Subnational Research and the Challenges of Scope Conditions

How do concepts and theories “travel” in political science? At least since Sartori’s (1970) famous metaphor, the capacity to travel, or the possibility for concepts and theories to be generalized, is directly related to the notion of scope conditions. In a more general sense, scope conditions mark precisely the set of conditions under which we assume that the conceptual or theoretical propositions apply, and by implication, where due to contextual differences (e.g., temporal, spatial, institutional) these propositions lose their validity (Goertz and Mahoney 2009, 2012; Gauquelin 2021, 254). A corollary of this is that most of our theories are context-sensitive (i.e., not universally valid) (Goertz and Mahoney 2012, 206).