Under what conditions do countries go to war? What is the in?uence of the 2008–2009economiccrisisonthevoteshareofradicalright-wingpartiesinWestern Europe? What type of people are the most likely to protest and partake in demonstrations? How has the urban squatters’ movement developed in South Africa after apartheid? There is hardly any ?eld in the social sciences that asksasmanyresearchquestionsaspoliticalscience.Questionsscholarsareinterested in can be speci?c and reduced to one event (e.g., the development of the urban squatter’smovementinSouthAfricapost-apartheid)orgeneralandsystemicsuchas the occurrence of war and peace. Whether general or speci?c, what all empirical researchquestionshaveincommonisthenecessitytouseadequateresearchmethods to answer them. For example, to effectively evaluate the in?uence of the economic downturn in 2008–2009 on the radical right-wing success in the elections preceding the crisis, we need data on the radical right-wing vote before and after the crisis, a clearly de?ned operationalization of the crisis and data on confounding factors such as immigration, crime, and corruption. Through appropriate modeling techniques (i.e., multiple regression analysis on macro-level data), we can then assess the absolute and relative in?uence of the economic crisis on the radical right-wing vote share.