Analysing the Consequences of Institutional Reforms Using Country Pairs: A Note on the (Coarsened Exact) Matched-Country-Pairs Methodology of the Rethinking Stakeholder Participation Project

This chapter lays out the methodological rationale for the matched-country-pairs research design used to select the case studies that constitute the core of the empirical analysis of participation and influence in the governance of global finance and health. At the outset, we selected Brazil, India, and China (the BICs) because, collectively, they account for almost half of the world’s population. Their size (and their closely related ascendant power), however, also makes their experiences potentially highly atypical. To examine to what extent their experiences might apply to developing countries more generally, we used coarsened exact matching (CEM) to match each BIC country with a much smaller country in the same region that is otherwise maximally comparable. After discussing the promise and limits of CEM for case selection research more broadly, we detail how we used CEM to select Argentina–Brazil and Vietnam–China as matched pairs, as well as alternatively Bangladesh and the Philippines as counterparts for India.