Analytic Narratives: The Method

An analytic narrative is a methodological proposal to bridge rational choice modeling with more traditional narrative explanations of phenomena in the social sciences. Typically, the methodology combines models from game theory with historical narrative. The analytic narrative project, however, does not represent a methodological breakthrough in itself. Rather, the project makes explicit the methodology that numerous scholars have adopted when combining historical and comparative research with rational choice models. Influenced by the work of Douglass C. North, the analytic narrative project started off with a commitment to understand institutional formation and change. In their book Analytic Narratives (1998), Robert Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Lauran Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast offer the first systematic outline of the key elements of the methodology, and they do so by exploring institutional change in a wide range of places and times. The authors' intent, as well as that of the majority of analytic narrativists, is to investigate enduring questions of political economy, such as political order, political and economic governance, and intra- or interstate relations.

Moreover, a distinguishing feature of the analytic narrative project is that it underscores the importance of the institutional context within which historical events occur. Understanding the institutional context helps account for how and why certain events may happen. The importance afforded to the historical and institutional detail is in fact what sets analytic narrativists apart from most rational choice scholars. Both deduce their hypotheses from the assumptions of rational choice and the logic of game theory. Rational choice scholars, however, start off from a general model and then test their hypothesis with appropriate data, while analytic narrativists formulate and refine the model itself in interplay with the context-specific institutional elements of the historical narrative. A major objective of analytic narratives, shared certainly with social science research, is to successfully identify the causal factors that explain a particular historical phenomenon—that is, to determine how some combination of causes brought it about. The notion of “mechanism” is commonly used. This entry discusses the conditions under which analytic narratives are most successful in providing explanations for historical phenomena. It first examines the distinctive roles of formal theory and context-specific evidence in developing a conjecture and ascribing causality. Second, it explores the behavioral assumptions underlying strategic game theory and their implications for analytic narratives.