Dealing With Complex Causality in Realist Synthesis: The Promise of Qualitative Comparative Analysis

In this article, the authors state two arguments: first, that the four categories of context, politics, polity, and policy make an adequate framework for systematic review being both exhaustive and parsimonious; second, that the method of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is an appropriate methodical approach for gaining realistic results that are useful for political practice. Instead of providing unsatisfactory monocausal explanations, the approach identifies different combinations of conditions leading to a given outcome. The authors illustrate their points with a two-step multi-value QCA (mvQCA) of 17 transport policy cases in Switzerland.