data. For example, inspired by studies on DNA sequence analyses, social sequence analyses identify the similarity of sequences and explore the temporal order of discrete events, such as life course trajectories, decision making and crisis (Abbott ; Abbott & Tsay ; Casper & Wilson ; Gauthier et al. ).…”

Investigating Sequences in Ordinal Data: A New Approach with Adapted Evolutionary Models

“…social sequence analyses that are inspired by DNA sequence analyses (e.g. Abbott 1995;Abbot & Tsay 2000, Gauthier et al 2010, Casper and Wilson 2015, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) that is inspired by studies of evolutionary sequences (Ragin 1987;Rihoux & Ragin 2009), and timeseries cross-section methods (Beck 2008). There also exists a more novel approach using Bayesian modelling to construe dynamic systems indicating flow of change Spaiser et al 2014).…”

“…Scholars have adopted the technique to explore the careers of social movements activists (Fillieule & Blanchard 2012), voting behavior (Buton et al 2012), crisis bargaining patterns (Casper & Wilson 2015), and the evolution of regime types (Wilson 2014). This approach identifies the temporal order of discrete events across observations, and uses an algorithm to compare and then cluster similar sequences.…”