Finding Testable Causal Mechanisms to Address Critical Public Management Issues

This article shows how Charles Ragin's method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be used to explore and untangle complex organizational relationships and outcomes in small-N data sets and to generate hypotheses about conjectural causal mechanisms. These can then be fruitfully tested statistically for large-N sets and applied to solve public management design problems, thereby aiding existing states to be transformed into preferred ones. The QCA method has particular relevance to public management as a tool for comparative analysis and research.