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Comments on Andrew Bennett, Ahron Barth, & Kenneth R. Rutherford's & Peregrine Schwartz-Shea's articles on methodological trends in political science instruction & scholarship (both, 2003), suggesting that the discipline is more & less pluralistic than either claim. It is contended that the raw data are misleading because qualitative & quantitative course offerings are not directly comparable as units of analysis, thus there is more pluralism than Schwartz-Shea found. However, Bennett, Barth, & Rutherford may have found more pluralism than warranted because long-term trends indicating increasing or at least steady pluralism are deemed hard to glean from their data. Questions raised when trying to implement methodological pluralism are delineated. Overall, the authors are lauded for their efforts. 1 Figure, 2 References. J. Zendejas

"The Logics of Systemic Theory" published on by Oxford University Press.

Although the statistical literature on conflict studies has generated strong and consistent findings on the relationship of political irrelevance and dyadic democracy to conflict, scholars have paid scant attention to the interesting theoretical issue of how they matter. The authors argue that additive controls and dropping irrelevant dyads constitute misspecifications of their effects. There are theoretical reasons to believe that the impact of distance on conflict is not sufficiently severe to justify the practice of simply dropping irrelevant dyads. Moreover, they argue that political irrelevance and dyadic democracy, rather than subtracting some constant quantity, interact to impose an upper bound on the probability of conflict initiation. They find both of these arguments to be supported in a reanalysis of a prominent study of dispute initiation.

Gordon and Smith (2004) do a great service by introducing innovative and creative quantitative methods that incorporate information from qualitative sources. It is nevertheless important to examine the conditions under which the proposed estimators will be useful in practice. These conditions prove to be surprisingly restrictive: with the possible exception of extremely low-information settings, virtually all of the cases of discernible causation must be coded as such, those codings must contain virtually no errors, and the process by which qualitative researchers produce evaluations of discernibility must conform to the authors' model of the qualitative data-generating process (QDGP) if the procedures are to retain any comparative advantage.

In "Testing for Necessary and/or Sufficient Causation," Jason Seawright (2002) presents an intriguing new Bayesian technique for testing theories that posit necessary conditions. His technique differs in substantial ways from those presented in separate articles by Dion (1998), Ragin (1987), and ourselves (2000) and constitutes a fundamental critique of those procedures. Having criticized quite a few procedures and theorists in our own article, we can hardly complain; rather, we recognize the constructive spirit of the endeavor and, in that same spirit, would like to offer a rejoinder.