This paper is a systematic analysis of the comparative method. Its emphasis is on both the limitations of the method and the ways in which, despite these limitations, it can be used to maximum advantage. The comparative method is defined and analyzed in terms of its similarities and differences vis-a-vis the experimental and statistical methods. The principal difficulty facing the comparative method is that it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases. Four specific ways in which this difficulty may be resolved are discussed and illustrated: (1) increasing the number of cases as much as possible by means of longitudinal extension and a global range of analysis, (2) reducing the property space of the analysis, (3) focusing the comparative analysis on “comparable” cases (e.g., by means of area, diachronic, or intranation comparisons), and (4) focusing on the key variables. It is argued that the case study method is closely related to the comparative method. Six types of case studies (the atheoretical, interpretative, hypothesis-generating, theory-confirming, theory-infirming, and deviant case analyses) are distinguished, and their theoretical value is analyzed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1955513.pdf

Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method

I Pr inces have always sought out soothsayers of one kind or another for the purpose of learning what the future holds. These hired visionaries have found portents in the configurations of stars, the entrails of animals, and most indicators in between. The results, on the whole, have been disappointing. Surprise remains one of the few things one can count on, and very few princes have succeeded in avoiding it, however assiduous the efforts of their respective wizards, medicine men, counselors, advisers, and think tank consultants to ward it off. Surprise is still very much with us. The abrupt end of the Cold War, an unanticipated hot war in the Persian Gulf, and the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union astonished almost everyone, whether in government, the academy, the media, or the think tanks. Although there was nothing inherently implausible about these eventsthe Cold War did have to end sometime, war had always been a possibility in the Middle East, and communism’s failures had been obvious for years-the fact that they arose so unexpectedly suggests that deficiencies persist in the means by which contemporary princes and the soothsayers they employ seek to discern the future course of world affairs. No modern soothsayer, of course, would aspire to total clairvoyance. We have no equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s famous character, the mathematician Hari Seldon, whose predictive powers were so great that he was able to leave precise holographic instructions for his followers, to be consulted at successive intervals decades after his death.’ But historians, political scientists, economists, psychologists, and even mathemati-

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War

Use of the term ‘modernization’ in its present connotations is of relatively recent origin, becoming an accepted part of the vocabulary of American, if not international, social science only in the decade of the 1960s. Despite its relatively rapid rise to currency, the popularity of the term does not appear to be matched by any widespread consensus concerning its precise meaning. The proliferation of alternative definitions has been such, in fact, that the ratio of those using the term to alternative definitions would appear to approach unity. The popularity of the notion of modernization must be sought not in its clarity and precision as a vehicle of scholarly communication, but rather in its ability to evoke vague and generalized images which serve to summarize all the various transformations of social life attendant upon the rise of industrialization and the nation-state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These images have proven so powerful, indeed, that the existence of some phenomenon usefully termed ‘modernization’ has gone virtually unchallenged. While individuals may differ on how precisely this phenomenon should be conceptualized and a number of critics have addressed themselves to the relative merits of alternative conceptualizations, both critics and advocates alike tend to assume the basic utility of the idea of modernization itself, treating only the manner of its conceptualization as problematic.

Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of National Societies: A Critical Perspective

Social security is one of the most important means by which modern nations protect the welfare of their citizens. The first appearance of social security represents a particularly important policy juncture at which many nations broke from the anti-welfare doctrine of traditional liberalism. The bulk of scholarship on social security treats its adoption as an explanation for other aspects of the social security experience, instead of an outcome to be explained. This article analyzes two alternative explanations of the timing of adoption: the prerequisites hypothesis, involving the level of development within nations, versus diffusion among nations. Three patterns emerge. Among the earliest adopters, social security diffuses up a developmental hierarchy of nations rather than down a hierarchy; in the middle group of adopters, a pattern of spatial diffusion is present in which social security is rapidly diffused among countries at widely different levels of modernization; and among the latest adopters, a combination of hierarchical diffusion and a prerequisite explanation appear to be the most satisfactory means of accounting for the pattern of adoption.

Prerequisites Versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption

This comparative and long-term in-depth analysis studies the macro-historical process of the nationalization of politics. Using a large wealth of newly collected and unexplored data on single constituencies in 17 West European countries, the analysis reconstructs the territorial structures of electoral participation and support for political parties, as well as their evolution since the mid-nineteenth century from highly territorialised politics of early competitive elections toward nation-wide alignments. It provides a multi-pronged empirical analysis through time, across countries, and between party families. The inclusion of all the most importan social and political cleavages (class, state-church, rural-urban, ethno-linguistic, and religious) allows to assess the nationalising impact of the left-right dimension that emerged from the National and Industrial Revolutions, and the resistance of pre-industrial cultural and centre-periphery factors to national integration. State formation, institutional, and socio-political mobilisation models are combined with actor-centered explanatory factors to account for key evolutionary steps and differences between national types of territorial configurations of the vote.

Sasha Weitman

Papers

The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History.

New perspectives on the French Revolution : readings in historical sociology

Tocqueville and the Old Regime.