Cases lacking both cause and outcome are irrelevant to a sufficiency hypothesis

Evidence

In context of the democratic peace, the hypothesis is that joint democracy (i.e., “Democracy” in table 7.1) is sufficient for “no war.” He shows that the inclusion of all cases can substantially enhance statistical significance by increasing the number of confirming observations. By contrast, Clarke argues that including all cases will lead one to confirm a proposition through irrelevant observations, in much the same way that “most ravens are white” might be confirmed by observing yellow pencils and blue books. Braumoeller and Goertz’s argument likewise suggests that, when testing a hypothesis about a sufficient cause, cases that lack both the cause and the outcome are irrelevant, since the hypothesis does not imply anything about the number or proportion of these cases that should be present. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 1144

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to democratic peace literature and to the whole Seawright/Clarke/Braumoeller methodological debate.
• SEED: Angle: how the democratic peace debate turns on an unexamined population definition rather than on data.