Worth repeating: Critical Realism and policy analysis

“Causal power means the power to bring about some sort of change at the level of empirical events. The Critical Realist (CR) philosophy of science argues that “there are enduring structures and generative mechanisms underlying and producing observable phenomena and events” (Bhaskar 2011: 2). According to CR, causal mechanisms are the “relatively enduring structures of nature and their characteristic ways of acting” that scientific activity tries to identify and characterize. These mechanisms may or may not be empirically observable. Mechanisms possess causal powers, “which, when triggered or released, act as generative mechanisms, with natural necessity and universality (within their range) so as to codetermine the manifest phenomena of the world, which occur for the most part in open systems: that is, where constant conjunctions do not pertain” (Bhaskar 2009a: 17).

“This ‘codetermination’ may take the form of generating or preventing, enabling or constraining, events, or effects (Hartwig 2007). A law in CR is not a constant conjunction of events but the characteristic pattern of activity, or tendency, of a mechanism (Steinmetz 1998). CR also argues that that mechanisms and their powers shape the course of empirical events within open systems. . .Single causal mechanisms do not act in isolation or in universal conjunctions in producing empirical effects. Causal laws should not be “regarded as empirical regularities” but instead as the expressions of the “tendencies of things” (Bhaskar 2009b: 199; 1997: 10).

“In open systems, mechanisms combine to produce actual events conjuncturally, that is to say, in concert with other mechanisms (Steinmetz 1998). The events, processes, cultural phenomena, etc., that are studied by sociologists are always “multiply determined” and always within causal “conjunctures” (Bhaskar 2009b: 196). While there are, of course, other definitions of causal mechanisms, and while some readers find the metaphor of “mechanism” rebarbative, its use in CR is distinctly non-mechanical (Gorski 2009).”

I take this to mean that the enduring contribution of the social sciences to really-existing policy analysis and public management is the two-notion of the sample and the intervening variables.

Source. George Steinmetz (2025). “Explaining Geopolitical Inventiveness: Late colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War (1945-1970).” Social Science History (accessed online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/explaining-geopolitical-inventiveness-late-colonialism-decolonization-and-the-cold-war-19451970/3F9A71473EDB5E5562CC1AA8BCAA46B1)