Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for the systematic analysis of cases. A holistic view of cases and an approach to causality emphasizing complexity are some of its core features. Over the last decades, QCA has found application in many fields of the social sciences. In spite of this, its use in feminist research has been slower, and only recently QCA has been applied to topics related to social care, the political representation of women, and reproductive politics. In spite of the comparative turn in feminist studies, researchers still privilege qualitative methods, in particular case studies, and are often skeptical of quantitative techniques (Spierings 2012). These studies show that the meaning and measurement of many gender concepts differ across countries and that the factors leading to feminist success and failure are context specific. However, case study analyses struggle to systematically account for the ways in which these forces operate in different locations.

With this article we are contributing to a conversation about Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) as a feminist research method. CFA was developed within the context of two collaborative and comparative research studies of gender equality policies in the European context, MAGEEQ (www.mageeq.net) and QUING (www.quing.eu). Since the introduction of CFA in these projects, many scholars have used the method—some affiliated with these projects as well as others. This contribution is a first reflection on CFA and a call for more extensive reflections on methodologies developed in feminist work. We use reflection on CFA's origins, mixed with illustrations taken from research articles by authors who have been affiliated with the projects and others, and self-criticism based on two of our own studies. These reflections underpin our conclusions about the ongoing potential of CFA and the necessity and urgency of more thorough attention to methodological issues related to the use of CFA.

As illustrated by these definitions from the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, context dependency is a defining characteristic of gender, since gender and intersectional inequalities differ spatially and temporarily in how they are organized. It is on this issue of context dependency where gender studies scholars often collide with (the application and interpretation) of regression-based statistical analysis in debates about quantitative methods (see Spierings 2012).

We have been invited by Politics & Gender's editors to review the origins and current standing of the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) policy, an effort initiated by the eponymous American Political Science Association (APSA) Ad Hoc Committee and led primarily by Colin Elman, Diana Kapiszewski, and Arthur (“Skip”) Lupia. We have not been bystanders in this unfolding history, and in keeping with feminist and interpretive epistemologies that inform our work and that tie positionality to knowledge claims (e.g., Haraway 1988), we include mention of our own involvement (see Mala Htun's 2016 parallel account of her activities). Herein lies one of our main points in assessing DA-RT: from the perspective of interpretive, feminist, and some other qualitative methods, transparency as an epistemological mandate is not new. On the contrary, it is widely accepted, and expected, within certain epistemic communities (noted also in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2014); it needs no set of new rules imposed from above, by journal editors and others, for its instantiation. Our assessment includes questions about the relationship between APSA and DA-RT, as the association's support has colored DA-RT's reception. Part of what we seek to account for is resistance on the part of political scientists of various sorts—and not only those in the interpretive community, which we know best—to the DA-RT initiative and even to the participatory Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) process designed by Alan Jacobs and Tim Büthe (2015) at the invitation of the APSA organized section Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (QMMR; see, e.g., Isaac 2016). Even as we see changes in representations of DA-RT in response to critiques, we are concerned that those questioning the substance of DA-RT and the process of its adoption by APSA (in the Ethics Guidelines) and various journals are being represented by its architects as “either not paying attention to what we have been doing or [as] purposely misrepresenting the project,” including presenting “conspiracy theories, enemy narratives, and speculation about others' motives” (Elman and Lupia, 2106, 45, 50). These very words speak to DA-RT's potential to marginalize dissenters and even split the discipline. How has U.S. political science arrived at this pass?