Qualitative Comparative Analysis: How Inductive Use and Measurement Error Lead to Problematic Inference

An increasing number of analyses in various subfields of political science employ Boolean algebra as proposed by Ragin's qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This type of analysis is perfectly justifiable if the goal is to test deterministic hypotheses under the assumption of error-free measures of the employed variables. My contention is, however, that only in a very few research areas are our theories sufficiently advanced to yield...