Analytic Narratives: The Method

Luz Marina Arias

An analytic narrative is a methodological proposal to bridge rational choice modeling with more traditional narrative explanations of phenomena in the social sciences. Typically, the methodology combines models from game theory with historical narrative. The analytic narrative project, however, does not represent a methodological breakthrough in itself. Rather, the project makes explicit the methodology that numerous scholars have adopted when combining historical and comparative research with rational choice models. Influenced by the work of Douglass C. North, the analytic narrative project started off with a commitment to understand institutional formation and change. In their book Analytic Narratives (1998), Robert Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Lauran Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast offer the first systematic outline of the key elements of the methodology, and they do so by exploring institutional change in a wide range of places and times. The authors' intent, as well as that of the majority of analytic Moreover, ...

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