Social Processes and Their Boundaries: Causal Versus Teleological Explanations

In general, there are two approaches for explaining a social process. The first is teleological: "things" happen because an actor intentionally pursues them as a goal. The second is causal: "things" happen because they are caused by factors of the past. Teleological explanations are typically used by historians, who try to understand processes of the past. Ex-ante forecasts are rarely possible with this approach. To the contrary, the causal approach is over-determined by the past and typically neglects the intentions and the "free will" of the concerned drivers.

This article attempts to unite the two mentioned approaches: Causal reasoning is used in order to explain the impossible results of a process. This way, the boundaries of possible processes are delimited by causal factors. However, how the resulting space of possibilities is used by a particular social process depends on the intentions of the concerned actors/drivers and consequently calls for teleological explanations.

Explaining the boundaries of a social process requires special statistical regression techniques. One of them is quantile regression: by an asymmetrical error-function it allows to explore the relation between independent structural variables and the best/worst results of a process. The other is iteratively reweighted least squares: here, the best/worst results of a process are identified by the stepwise elimination of observed processes with lower/higher performance.

As an illustration of the previous methodology, the author investigates the boundaries of authoritarian regimes, which aim at restraining political liberties. Some of their boundaries are the protests of the national civil society, others the sanctions of the international community. With the appropriate freedom-house indicators it is possible to the assess their relative importance and to make forecasts about unlikely political changes. The use of the related possibility space by the political regime requires teleological explanations that will be presented for exemplary cases.