The commonality of socialism: A comparative study of socialist thoughts using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) method

This paper seeks to identify the common characteristics of socialist thoughts. Using “A history of socialist thought from the precursors to the present” by Mukherjee and Ramaswamy (2000) as data, this paper utilizes qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) method to find the combination of characteristics that make up socialist thoughts, and political compass to visualize the positions of socialist thoughts. These common characteristics are categorized into groups of Goal and implementation, International view, Politics, Economy, Society, Democratic institution, Revolutionary action, and Revolutionary forces. Among them, Politics, Society, and Revolutionary action groups can be considered to have causal relationship with socialist thoughts. Most socialist thoughts are on the Libertarian left quadrant of the political compass. The methods in this paper have the potential to combine the strengths and limit the weakness of both qualitative and quantitative methods in more comprehensive research of socialist thoughts, for better application of socialism in practice in the future.