An Interventionist Potential Outcomes Framework

This commentary uses interventionism, a counterfactual theory of causation from philosophy of science, to evaluate the causal analysis in the article “Legacies of the Third Reich: Concentration Camps and Out-Group Intolerance” (Homola, Pereira, and Tavits 2020; hereafter “Legacies”). The section ‘An Interventionist Potential Outcomes Framework’ consists of a condensed presentation of the interventionist theory, while the section ‘Translating “Legacies of the Third Reich”’ re-expresses the causal claims from “Legacies” in interventionist terms and presents an accompanying causal graph. The section ‘Three Stages of Interventionist Causal Analysis’ then highlights one of the steps in the causal graph to illustrate the key stages of interventionist causal analysis in qualitative and mixed-method research.