Immanuel Wallerstein passed away on August 31, 2019 at the age of 88. As the founder of world-systems theory and author of hundreds of articles and commentaries and dozens of books, including his four-volume magnum opus, The Modern World-System, Wallerstein’s research exemplified the methodology of comparative analysis and was a cornerstone in the development of QCA.

The 3rd International QCA Paper Development Workshop (Dec 11-12, 2019) has released a call for abstracts.

Claude Rubinson (Univ of Houston-Downtown), Lasse Gerrits (Univ of Bamberg), Roel Rutten (Tilburg Univ), and Thomas Greckhamer (Lousiana State Univ) have produced a pedagogical piece “Avoiding Common Errors in QCA: A Short Guide for New Practioners,” available on the Community Resources page of the COMPASSS website.

Lasse Cronqvist has published Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Eine Einführung mit TOSMANA und dem QCA Add-In (Rainer Hampp Verlag 2019). The textbook is aimed at readers with no previous knowledge of QCA and presents the basics of the methodology in a compact form. The descriptions are mainly application-oriented and combines the description of QCA with the application with TOSMANA and the QCA Add-in for Excel.

As part of the American Political Science Association’s recent deliberations regarding transparency in empirical research and with input from the many members of the COMPASSS community, Carsten Schneider, Barbara Vis, and Kendra Kovu drafted a report on transparency in STM/CCM research for the Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. A link to the full report is available on SSRN at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3333474. A summary of the report is also available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3333483.