Episode Analysis in Qualitative Historical Political Science

A key strength of qualitative historical political science is that it can create a window into the past as seen through the eyes of its contemporaries. The methodological literature refers to this historically minded approach as reading history forward (Ahmed 2010; Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010; Møller 2021). To create this rich glimpse into the past, scholars offer narrative accounts which often focus on key episodes. These within-case episodes capture not only moments of change (Sewell 1996), but also moments when change was almost reached (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007), and even moments when attempts at change flat-out failed (Issar and Dilling 2022). Fifteen years ago, Capoccia and Ziblatt (2010) stressed the value of episode analysis as a methodological approach and called for more research within this tradition.