Individual skill
cps-theory-building
Use when building or sharpening the theoretical argument of a Comparative Political Studies (CPS) manuscript so it yields portable, testable comparative implications. Builds the mechanism and its observable implications; it does not run the empirics.
Comparative-Political-Studies-Skills/skills/cps-theory-building/SKILL.md
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# Theory Building (cps-theory-building)
CPS rewards arguments that travel. A good CPS theory is a **mechanism with scope conditions** that
generates observable implications a comparativist can test in more than one setting. Theory can be
verbal-causal, formal/game-theoretic, or comparative-historical — but it must do more than label; it
must predict *what should differ across cases* and *when the mechanism turns off*.
## When to trigger
- Turning a comparative puzzle into a stated argument with implications
- A reviewer said the paper "lacks a theory," "is descriptive," or "the mechanism is a black box"
- Your finding has no portable claim — nothing another comparativist could import
- You need to specify scope conditions and the contrast with the rival from `cps-literature-positioning`
