Capturing causation in political science: the perspective of research design

Abstract In the last decades, ‘research design’ has become a strategic topic across political science. An emerging discourse relies on it to encompass paradigmatic oppositions and cultivate a pluralist approach to causation. As an introduction to the special issue on the topic, we offer an outline of the roles that the discipline recognizes to design in its relation to models and contend that, in a time of fascination for predictors, political science pluralism allows for balancing interpretability and validity of findings at once.