Binary coding of concepts creates measurement error by treating unequal cases as equivalent.

Evidence

Often, to dichotomize is to introduce measurement error. A dichotomous view of corporatism implies that all countries with value 1 are basically equivalent. This may be far from true. For example, Katzenstein (1985) includes Switzerland as a corporatist system, even though he concedes it lies at the weak end of the corporatism scale. However, one could easily put Switzerland into the category of noncorporatist countries (see Siaroff 1999 for a survey of corporatism measures). A continuous view of the concept of corporatism puts Switzerland where it belongs, in the gray zone. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 230

Categorization

• CANDY: Switzerland is the case that breaks the corporatism coding — a country that could be dropped into either bucket depending on the analyst.