Alessia Damonte - Types of Causality Analysis in the Social Sciences

Assoc. Prof. Alessia Damonte, Types of Causality Analysis in the Social Sciences: Regularity, Counterfactual, Manipulability/interventionist, and Mechanistic.

June 7th, 2023.
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The talk considers whether the different understandings of causation in the social sciences -- regularity, counterfactual, manipulability/interventionist, and mechanistic -- raise insurmountable barriers to exchange and learning across research communities. It highlights the ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences between accounts and considers possible complementarities. Last, it encourages researchers to rely on causal structures as a fruitful common ground to improve learning across different accounts. The backing material can be found at here.
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Alessia Damonte is Associate Professor at the University of Milan, Dept. of Social and Political Sciences. She teaches courses on policy design evaluation, contributes to developing the new "Computational Models and Designs Hub," and sits on the Open Science University Commission. She has been among the founding members of the SISP Standing Groups on “Research Methods for Political Science” and “Political Science and Public Policy” and involved in the ECPR Standing Group on “Regulation and Governance.” Her research interest lies in the quality of procedures for public policy design as an amenable cause of individual rights’ content and political systems’ performance. Her commitment to pluralism in research methods follows from a quest for adequate strategies to yield sound causal knowledge of such institutional scaffolding and its consequences. Her current agenda focuses on "Rules as Data" and measurement issues.