Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics

An Introduction

Todd Landman, Edzia Carvalho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317533795
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on the strengths of the third edition, this highly regarded textbook continues to provide the best introduction to the strategies of comparative research in political science. Divided into three parts, the book begins by examining different methods, applying these methods to dominant issues in comparative politics using a wealth of topical examples from around the world, and then discusses the new challenges in the area. This thoroughly revised and updated edition features:

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• Additional contemporary case studies including the democratisation of technology and the Arab Spring;

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• Detailed discussion of regression analysis and diffusion;

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• More analysis of justice, inequality, and compliance;

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• Reflection on new methods and treatments of contemporary comparative politics.

Balancing reader friendly features with high quality analysis makes this popular academic text is essential reading for everyone interested in comparative politics and research methods.

Part I
Why, How, and Problems of Comparison

The chapters in this part of the book establish the rationale for the systematic comparison of countries, demonstrate the different ways in which countries can be compared, and examine the various problems that scholars have confronted or will confront when comparing countries. Too often, both the choice of countries and the way in which they are compared are decided for reasons not related to the research question. In contrast, these chapters argue that the comparative research strategy matters. From the initial specification of the research problem through the choice of countries and method of analysis to the final conclusions, scholars must be attentive to the research question that is being addressed and the ways in which the comparison of countries will help provide answers.

To this end, Chapter 1 shows that the comparison of countries is useful for pure description, making classifications, hypothesis testing, and prediction. It then shows how methods of comparison can add scientific rigour to the study of politics in helping students and scholars alike make stronger inferences about the political world they observe. This is followed by a discussion of key terms needed for a science of politics including theory and method; ontology, epistemology, and methodology; cases, units of analysis, variables, and observations; levels of analysis; and quantitative and qualitative methods. Chapter 2 delves deeper into the different ways in which countries can be compared and why these different methods matter for making inferences. It argues that scholars face a key trade-off between the level of conceptual abstraction and the scope of countries under study. It shows how comparing many countries, few countries, or single-country studies all fit under the broad umbrella of ‘comparative politics’ and that all have different strengths and weaknesses for the ways in which political scientists study the world. It continues by outlining the main problems that confront comparativists and suggests ways in which to overcome them. These problems include ‘too many variables and too few countries’, establishing equivalence between and among comparative concepts, selection bias, spuriousness, ecological and individualist fallacies, and value bias.

The next three chapters are devoted to a fuller discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the comparison of many countries (Chapter 3), few countries (Chapter 4), and single-country studies (Chapter 5). The discussion centres on the underlying assumptions of the methods, the types of research questions they address, and the advantages and disadvantages they have for drawing inferences. Chapter 3 contains a basic introduction to regression analysis. Chapter 4 lays out the two main forms of comparative analysis of few countries (most similar systems design and most different systems design) and then discusses the different ways in which they have been expanded and enhanced. Chapter 5 concludes this part of the book with a full discussion on the value of single-country studies for comparative analysis, including description, plausibility probes and generating hypotheses, confirming and infirming theory, and process tracing and exploring causal mechanisms. Together, these chapters offer a synthesis of comparative methods and provide a ‘tool chest’ for students and scholars that can be used to approach both existing and new research questions in political science.

1
Why Compare Countries?

Making comparisons is a natural human activity. From antiquity to the present, generations of humans have sought to understand and explain the similarities and differences they perceive between themselves and others. Though historically the discovery of new peoples was often the product of a desire to conquer them, the need to understand the similarities and differences between the conquerors and the conquered was none the less strong. Citizens in all countries around the world continue to compare their position in society to that of others across many different dimensions: (1) their regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, familial, and cultural allegiances and identities; (2) their material possessions, economic, social, and political positions; and (3) their relative location in systems of power and authority. One need only observe the dramatic changes that have taken place across the Middle East and North Africa since late 2010 to see the many differences and similarities in the kinds of things that ordinary people can become highly motivated to change. Privately, individuals grow up worried about their types of fashion, circle of friends, collections of music, appearance and behaviour of their partners, money earned by their parents, universities they attend, and careers they may achieve. These concerns are a function of baseline criteria and standards (however determined) against which they compare their own set of choices, circumstances, and achievements.

In short, to compare is to be human. But beyond these everyday comparisons, how is the process of comparison scientific? And how does the comparison of countries help us understand the larger political world? In order to answer these important questions, this chapter is divided into four sections. The first section establishes the four main reasons for comparison: (1) contextual description, (2) classification and ‘typologizing’, (3) hypothesis testing and theory building, and (4) prediction (Hague et al. 1992:24–27; Mackie and Marsh 1995:173–176; Franzese 2007; Kopstein and Lichbach 2008a, 2008b; Landman and Robinson 2009b). It argues that these are cumulative and mutually reinforcing if comparative scholars wish to address real-world problems with a systematic analysis of observational data across different countries. The second section specifies how political science and the sub-field of comparative politics can be scientific, outlining briefly the similarities and differences between political science and natural science in which we explain why and how evidence and inference in political science are linked and how they form the basis for a science of comparative politics. The third section clarifies the terms and concepts used in the preceding discussion and how they are needed for a science of politics, including (1) theory and method; (2) ontology, epistemology, and methodology; (3) cases, units of analysis, variables, and observations; (4) levels of analysis and ecological and individualist fallacies; and (5) quantitative and qualitative methods. The fourth section summarizes these reasons, justifications, and terms for a science of comparative politics and paves the way for the fuller discussion of how to compare countries in ensuing chapters in Part I of this textbook.

Reasons for comparison

The activity of comparing countries centres on four main objectives, all of which are mutually reinforcing in any systematic comparative study but some of which receive more emphasis than others, depending on the research and analytical aspirations of the scholar. Contextual description allows political scientists to know what other countries are like. Classification makes the world of politics less complex, effectively providing the researcher with ‘data containers’ into which empirical evidence is organized (Sartori 1970:1039). The hypothesis-testing function of comparison allows the elimination of rival explanations about particular events, actors, structures, and so on in an effort to help build more general theories. Finally, comparison of countries and the generalizations that result from comparison allow for certain kinds of prediction to be formulated about the likely outcomes in a set of countries that have not been included in the original comparison or about outcomes in the future given the presence of certain antecedent factors and conditions that have been deemed significant through careful comparative analysis.

Contextual description

This first objective of comparative politics is the process of describing the political phenomena and events of a particular country or group of countries. Traditionally, in political science, this objective of comparative politics was carried out in those countries that were different to those of the researcher. Indeed, in the history of American political science through the 20th century, a comparativist was originally considered to be anyone who carried out research on a country other than the United States. Through often highly detailed description, scholars sought to escape their own ethnocentrism by studying those countries and cultures that were foreign to them (Dogan and Pelassy 1990:5–13). The comparison to the researcher’s own country was thus either implicit or explicit, and the goal of contextual description was either more knowledge about the country studied, more knowledge about the scholar’s own political system, or both. The comparative literature is replete with examples of this kind of research, and it is often cited to represent ‘old’ comparative politics as opposed to the ‘new’ comparative politics, which has analytical aspirations that move beyond mere description (Mayer 1989; Apter 1996; Landman 2012). Today, comparativists are defined by what they do: compare similarities and differences across different samples of countries and time periods in order to explain and understand important political phenomena. The debate about what constitutes old and new comparison, however, often misses the important point that all systematic research begins with good description. Description serves as an important component to the research process and ought to precede the other three objectives of comparison. Purely descriptive studies can serve as the ‘raw data’ for those comparative studies that aspire to higher levels of explanation and provide initial hunches about which topics of research may be of interest and which factors may be important to explain observed phenomena that are related to those topics.

In the field of Latin American politics, the Sandino Affair is a fine example of contextual description (Macauley 1967). The book provides an exhaustive account of Augusto Sandino’s guerrilla campaign to oust US marines from Nicaragua after a presidential succession crisis. It details the specific events surrounding the succession crisis, the role of US intervention, the way in which Sandino upheld his principles of non-intervention through guerrilla attacks on US marines, and the eventual death of Sandino at the hands of Anastasio Somoza. The study serves as an example of what Gabriel Almond (1996:52) has called ‘evidence without inference’, where the author tells the story of this remarkable political leader, but the story is not meant to make any larger analytical statements that can be generalized beyond the narrative of the case itself. Rather, the focus is on the specific events that unfolded in Nicaragua, and the important roles played by the various characters as they interacted with one another. From a comparative perspective, however, the account could provide a wealth of evidence for studies examining the role of indigenous resistance to outside intervention, the history of the rise of military authoritarianism in Central America, the roots of revolutionary movements (e.g. the Sandinistas who overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979), among many other relevant topics found in comparative politics both inside and outside the region of Latin America (e.g. see Chapter 7 in this volume on violent political dissent and social revolution).

Classification

In the search for cognitive simplification, comparativists often establish different conceptual classifications in order to group vast numbers of countries, political systems, events, and the like into distinct categories with identifiable and shared characteristics and attributes. Classification can be a simple dichotomy (i.e. two categories), such as that between ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘democracy’, which draws on a set of theoretically derived criteria that help determine where particular countries would fall in the classification. Classification can be a more complex array of regimes and governmental systems in which there is a greater differentiation across the categories. Like contextual description, classification is a necessary component of systematic comparison, but in many ways it represents a higher level of comparison since it groups a large number of separate descriptive entities into simpler categories. It reduces the complexity of the world by seeking out those qualities that countries share and those that they do not share. Classification schemes are a first step towards capturing cross-national variation in political phenomena, such as that between democratic and authoritarian countries, developed and under-developed countries, core and periphery countries, military and civilian regimes, among many other classic distinctions found in the comparative political analyses.

The process of classification is not new. The most famous effort at classification is arguably found in Aristotle’s Politics (Book 3, Chapters 6 – 7), in which he establishes six types of rule. Based on the combination of the form of rule (good or corrupt) and the number of those who rule (one, few, or many), Aristotle derived the following six types of political systems: monarchy, aristocracy, polity, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (see Hague et al. 1992:26). In The History of Government, Samuel Finer (1997) claimed that since antiquity (ca. 3200 BCE), all forms of government have belonged to one of the following four basic types: (1) the palace polity, (2) the church polity, (3) the nobility polity, and (4) the forum polity. Each type that he identifies is ‘differentiated by the nature of the ruling personnel’ (Finer 1997:37). In the palace polity, ‘decision-making rests with one individual’ (Finer 1997:38). In the church polity, the church has a significant if not exclusive say in decision making (Finer 1997:50). In the nobility polity, a certain pre-eminent sector of society has substantial influence on decision making (Finer 1997:47). In the forum polity, the authority is ‘conferred on the rulers from below’ by a ‘plural headed’ forum (Finer 1997:51). Like Aristotle, Finer based his classification on attributes relating to decision making...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of briefing boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Why, how, and problems of comparison
• PART II Comparing comparisons
• PART III Comparative methods and new issues
• Glossary
• References
• Index