Response to David Freedman

As Jonathan Swift made mockingly clear, “modest proposals” that purport to solve previously unyielding problems can have horrible implications. Such proposals should be subjected to skeptical analysis. So we are pleased that our proposed random method of case selection for the qualitative component of multi-method research has attracted some skeptical commentary in the research community in political science. And we are very grateful to David Freedman for providing a perspective on our approach. He is especially qualified to do so, as he is a leading statistician who has long worried about inflated claims for statistical methods in the social sciences, and has been a champion of approaches that are sensitive to the particularities of each datapoint.