The historical turn in social science has prompted scholars to engage with the work of historians on a large scale. Here, social scientists face two standard problems of selection bias: confirmation bias and convenience sampling. So far, the record of dealing with these problems has been poor, and little has been done to specify how social…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…