What Is Social Causation?

It was noted above that social explanations most typically are causal explanations: specification of the causal conditions that brought about the outcome or regularity of interest.

Generally speaking, a cause is a condition that either necessitates or renders more probable its effect, in a given environment of conditions. It is a circumstance that has the power or capacity to bring about the effect (Cartwright 1989). (For the philosophers, this means that “C is sufficient in the circumstances to bring about E or to increase the likelihood of E.” See Mackie 1974 for a detailed exposition.) Normally a cause is also neces­sary for the production of its effect - “if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred.” The probabilistic version can be formulated this way: “If C had not occurred, the likelihood of E would have been lower.” (Wesley Salmon explores the intricacies in much greater detail; see Salmon 1984.) These features of necessity, sufficiency, and differential conditional probabilities provide the basis for developing specific empirical methods for testing causal relationships.

This account depends upon something that David Hume abhorred: the idea of causal necessity. For natural causes we have a suitable candidate in the form of natural necessity deriving from the laws of nature: “When C occurs, given the laws of nature, E necessarily occurs.” However, there are no “laws of society” that function ontologically like laws of nature. So how can there be “social necessity”? Fortunately, there is an alternative to law-based necessity, in the form of a causal mechanism. A mechanism is a particular configuration of conditions and processes that predictably leads from one set of conditions to an outcome. Mechanisms bring about specific effects. For example, “over-grazing of the commons” is a mech­anism of resource depletion. Moreover, we can reconstruct precisely why this mechanism works for rationally self-interested actors in the presence of a public good. So we can properly understand a claim for social causation along these lines: “C causes E” means “there is a set of causal mechanisms that convey circumstances including C to circumstances including E.”

There is an important recent body of work in the philosophy of social science on social mechanisms that converges with original and useful work on methodology of comparative research coming from within the historical social sciences.^[132] This work makes the case for placing the dis­covery of concrete causal mechanisms at the center of our conception of historical and social inquiry. Social mechanisms are concrete social processes in which a set of social conditions, constraints, or circumstances combine to bring about a given outcome.^[133] On this approach, social explanation does not take the form of inductive discovery of laws; rather, the generalizations that are discovered in the course of social science research are subordinate to the more fundamental search for causal mechanisms and pathways in individual outcomes and sets of outcomes.^[134] This approach casts doubt on the search for generalizable theories across numerous societies.

This approach places central focus on the idea of a causal mechanism: to identify a causal relation between two kinds of events or conditions, we need to identify the typical causal mechanisms through which the first kind brings about the second kind. What, though, is the nature of the social link­ages that constitute causal mechanisms among social phenomena? I argue for a microfoundational approach to social causation: the causal properties of social entities derive from the structured circumstances of agency of the individuals who make up social entities - institutions, organizations, states, economies, and the like (Little 1998). So this approach advances a general ontological stance and research strategy: the causal mechanisms that create causal relations among social phenomena are compounded from the structured circumstances of choice and behavior of socially constructed and socially situated agents.

Now let us turn to inquiry. How would we detect social causation? Fundamentally there are three ways. We can exploit the mechanism requirement and seek out particular or common social mechanisms. Both social theory and process-tracing can serve us here (Goertz and Starr 2003, George and Bennett 2005). Second, we can exploit the “necessary and sufficient condition” feature by using comparative methods like Mill's methods (Ragin 1987). And third, we can exploit the probabilistic and statistical implications of a causal assertion by looking for correlations and conditional probabilities among the conditions associated with hypothe­sized causal mechanisms (Woodward 2003). This feature underpins standard “large-n” quantitative research methods in social science. In each case, we must keep fully in mind the centrality of causal mechanisms. A discovery of a statistical association between X and Y is suggestive of causation, but we need to be able to hypothesize the mechanism that would underlie the association if we are to attribute causation. Likewise, the discovery that a study of multiple cases suggests that A is necessary for E and A&B are sufficient for E requires us to consider the question, what is the concrete social mechanism that links A, B, and E?

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