Introduction

Introduction

Comparative politics has firmly established itself as a significant, vibrant, and definitive tradition and field of inquiry in the discipline of political science. The field, at least as far as research and postgraduate teaching are concerned, has moved well beyond its early ‘public law’ phase of comparative institutionalism and its more parochial labelling as ‘anything that studies countries outside the United States’ (see, e.g. Valenzuela, 1988; Landman, 2000, 2003, 2008). It is now one that is at the centre of debates on normative and empirical theory (Lichbach and Zuckerman, 1997), quantitative and qualitative methodology (King et al., 1994; Brady and Collier, 2004; Gerring, 2007), and the ability for political science scholarship to have practical relevance to practitioners and policy makers across a range of significant issues areas in the contemporary world (e.g. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Schram and Caterino, 2006). The American Political Science Review (and now Perspectives on Politics) has long had a special section devoted to book reviews in comparative politics, the specialized section of the American Political Science Association on Comparative Politics has over 1,500 members and is the largest of the Association's sections, and major political science research meetings such as the European Consortium for Political Research's annual workshops are often dominated by comparative politics research. There are three main journals dedicated to comparative politics, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, while other top-rated journals in the field, such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Government and Opposition, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research have a significant and frequent number of articles that can broadly be classified as comparative.

In many ways, the field of comparative politics has been defined by what it does, namely, providing explanation and understanding of important social and political phenomena through the comparison of similarities and differences across different units, where such units are typically, but not exclusively, nation states. The methodological core of comparative politics draws on J. S. Mill's (1843/1961) methods of ‘difference’ and ‘agreement’, and allows for some form of ‘control’ to be introduced in ways that approximate the experimental or quasi-experimental conditions found in the natural sciences (see Faure, 1994; Mahoney and Goertz, 2004; Goertz, 2005). In short, to compare is to control. Alongside the methodological identity of comparative politics, some have argued that the field has its own distinctive [Page 2]theoretical traditions (e.g. Chilcote, 1994), but today comparative politics is characterized more through the development of rational, structural, and cultural theories (see Lichbach and Zuckerman, 1997) that are tested using some form of comparative method. Evidence is collected and analyzed in systematic fashion to yield substantive inferences that typically go beyond the confines of the case or cases that have been compared.

From the early comparisons until now, comparative method has advanced considerably, which is a function of greater attention to questions of case selection, the logic of inference and raising the number of observations, data availability, and enhanced computer technology, among others. These new themes and developments are raised repeatedly across the chapters of this volume. Classic ‘first generation’ comparativists such as Gabriel Almond, Robert Dahl, Barrington Moore, Seymour Martin Lipset, Samuel Huntington, Arend Lijphart, Giovanni Sartori, Ted Gurr, Theda Skocpol, Adam Przeworski, and Henry Teune achieved so much in setting the research agenda of the field across a range of seminal topics such as democracy, political violence, political development, social revolution, institutional design, and many others, while at the same time developing strategies for comparison that were attentive to variation in the outcomes that were to be explained, as well as rules of inquiry that addressed questions of concept development, conceptual stretching, case selection (at least partially), and theory-building. These scholars generally saw a methodological division in the field between those engaged in large-N cross national quantitative analysis on the one hand, and those engaged in either small-N comparative analysis or single-country case studies on the other (Lijphart, 1971).1 This division has persisted to some degree in the field but was significantly challenged through the publication of Designing social inquiry (King et al., 1994), which argued that the same logic of inference that applies to large-N statistical analysis (on individual or aggregate data) should apply to small-N comparative and single-country analysis. This challenge suggests that all comparative analysis broadly occupies a continuum that trades the number of observations off against the strength of the inferences that are drawn (see Landman, 2000, 2003, 2008). For King et al. (1994), the inferences drawn from small-N comparative analysis and single-country studies could be strengthened only through raising observations, which is achieved through analyzing individual level data within studies that compare few countries, or adding countries and time to the analysis such that variables are given room to vary and comparative studies avoid indeterminate research designs. Despite the achievements of the classic comparativists, King et al. (1994) were able to show that many studies still suffered from selection bias and that many of the findings from the existing literature could be called into question on this basis (see also Geddes, 2003).

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