🧭 What This Paper Reassesses

The enhanced standard analysis (ESA) was designed to prevent so-called untenable assumptions in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). One important source of such assumptions arises from statements about necessity. Most QCA researchers—here called QCA realists—have articulated three criteria for a meaningful claim of necessity: empirical consistency, empirical relevance, and conceptual meaningfulness.

📊 Reassessing Thiem’s (2017) Data-Mining Test

When Thiem’s data-mining approach to detecting supersets is constrained to meet the realist standards for necessity, the purported CONSOL effect attributed to Schneider and Wagemann’s ESA disappears. Key components of this reassessment include:

• The three realist criteria required for meaningful necessity claims: empirical consistency, empirical relevance, conceptual meaningfulness.
• Application of those criteria to Thiem (2017)’s superset-detection procedure.
• The finding that, under these constraints, no CONSOL effect of Schneider and Wagemann’s ESA is observed.

🔍 What QCA Idealists Claim—and What Still Blocks Their Adoption

QCA idealists challenge many realist conventions and argue that searching separately for necessary conditions is unnecessary. Their core claim is that the most parsimonious solution formula already reveals a minimally necessary disjunction of minimally sufficient conjunctions, rendering separate necessity searches redundant. The paper engages this perspective and identifies several unresolved empirical and theoretical issues that appear to prevent the idealist position from becoming mainstream.

⚖️ Why It Matters

This work clarifies a central methodological dispute in QCA by showing how adherence to realist standards changes the outcome of data-mining tests for necessity. It also maps the substantive claims of idealists and highlights the empirical and theoretical obstacles that must be addressed before those claims can supplant prevailing conventions.