EXCERPTED FROM

Doing
Comparative Politics:
An Introduction to
Approaches and Issues
THIRD EDITION

Timothy C. Lim

Copyright © 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62637-450-8 pb

1800 30th Street, Suite 314

Boulder, CO 80301 USA
telephone 303.444.6684
fax 303.444.0824

This excerpt was downloaded from the

Lynne Rienner Publishers website
www.rienner.com

Contents
List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 Getting Into Comparative Politics 5

What Is Comparative Politics? 3

What Is Politics? 10

What Does It Mean to Compare? 15

Why Compare? 17

What Is Comparable? 18

What Are the Advantages of the Comparative Method? 23

The Importance of Method and Theory 25

2 Comparing to Learn, Learning to Compare 27

Comparing and Open-Mindedness 28

Comparing and Critical Thinking 28

Strategies of Comparing 29

The Logic of Comparative Analysis 30

Concrete Models of Comparative Analysis 43

Conclusion 58

3 Thinking Theoretically in Comparative Politics 61

Why Study Theory? 61

Theory in Comparative Politics 67

Theoretical Divisions: Rationality, Structure, and Culture 71

Rationality: A Nontechnical Introduction 72

The Structural Tradition 78

v
vi Contents
 The Cultural Tradition 86
A Hybrid Tradition: Institutionalism 93
Separation or Synthesis? 96
Bringing Everything Together 97

4 Why Are Poor Countries Poor?

Explaining Economic Underdevelopment 103
Defining Poverty 105
To Be Poor or Not to Be Poor? A Rational Choice Perspective on
Poverty 108
Cultural Explanations of Poverty: The Bad and the Good 119
Keeping the Poor Down? Structural Explanations of Poverty 126
Conclusion 136
5
Why Has East Asia Prospered?
Explaining Economic Growth in
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China 139
Rationality, the Strong State, and Rapid Economic Growth in East
Asia 143
Culture and Capitalist Development in East Asia 156
Global Capitalism and the Rise of East Asia 168
Explaining China’s Economic Rise 179
Conclusion 186

6 What Makes a Democracy?

Explaining the Breakdown of Authoritarian Rule 189
Defining Democracy: A Never-Ending Debate? 190 Economic
Development and Democracy:
A Necessary Relationship? 195
Agents of Democratization: Rational Choice and Democratic Transition
204
Structure and Rationality: Competition or Synthesis? 216
A Missing Link? Culture and Democracy 218
Taking the Next Step 228

7 Why Do People Kill?

Explaining Genocide and Terrorism 233
Definitions: Genocide and Terrorism 236
Strategic Killers? Rational Choice Explanations of Genocide and
Terrorism 245
The Culture of Killing: Cultural Approaches to Explaining Collective Political
Violence 257
The Power of Culture: Making Genocide and Terrorism Possible 261
Choice or Fate? A Structural View of Genocide and Terrorism 271
Conclusion 277
Contents vii
8 Why Collective Action?

Explaining the Rise of Social Movements 279

What Is a Social Movement? 281
Social Movements and Rationality 285
Structural Accounts of Social Movements 295
Culture and Social Movements 302
The Three Perspectives and the Arab Spring 310 Conclusion
317

9 Globalization and the Study of Comparative Politics 321

What Is Globalization? 323
Implications of Globalization in Comparative Politics 326
Globalization and the Three Research Traditions 328
Conclusion 340

Glossary 341
Selected Bibliography 361
Index 383
About the Book 409
 1 Getting Into Comparative
Politics
Scholars who study comparative politics, and all scholars for
that matter, are generally concerned with answering questions, or with
providing explanations for the myriad processes, issues, and events that shape
the world in which we live. Of course, answering questions first requires that
we ask questions. In the field of comparative politics, these questions have
generally revolved around large-scale political, social, and economic changes
that occur primarily at the domestic or national level. Examples of such large-
scale change include social revolutions (e.g., the French Revolution of 1789,
the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the Chinese Revolution of 1949), nation-
building, economic transformation and development (e.g., the shift from a rural
economy to a capitalist-industrial economy), political development (especially
democratization), among others. The foregoing list of issues leads to fairly
obvious, albeit broad, questions: Why do social revolutions occur, and why are
some successful, while others are not? Why did some countries industrialize
long ago, while many other countries only began to industrialize fairly
recently? Why have some countries democratized, while others remain
decidedly nondemocratic? Part of “getting into comparative politics” means
asking the sorts of questions around which the field revolves.
Given the importance of questions, it would be useful to introduce a few
more, some big and some not so big; some very clearly part of the domain of
comparative politics, and some perhaps much less so:

• Why does the United States lead the rest of the industrialized world—
by a very wide margin—in the number of gun homicides?
• Why are there still so many desperately poor peoples and desperately
poor countries in the world? Conversely, how have some peoples and
countries been able to become rich and prosperous in only a generation
or so?

1
2 Doing Comparative Politics
• Why do some mass protests against violent and repressive governments
work while others fail miserably?
• Why do high school students in the United States—in the richest country
on the planet—do relatively poorly on international tests of math and
science?

The foregoing list is purposely bookended by two questions not normally

asked in the field of comparative politics, in that they are both centered on the
United States and are both about “smaller” (albeit far from unimportant) issues.
I do this for one simple reason: to highlight the fact that the field of comparative
politics, in principle, can cover a very diverse range of issues and is not limited
to the study of foreign countries. I will discuss both these points later in the
chapter. First, however, I want to say something about the issue of “answers,”
for finding answers is also a part— a very big part—of getting into comparative
politics. For all the questions just posed, there are many possible answers.
Some answers may seem very persuasive, and others may seem completely
unconvincing. On the question about gun homicides, for example, controversial
director Michael Moore argued in his Oscar-winning 2002 film Bowling for
Columbine that the high level of gun violence in the United States is largely
due to a “culture of fear.” This culture of fear, he posited, is constantly
reproduced through policies and practices that exacerbate insecurity throughout
US society; more important, it pushes Americans to resolve problems and
interpersonal conflict through violence, a reaction that in turn creates a self-
confirming cycle: fear begets violence, which begets more fear, which begets
even more violence, and so on. A culture of fear may not explain everything
we need to know about gun violence in the United States, but according to
Moore, it is almost certainly a major element—perhaps the major element—of
any explanation that purports to tell us why Americans are so prone to shooting
each other. Is Moore right? Or is his argument completely baseless? How do
we know? More broadly, how do we know if any argument—especially one
that deals with complex social, political, or economic phenomena—is valid or
even plausible? This book is designed, in part, to help you answer these sorts
of questions. Learning how to evaluate specific arguments, however, is
secondary to the overarching goal of this book, which is to enable you to better
understand and explain social, political, or economic processes, events, and
outcomes on your own.
So what does any of this have to do with comparative politics? The answer
is this: comparative politics provides us with a ready array of conceptual and
analytical tools that we can use to address and answer a wide range of questions
about the social world, including the question “Why are there so many gun
homicides in the United States?” Put another way, comparative politics
provides a systematic, coherent, and practical way to understand and
 3
Getting Into Comparative Politics

make better sense of the things that happen in the world around us, from our
own neighborhoods to the world at large. In a broader sense, moreover,
comparative politics is relevant to almost anyone, even and especially to those
who assume that the field is only about studying foreign countries. This is
because, as a general procedure or approach, comparative politics can be
applied to a huge variety of problems, from the mundane to the sublime, in a
wide variety of areas. Explaining gun violence is just one example, but there
are many others. Consider the following potpourri of questions and issues: Can
a single-payer national healthcare system work in the United States? Are
fundamentalist religious beliefs and democracy always and forever
incompatible? Is vast economic inequality a necessary byproduct of a capitalist
system? Will the legalization of all drugs, including the decriminalization of
marijuana, significantly reduce crime and make drug use safer?
To repeat: a comparative politics approach is well suited for addressing all
the foregoing questions and many others. At this point, of course, the reasons
may not be clear, but they will become much clearer as we proceed. It is also
important to say, at this early juncture, that comparative politics is not the only,
nor is it always the best, approach one can use. Nonetheless, virtually any
student or concerned citizen (not to mention scholar or policymaker) will
benefit tremendously from cultivating and developing a comparative politics
approach or, to put it more colloquially, from simply getting into comparative
politics. With all this in mind, the next important step we need to take is to
clarify what the term comparative politics means and what it implies. As we
will see, this is easier said than done.

What Is Comparative Politics?

Many textbooks on comparative politics provide a clear, seemingly simple
answer to the question “What is comparative politics?” Perhaps the simplest is
one introduced earlier: “Comparative politics is the study of politics in foreign
countries” (Zahariadis 1997, p. 2, emphasis added). Few texts, though, stop
there. Most also emphasize that comparative politics, in slightly more formal
terms, involves both a method of study and a subject of study. As a method of
study, comparative politics is—not surprisingly— premised on comparison or
comparative analysis. As a subject of study, comparative politics focuses on
understanding and explaining political phenomena that take place within a
state, society, country, or political system. (See Figure 1.1 for a discussion of
these various terms.)1 This slightly more detailed definition of the field gives
us a better sense of what comparative politics is and how it may differ from
other fields of inquiry, although, as will be discussed later, it is a definition that
can raise more questions than it answers. Still, defining comparative politics as
4 Doing Comparative Politics
a method of study based on comparison and a subject of study based on an
examination of political phenomena in various countries highlights several
important points. First, it immediately tells us that the field is ostensibly
concerned with internal or domestic dynamics, which helps to distinguish
comparative politics from international relations (IR)—a field of study
largely, though not exclusively, concerned with the external relations or foreign
policies of states. Second, it tells us that comparative politics is, appropriately
enough, concerned with political phenomena. Third, and perhaps most
important, it tells us that the field is not only characterized but also defined by
a comparative method of analysis. I might also point out that this second
definition does not automatically exclude the United States (as the first does)
from the field of comparative politics: the United States is a state or country in
exactly the same sense that France, Japan, India, Mexico, South Korea,
Zimbabwe, or Russia is.2
As already noted, though, the second definition of comparative politics
raises a number of other questions and issues. Can comparative politics, for
example, focus only on what happens inside countries? In other words, is it
possible to understand the politics of a place without understanding and
accounting for the impact of external or transnational/international forces? This
is a very important question, but there are several others: What is meant by
political phenomena—or by politics more generally? Are economic, social, and
cultural phenomena also political, or do they fall into a completely different
category? Regarding the question of method, we might also ask: What does it
mean to compare? Is comparison in comparative politics different from, say,
comparison in sociology, history, chemistry, or any other field of study? Even
more basically, why do we compare? That is, what’s the point of making
comparisons in the first place? And last, how do we compare?

The Importance of Definitions

In posing so many questions, I realize that I also might have raised a question
in your mind, namely, why make things so complicated? Isn’t it possible to just
be satisfied with a very short and easy-to-understand definition? The simple
answer is no. One reason is clear: definitions are important. Very important.
This is partly because they tell us what is included in the field of study and
what is left out. Consider the definition suggested earlier: “Comparative
politics is the study of politics in foreign countries.” This definition, at least
implicitly, leaves out the United States (or really any other country, depending
on the nationality of the reader). But it is not clear why the United States should
receive such special consideration. Is it because the United States is different
from all other countries—literally incomparable? Or is there some other, less
obvious reason? We are left to wonder. Consider, too, the point made in the
 5
foregoing paragraph on the notion of politics: Does a study of politics in foreign
countries mean that we

Figure 1.1 Some Key Concepts in Comparative Politics: State,

Nation, Nation-State, Government, and Country

The terms state, nation, nation-state, government, and country are often used
interchangeably, especially in the popular press and media in general. Although
this practice is not entirely unwarranted, it is important to recognize that the
terms are not synonymous. A state, for example, is a legal concept that is
premised on a number of conditions: a permanent population, a defined territory,
and a national government capable of maintaining effective control over its
territory. In addition, many scholars (following Max Weber) argue that a state
must have a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force or violence within
a given territory. Notice that the definition of state includes a reference to
government, which can be defined as the agency or apparatus through which a
body exercises authority and performs its functions. In this definition,
governments need not be part of a state; moreover, multiple governments may
exist within a single state. We can find governments in all sorts of places—in a
university or school (that is, the student government) or in sovereign “nations”
(for example, a Native American tribal council)—and at many levels. Cities,
counties, provinces, and whole regions (for example, the European Union) can
also have their own separate governments.
The example of Native Americans is a useful way to differentiate a nation
from a state. A nation, in the simplest terms, can be defined as a group of people
who recognize each other as sharing a common identity. This common identity
can be based on language, religion, culture, or a number of other self-defined
criteria. This makes the concept of the nation inherently subjective or
intersubjective. Nations do not require states or governments to exist, nor must
nations exist within a single defined territory. One can speak, for example, of
nations that transcend borders, such as the Nation of Islam. Combining the
definitions of state and nation creates the concept of the nation-state. Technically
speaking, a nation-state would only exist if nearly all the members of a single
nation were organized in a single state, without any other distinct communities
being present (Willets 1997, p. 289). From this perspective, despite its prevalent
usage, many scholars argue that there are no true nation-states and that the
concept should be entirely abandoned. But there are what we might call national
states—states in which a common identity is forged around the concept of
nationalism itself (for more on this issue, see Eley and Suny 1996). For example,
people living in the United States may be divided by a wide range of religious,
cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and other differences. Yet they all may share a
common sense of “being American.” Practically speaking, the term national
state is often used as a synonym for nation-state. The notion of a national state,
moreover, comes close to the more concrete concept of country, which may be
defined as a distinct political system of people sharing common values and
6 Doing Comparative Politics
occupying a relatively fixed geographic space (Eley and Suny 1996). Country is
the most generic of the terms referred to here.

do not study economic, social, or cultural issues and concerns in those same
foreign countries? Does it mean we only examine those things that
governments or states do? If the answer to the last two questions is yes, it would
necessarily mean that a lot of potentially important issues and concerns would
 7
be left out in the study of comparative politics. Yet this would clearly be a
mistake.
Given the complexities of defining the field, there continue to be a variety
of definitions of comparative politics. Admittedly, at least in a broad or generic
sense,3 most definitions of comparative politics are now on the same basic page.
At the same time, there are still subtle and usually unstated differences. (For a
sampling of various definitions of comparative politics, see Figure 1.2.) Thus,
despite some basic consensus, it is nonetheless worthwhile to explore, in
greater depth, the various aspects of how to define the field of comparative
politics. For without greater exploration, a number of important, even
fundamental, issues may go unquestioned. My intention, however, is not to
provide the definition of comparative politics.

Figure 1.2 A Few Definitions of Comparative Politics

“Comparative politics involves the systematic study and comparison of the

world’s political systems. It seeks to explain differences between as well as
similarities among countries. In contrast to journalistic reporting on a single
country, comparative politics is particularly interested in exploring patterns, pro
cesses, and regularities among political systems” (Wiarda 2000, p. 7).

Comparative politics is “the study and comparison of domestic politics across

countries” (O’Neil 2015, p. 5).

“What is comparative politics? It is two things, first a world, second a discipline.

As a ‘world,’ comparative politics encompasses political behavior and
institutions in all parts of the earth. . . . The ‘discipline’ of comparative politics
is a field of study that desperately tries to keep up with, to encompass, to
understand, to explain, and perhaps to influence the fascinating and often riotous
world of comparative politics” (Lane 1997, p. 2).

“Comparative politics . . . involves no more and no less than a comparative study

of politics—a search for similarities and differences between and among
political phenomena, including political institutions (such as legislatures,
political parties, or political interest groups), political behavior (such as voting,
demonstrating, or reading political pamphlets), or political ideas (such as
liberalism, conservatism, or Marxism). Everything that politics studies,
comparative politics studies; the latter just undertakes the study with an explicit
comparative methodology in mind” (Mahler 2000, p. 3).
Getting Into Comparative Politics

Instead, my goal is to help you understand the complexities and subtleties of

defining the field. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by asking the type
8 Doing Comparative Politics
of questions posed earlier. Next, of course, I need to try to answer these
questions, which is what I will endeavor to do in the remainder of this chapter.
In thinking about the definition of comparative politics, it is useful to
recognize that comparative politics is not the only field in political science that
focuses on countries or states as the primary units of analysis. Scholars in
international relations, as suggested earlier, are also intimately concerned with
countries or, more accurately, states. But IR scholarship is typically more
interested in examining relations between and among states—that is, with their
interactions in an international system. Even though this has not precluded IR
scholars from looking at what happens inside states or countries, a good deal
of research in the field has tended to treat states as undifferentiated wholes,
which is to say that IR scholars (especially those associated with, until fairly
recently, the dominant research school in IR, realism or neorealism) assume
that states are functionally alike when interacting with other states. This is a
critical assumption, largely because it suggests that it is possible to explain the
behavior of states or countries without a careful examination of their internal
working and makeup (internal workings and makeup include such things as a
country’s political and economic systems, its cultural norms and traditions,
and its specific historical experiences and institutions). The reasoning behind
this assumption stems from the belief that the international system is anarchic,
such that each and every state is forced to behave in similar ways regardless of
its internal makeup or its domestic politics. The logic here is both simple and
compelling: in an anarchic (as opposed to hierarchic) system, states must
compete with other states for security, power, and influence. They must do so
precisely because there is no ultimate rule-maker and rule-enforcer for the
system as a whole. Lacking an ultimate authority, individual states (or actors)
are forced onto the same basic path when dealing with other states. Each state
must, in other words, do those things that ensure its own longterm survival.
This generally means, among other things, building a strong army, developing
a network of mutually beneficial military-strategic alliances, maintaining a
diplomatic corps, gathering intelligence, and engaging in military conflict
when necessary.
In this view, the internal makeup of a country is relatively unimportant in
terms of explaining or predicting its external behavior. Thus, for example, a
liberal democracy with a strong presidential system (such as the United
States) would behave—with regard to its foreign policy decisions— in the
same way that a single-party, communist-led dictatorship would.4 In a similar
vein, we would expect a state governed by an Islamic fundamentalist regime,
say Iran, to act in essentially the same manner as any other state. A more salient
consideration would be the size and military capacity of a country. That is, a
large, militarily powerful country would behave differently from a small,
militarily weak country. The foregoing discussion, I should stress, is highly
 9
simplified and stylized; in addition, it fails to account for wide and significant
divergences within IR scholarship.5 Nonetheless, it is a useful way to grasp
what has long been a basic distinction between IR and comparative politics.
This is necessary if only because so many people, including some political
scientists (at least those outside of IR and comparative politics), are largely
oblivious to the differences between the two fields. Yet for the most part, the
two fields have developed along very different lines, both theoretically and
methodologically, and have only occasionally intersected in a significant and
meaningful manner. This is reason enough to spend a lot of time defining
comparative politics, for if we cannot even distinguish it from related fields,
how can we reasonably talk about a comparative politics approach?
The strong tendency, in IR, to gloss over the domestic or internal
characteristics of states or countries left a huge gap to be filled. Comparative
politics has, almost by default, filled this gap, a fact reflected in earlier
definitions of the field. In this respect, we might say that, whereas IR is
generally based on an outside-in approach, comparative politics has generally
been based on an inside-out approach. The different emphases of the two fields
have in turn produced (at least in the past) a very clear-cut division of
(intellectual) labor. Thus, as Nikolaos Zahariadis pointed out:

Comparative research tends to be geographic in orientation; that is

comparativists generally describe themselves either as country specialists or
as Europeanists, Africanists, Asianists, and so on. [Ironically, this has led
many “comparativists,” in practice, to eschew engaging in comparative
research; instead, many have become narrowly, even exclusively, focused on
their country of expertise.] In contrast, divisions in international relations are
more thematic and involve issues such as international conflict or
international political economy that transcend geographic boundaries. (1997,
p. 4)

Zahariadis is correct, but his observations do not go far enough. The division
of labor between comparative politics and IR has resulted not only in different
orientations and research interests but also in a belief, particularly among IR
scholars in the realist school, that there is a very high, even impenetrable, wall
between domestic and international politics.

Can the Internal Politics of a Place and the Impact of External

Forces Be Understood Separately?
All this brings us back to an integrally related issue, one raised earlier in the
chapter—whether is it possible to understand the internal politics of a place
without understanding the impact of external forces. My answer to
Getting Into Comparative Politics
10 Doing Comparative Politics
this question is a simple and unequivocal no. This impossibility, I think, has
been true for a very long time (at least since the beginnings of colonialism in
the fifteenth century) but is particularly true today. Processes such as
globalization in all its various dimensions (a topic covered at length in Chapter
9), in particular, have made it nearly impossible to understand the internal
dynamics of a country without looking at what happens on the “outside.” In
practice, virtually all comparativists recognize this, although there is still a
great deal of disagreement over the relative importance of internal versus
external factors. Some scholars argue that external and, particularly, system-
level factors—such as the structure of the world economy or particular
relationships of dependence between poor and rich countries—are extremely
and sometimes overwhelmingly important. Others argue that although such
things matter, what matters most are the individual attributes of societies and
their states. These individual attributes may derive from particular historical
experiences, from culture, from specific types of institutional arrangements,
and so on. The debate between these two sides is related to the main theoretical
approaches in comparative politics, which we will cover in much more depth
in subsequent chapters. For now, suffice it to say that although almost all
comparativists now recognize the peril of defining the field strictly in terms of
what happens inside a country, state, or society, there is no consensus on
exactly what this means.

Another Definition of Comparative Politics

Admitting that comparative politics cannot be limited to looking at what
happens inside a country or other large social unit, I should stress, does not
mean that we need to completely abandon any distinctions among fields of
study, and especially between comparative politics and IR. We do need,
however, to amend our definition of comparative politics. Thus, rather than
defining comparative politics as a subject of study based on an examination of
political phenomena within or in countries, we can say that comparative politics
examines the interplay of domestic and external forces on the politics of a given
country, state, or society. This amended definition, unfortunately, still does not
tell us if it is legitimate to separate the study of politics from economics,
society, culture, and so on. It is to this question that we turn next.

What Is Politics?
Traditionally (that is, prior to the 1950s), comparative politics mainly involved
describing the basic features of political systems. Most research in comparative
politics, moreover, operated on the premise that politics referred exclusively to
the formal political system—that is, to the concrete institutions of government
(such as the parliament, the congress, and the bureaucracy) and to the
constitutional and judicial rules that helped governments function.
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 11

Accordingly, early studies tended to be little more than factual and generally
superficial accounts of how particular institutions of government operated and
were organized or how certain laws were written and then passed. Such
accounts may be useful and even necessary, but they can tell only a small part
of what we need to know about politics. Even those political processes and
actors closely associated with the formal political system— such as political
parties, elections, foreign and domestic decisionmaking— were left out of
these early studies. Politics, in short, was conceived of in very narrow terms.

A Process-Oriented Definition of Politics

This narrowness began to change in the 1950s, when scholars laid a new
foundation for the field of comparative politics and for political science more
generally. There are several complex reasons for this, most of which are not
necessary to discuss for present purposes. Suffice it to say, then, that the
traditional concern with the formal and legalistic conceptualization of politics
was challenged and ultimately cast aside in favor of a broader view. An
influential article by Roy Macridis and Richard Cox (1953) symbolized this
change. The two authors argued that the preoccupation with formal political
institutions and judicial rules was too close to the study of law and not close
enough to the study of politics, which, in contrast to the study of law, “observed
that relations between society and authority were governed by judicial but also
by informal rules and sometimes by brute force” (cited in Zahariadis 1997, p.
7). Although Macridis and Cox (along with several other prominent scholars)
succeeded in breaking the hold of formalism/ legalism in comparative politics,
they did so only to a limited extent. This was true for two basic reasons. First,
although the move away from formalism/ legalism opened the door to
comparative study of a broader range of political institutions and processes,
politics was still defined primarily if not solely in relation to activities that
involved the state or the government. Second, the discipline of political science
generally and comparative politics specifically remained tied to the idea that
politics—as a subject of study—could be separated from economics, sociology,
history, geography, anthropology, or any other field in the social sciences and
humanities.
The limitations of this latter view become particularly clear, noted Adrian
Leftwich, “when one considers concrete problems in modern societies, such as
unemployment in the industrial societies on the one hand, and rural poverty in
the Third World on the other. The harder you think about these issues, the more
difficult it is to identify them as strictly economic, social, or political in their
causes or consequences” (1983, p. 4). I agree, which is why in this book we
will begin with a concept of politics that is broader than what is offered in many
traditional textbooks. This alternative definition, what we might call a process-
12 Doing Comparative Politics

oriented or processual definition (Stoker and Marsh 2002), sees politics as part-
and-parcel of a larger social process. In this view, politics “is about the uneven
distribution of power in society [or between societies], how the struggle over
power is conducted, and its impact on the creation and distribution of resources,
life chances and well-being” (p. 9). This process-oriented definition, as should
be clear, makes it difficult if not impossible to maintain firm boundaries
between disciplines. To see this, consider, for example, how uneven
distributions of power in societies come about in the first place. Are these
uneven power distributions the product of history? Or do contemporary
economic forces play the determinative role? What about the effects of culture,
religion, custom, or even geography? Is it possible to say that one type of factor
always predominates, or is there an inextricable interaction among these
different forces—be they economic, social, political, cultural, geographic, and
so on? The answer to all these questions is, I believe, fairly clear, and it boils
down to the conclusion that politics is integrally and necessarily tied to history,
culture, economics, geography, and a variety of other forces. In practice, I
think, most comparativists agree with this view of politics, which is why
comparative political analysis today tends to be wide-ranging and inclusive.
In addition to transcending disciplinary boundaries, a process-oriented
definition of politics has at least two other implications. First, it clearly takes
politics out of the governmental arena and puts it into almost all domains of
life. These other domains include virtually all social and civil institutions and
actors, such as churches, factories, corporations, trade unions, political parties,
think tanks, ethnic groups and organizations, women’s groups, organized
crime, and so on. Second, a process-oriented definition of politics reinforces
our amended definition of comparative politics stated earlier (namely, “as a
field that looks at the interplay of domestic and external forces on the politics
of a given country, state, or society”). For it is clear that politics—as a struggle
for power over the creation and distribution of resources, life chances, and well-
being—is not something that can be easily compartmentalized into the
domestic and international. This is because the activities that determine the
distribution and use of resources (at least for the past few hundred years) are
rarely confined to a single, clearly defined political territory; thus, as all politics
is local (according to one popular saying), all politics is also potentially
international and global.

Losing Focus?
There are, I should note, many political scientists who would disagree with this
broad conception of politics. We are already familiar with the basic argument,
which essentially reverses the problem of narrow definitions. To wit: while
narrow definitions exclude a lot of potentially important “stuff,” overly broad
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 13

definitions may include too much. That is, because there are no neat boundaries
telling us what is and what is not included in the scope of the definition, we are
studying both everything and nothing. Zahariadis, for example, would like us
to differentiate politics from “corporate decisions”; the latter, he asserted,
“affect only a specific corporation” (1997, p. 2). Yet just a little reflection tells
us this is not always the case. Certainly there are myriad decisions made within
a corporation (or within a family, factory, church, or other social institution)
with very limited or no public or societal impact. At the same time, it is also
true that a vast number of “private” corporate decisions have a clear and
sometimes profound public dimension. By their very nature, in fact, many
corporate decisions have a deep influence on how resources are obtained, used,
produced, and distributed. Moreover, in an era of mega-corporations—where
the largest firms are bigger, and often immensely bigger, than many countries
in terms of command over economic resources—the suggestion that corporate
decisions do not have a far-reaching public impact is difficult to maintain.
Consider, in this regard, Wal-Mart. In the 2015 fiscal year, Wal-Mart’s total
revenue (domestic plus international) amounted to $486 billion (Wal-Mart
2015 Annual Report), which was more than the estimated gross domestic
product (GDP) of all but thirty-eight countries that same year. More
specifically, in 2015, Wal-Mart’s revenues put it between Belgium, with a GDP
(based on a purchasing power party [PPP] valuation) of $492 billion, and
Switzerland, with a GDP of $481 billion. Needless to say, Wal-Mart’s revenues
vastly exceeded the GDP of most of the world’s smaller countries. Haiti’s GDP,
to cite just one example, was a paltry $18 billion in 2015, or about 4 percent of
Wal-Mart’s total sales. (All GDP figures cited in KNOEMA 2015; see Figure
1.3 for additional details.) It is not hard to see that Wal-Mart’s corporate
decisions, in general, can and often do have a much greater political impact
than decisions made in Haiti. Where, then, do we draw the line between public
and private decisions? Is it even possible to do so? I would argue that the line,
in some respects, has simply become too blurred to be of major significance
today.
Admittedly, though, it would be a mistake for politics to be defined as
“everything including the kitchen sink.” Indeed, as I discuss in subsequent
chapters (and as suggested earlier), it is often necessary to provide clearcut,
precise definitions. This is especially true when trying to develop an argument
or when trying to support a specific hypothesis or claim. After all, if one cannot
precisely or adequately define what it is being studied—say democracy or
terrorism—how can one possibly claim to say anything meaningful about that
subject? In defining an entire field of study, however, precision is less
important, but not irrelevant. The trick, then, is to develop a definition that is
neither too narrow nor too unfocused. One solution, albeit a pragmatic one, is
14 Doing Comparative Politics

to acknowledge that the politics about which comparativists (and other political
scientists) are most concerned, according to Gerry Stoker and David Marsh, is
primarily collective as opposed to interpersonal,
Figure 1.3 Wal-Mart vs. the World, 2015 Estimates

The table below shows where Wal-Mart would rank, based on total revenue
compared to GDP, if it were a country. The comparison, of course, is overly and
perhaps fatally simplistic, but nonetheless gives a rough indication of the
economic size and power of the company relative to a range of countries.

Purchasing Power–Adjusted
Rank Country GDP ($ billions)

1 United States 18,125

10 France 2,634
20 Taiwan 1,125
30 South Africa 725
— Wal-Mart 486a
40 Singapore 471
50 Qatar 346
60 Ireland 238
70 New Zealand 165
80 Libya 103
90 Côte d’Ivoire 77
100 Democratic Republic of Congo 62

Sources: Figure for Wal-Mart based on the 2015 fiscal year, and includes total
revenues for Wal-Mart US, Wal-Mart International, and Sam’s Club (Wal-Mart 2015
Annual Report, http://stock.walmart.com/files/doc_financials/2015/annual/2015-annual-
report.pdf). GDP figures cited in KNOEMA 2015.
Note: a. Total sales.
and it involves interaction both within the public arena—that is, in the
government or state—and also between the public arena and social actors or
institutions (2002, p. 10). No doubt, this qualification will still be unsatisfactory
to many political scientists, but it is also one upon which a large number of
comparativists have chosen to base their research and analysis.
With all this in mind, let us now turn to the other major aspect of
comparative politics—comparing—by posing a simple question.
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 15

What Does It Mean to Compare?

In thinking about what it means to compare, let us first consider what Charles
Ragin, a prominent social scientist, has to say: “Thinking without comparison
is unthinkable. And, in the absence of comparison, so is all scientific thought
and scientific research” (Ragin 1987, p. 1, citing Swanson 1971, p. 141).
Although Ragin was citing another scholar, his own position is clear: in all the
sciences—social and natural—researchers, scholars, and students are
invariably engaged in making some sort of comparison. If this is so (and it is
fair to say that it is), then there is very little that sets comparative politics apart
(on the surface, at least) from other fields of study. This is to say that the
comparative strategies used by comparativists are not in principle different
from the comparative strategies used by other political scientists or by
sociologists, economists, psychologists, historians, and so on. But it does not
mean that absolutely no differences exist: (very) arguably, one practice that
sets comparative politics apart from other fields is the explicit and direct focus
on the comparative method—as opposed to simply or informally “comparing.”6
The comparative method, as I will discuss in detail in the following
chapter, is a distinctive mode of comparative analysis. According to Ragin
(1987), it entails two main predispositions. First, it involves a bias toward
(although certainly not an exclusive focus on) qualitative analysis, which
means that comparativists tend to look at cases as wholes and to compare whole
cases with each other. Thus the tendency for comparativists is to talk of
comparing Germany to Japan, or the United States to Canada. This may not
seem to be an important point, but it has significant implications, one of which
is that comparativists tend to eschew—or at least put less priority on—
quantitative analysis, also known as statistical or variable-centered analysis
(Ragin 1987, pp. 2–3). In the social sciences, especially over the past few years,
this orientation away from quantitative and toward qualitative analysis
definitely sets comparativists apart from other social scientists. Even within
comparative politics, however, this is beginning to change. The second
predisposition among comparativists is to value interpretation and context (pp.
2–3). This means, in part, that comparativists (of all theoretical orientations, I
might add) begin with the assumption that “history matters.” Saying that
history matters, I should caution, is much more than pointing out a few
significant historical events or figures in an analysis; instead, it involves
showing exactly how historical processes and practices, as well as long-
established institutional arrangements, impact and shape the contemporary
environment in which decisions are made, events unfold, and struggles for
power occur. It means, in other words, demonstrating a meaningful continuity
16 Doing Comparative Politics

between the past and the present. This is not easy to do, but for a comparativist
using history, it is often an essential task. (See Figure 1.4.)
Although understanding the predisposition of comparativists is important,
this still doesn’t tell us what it means to compare—a question that may seem
easy to answer, but in fact is not. Just pointing out or describing differences and
similarities between any two countries, for example, is not by any account the
be-all and end-all of comparative analysis. Indeed, staying strictly at the level
of superficial description—for example, China has a Confucian heritage,
whereas the United States does not; both France and Russia experienced social
revolutions—one will never genuinely engage in

Good historical analysis must show how past events and processes connect with
and shape contemporary events and processes. Just “talking about” history is
never enough.

comparative analysis, no matter how accurate the observations. And revealing

anything meaningful or insightful about political phenomena is even less likely.
Comparing, then, involves much more than pointing out similarities or
differences between two or more entities. Just what else is involved in
comparative analysis is the topic of our next chapter, so I will reserve the
remainder of this discussion on the topic until then. In the meantime, we need
to address another basic and essential question.
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 17

Why Compare?
To be good comparativists, we need to know why we compare. In other words,
what is the purpose of comparing? On this question, Giovanni Sartori (1994)
offered us a very simple answer: we compare to control. By control, Sartori
meant to say—albeit in a very loose way—that we use comparisons as a way
to check (verify or falsify) whether our claims or assertions about certain
phenomena are valid by controlling for, or holding constant, certain variables.
Take the statements “poverty causes corruption” or, conversely, “corruption
causes poverty”; “authoritarianism is more conducive to high levels of
economic growth than democracy”; and “social revolutions are caused by
relative deprivation.” How do we know, Sartori asked, whether any of these
statements is true, false, or something else? “We know,” Sartori answered, “by
looking around, that is, by comparative checking” (p. 16, emphasis added). It
is important to understand that, in most comparative analyses, actual control
variables are not used. This issue may not be very clear right now and, for our
purposes, is not critical. The main point is this: different types of comparisons
allow a researcher to treat a wide variety of similarities or differences
(depending on the particular comparative principle used) as if they are control
variables. In so doing, the researcher can safely eliminate a whole range of
potentially significant factors and instead concentrate on those variables
deemed most important. This is what Michael Moore implicitly did in his film
when, to show that his argument was right, he compared the United States and
Canada. More specifically, he asserted that because the two countries shared a
number of common features, for example, a high rate of gun ownership, ethnic
diversity, and exposure to violence in entertainment, none of the commonalities
could explain why the United States was a such violent society. In other words,
in that comparison, he was treating all the similarities between the two
countries as control variables in order to assess how lower or higher levels of
fear impact the gun homicide rate in the two countries.
Unfortunately, comparative checking usually cannot (indeed, can almost
never) provide definitive answers. This is true, in part, because comparative
checking is an imperfect mode of analysis, at least when comparing many
complex real-world cases. It is also true, in more substantive terms, because
comparison is not the best method of control in scientific analysis. There are
much better methods of control, such as the experimental method and
statistical control. “But,” as Sartori also noted, “the experimental method has
limited applicability in the social sciences, and the statistical one requires many
cases” (1994, p. 16), something that research in comparative politics generally
lacks (this is referred to as the small-N problem). Like it or not, therefore,
comparison often represents only a secondbest method of control in the social
sciences and comparative politics.
18 Doing Comparative Politics

Despite its second-best status, comparing to control is an undeniably

important purpose of comparative analysis. Yet many comparativists,
especially those with a strong predisposition toward qualitative and historical
analysis, are not always, or even mostly, involved in (formally and rigorously)
testing hypotheses through their comparisons (Ragin 1987, p. 11). Instead, as
Ragin noted, many comparativists “apply theory to cases in order to interpret
them” (p. 11, emphasis in original). We will see examples of this in subsequent
chapters, but what Ragin meant, in part, is that comparativists recognize that
countries or other types of macrosocial units all, in important ways, have a
unique story to tell. Ragin suggested, therefore, that some researchers are often
most interested in using comparative analysis to get a better grasp of these
individual “stories,” rather than primarily using them as a way to verify or
falsify specific arguments or hypotheses. In other words, for these researchers,
in-depth understanding is the goal of comparative analysis. Comparing to
understand, to put it in slightly different terms, means that researchers use
comparison to see what other cases can tell them about the specific case or
country in which they have the most interest.
In a similar vein, some comparativists assume that the sheer complexity of
real-world cases makes control a worthwhile but difficult, if not impossible,
goal to achieve. Instead, they advocate a more pragmatic approach that attempts
to build theoretical generalization—or explanation—through an accumulation
of case-based knowledge (this is sometimes referred to as analytical
induction). In this view, it is understood that no case, by itself, or no
comparison of a small number of cases is sufficient to test a theory or general
claim. This is largely because the overwhelming complexity of any given case
makes any test problematic and highly contingent. Instead, each case or each
small-N comparison provides comparativists another piece (albeit often a very
complicated piece in and of itself) to work into a much larger puzzle. I will
come back to this issue—and specifically the issue of complex causality—
later.
Even though the foregoing discussion may be a little confusing, the key
point is simply that, although researchers use comparisons for different reasons,
doing comparative politics requires that you be aware of your reason and
rationale for making a comparison. Figure 1.5 provides a summary of the three
general purposes of comparing.

What Is Comparable?
Another important question about comparing involves the issue of exactly what
one can compare. What, to put it simply, is comparable? Again, the answer
may seem obvious at first blush, especially in the context of comparative
politics. For instance, it certainly seems reasonable to assert that countries
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 19

(governments, societies, or similar entities) are comparable. Yet why should

this be the case? One basic answer is that all countries share at least some
common attributes—for example, they all occupy a territory defined by
political boundaries, they all represent the interests of a political community,
they are all recognized (albeit not always officially as in the case of Taiwan or
Palestine) by other countries or states, and so on. Implicitly, this is why most
everyone assumes, to paraphrase a common saying, that oranges can be
compared to other oranges, and apples can be compared to other apples (while,
of course, apples and oranges cannot be compared to each other). At the same
time, countries each differ in some meaningful ways. Indeed, it is fair to say
that differences are crucially important in any type of comparative analysis.
After all, if all countries were exactly alike, there would be no reason to
compare them. Think about this last point for just a moment. Why, to repeat
the basic question, is there nothing to be learned from comparing two
completely identical units of analysis? Methodologically speaking, the answer
is clear: comparing completely
20 Doing Comparative Politics

Figure 1.5 Three Purposes of Comparing: A Summary

Comparing to Comparing to Comparing to

Control Understand Explain

Basic strategy Comparative Interpretation Analytical induction or purpose checking

Logic or Researcher uses a Researcher is Researcher uses cases

approach to range of cases as a primarily interested in as a way to
build a comparative way to test (verify or a single case and uses
stronger theoretical analysis falsify) a specific different cases or
explanation. Cases are
claim, hypothesis, general theories as a used in a step-
by-step or theory. way to learn more manner, with each
about the case being case contributing to
studied. the development of a
general theory.

Simple (1) Begin with a (1) Begin with case (1) Begin with example claim:
A high level (and issue): The high general theory:
of gun ownership level of homicides in Structural
theory of will lead to a high South Africa.
democratization. level of gun-related homicide.
(2) Test the claim: (2) Use existing (2) Use various cases
Researcher examines theories and other to strengthen the a range
of countries cases to better theory: Researcher in order to
control for understand case: begins by looking at gun ownership;
if Researcher uses a the democratization countries with the range
of theories on process in Mexico. highest rates of gun gun violence to
better This examination may ownership have low
understand why South lead researcher to rates of gun-
related Africa is the most revise elements of homicides (and
vice violent country in the theory; the researcher
versa), the claim is world. Researcher then looks at Taiwan,
falsified and must also uses other cases Poland, and
Ukraine.
be rejected. to see what those Each case is used
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 21

cases can tell him as a steppingstone about

South Africa. in developing or
strengthening original
theory.

identical units does not allow us to assess the significance of any particular
variable. In this respect, we might say that comparing apples to oranges
generally makes more sense than comparing oranges to oranges or apples to
apples.
22 Doing Comparative Politics

Thus, to determine what we can compare, we can begin by saying that we

can compare “entities whose attributes are in part shared (similar) and in part
non-shared” (Sartori 1994, p. 17). Accordingly, we can say that countries are
comparable to each other—as are provinces or states (such as California and
Texas), cities, and neighborhoods—because all countries share certain
attributes, but also differ from each other in a variety of ways. Saying all this,
however, still doesn’t tell us all we need to know. Is it appropriate, for instance,
to compare the United States to Côte d’Ivoire, Japan, Indonesia, Guinea-
Bissau, or New Zealand? Similarly, is it appropriate to compare California to
Rhode Island or New York state, or Los Angeles to Philadelphia (or Seoul,
London, or Paris)? It depends on what the researcher is hoping to accomplish;
it depends on what the focus of analysis is; it depends on the particular research
design the researcher plans to use; and it depends on the range of similarities
and differences between or among the units of comparison. This is an obvious
point; still, it is one worth making because, when phrased as a question—“On
what does our comparison depend?”—it forces the researcher to think more
carefully about how to design their study. It forces the researcher, as well, to
justify the comparisons ultimately made.
What we can compare, I should stress, is definitely not limited to countries
or other geographic entities (more on this in Chapter 2). Nor is it necessarily
limited to comparable data from two or more countries. Such a restriction, for
example, would automatically exclude comparatively oriented but single-
country (or single-unit) case studies, including such classic comparative
studies as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America ([1835] 1988) and
Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
([1915] 1961) (both cited in Ragin 1987, p. 4). As Ragin explained it, “Many
area specialists [i.e., researchers who concentrate on a single country] are
thoroughly comparative because they implicitly compare their chosen case to
their own country or to an imaginary or theoretically decisive ideal-typic case”
(p. 4). Other scholars, including Sartori, would disagree, or at least would be
quite skeptical of the claim that single-country case studies can be genuinely
comparative. Sartori wrote, for example, “It is often held that comparisons can
be ‘implicit.’ . . . I certainly grant that a scholar can be implicitly comparative
without comparing, that is, provided that his one-country or one-unit study is
embedded in a comparative context and that his concepts, his analytic tools, are
comparable. But how often is this really the case?” (1994, p. 15, emphasis in
original).7 Sartori made a good point, but so too did Ragin. My own view is that
single case studies can be comparative if the researcher is clear about the
“comparative context.” But this is far less difficult than Sartori implies. (I will
return to a discussion of this point in the following chapter.) There is, I might
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 23

also note, a special type of case study, which is referred to as a within-case

comparison. A within-case comparison examines an ostensibly single case
over time, during which there is a significant change in the variable or variables
under investigation.8 As I discuss further in Chapter 2, this is actually a type of
binary comparison, and one that is unequivocally comparative.
We are not going to resolve the debate here. Suffice it to say, then, that
doing comparative analysis requires far more than just looking at a foreign
country or just randomly or arbitrarily picking two or more countries to study
in the context of a single paper or study. It is, instead, based on a general logic
and on particular strategies that guide (but do not necessarily) determine the
comparative choices we make. Understanding the logic of comparative
analysis, in fact, is essential to doing comparative politics. Needless to say, this
will also be an important topic of discussion in Chapter 2. But to conclude for
now our general discussion of comparing, it would be useful to consider some
of the advantages of the comparative method (a topic also addressed in the
following chapter).

What Are the Advantages of the Comparative Method?

Earlier I noted that comparativists tend to look at cases as wholes and to
compare whole cases with each other. There are important advantages to this
practice, the first and most important of which, perhaps, is that it enables
researchers to deal with complex causality (or causal complexity). At one level,
complex causality is an easy-to-grasp concept. After all, there is little doubt
that much of what happens in the “real world” is an amalgam of economic,
cultural, institutional, political, social, and even psychological pro cesses and
forces. Not only do all these processes and forces exist indepen dently (at least
to some extent), but they also interact in complicated, difficult-to discern, and
sometimes unpredictable (or contingent) ways. Thus, in studying a particular
phenomenon—say, political violence—it is likely that several or even dozens
of factors are at play. Some factors may be primarily economic, such as
poverty, unemployment, and unequal income distribution. Other factors may
be cultural (for example, specific religious values and practices, community
norms), political (for example, lack of democracy or a skewed distribution of
political power, which itself could be based on religious or ethnic differences),
socioeconomic (for example, strong class-based divisions), and so on. An
adequate understanding of political violence may have to take all these factors
into account and will likely have to specify their interrelationship and
interaction within certain contexts. Ragin provided a very useful, three-point
summary of complex causality:
24 Doing Comparative Politics

First, rarely does an outcome of interest to social scientists have a single

cause. The conditions conducive for strikes, for example, are many; there is
no single condition that is universally capable of causing a strike. Second,
causes rarely operate in isolation. Usually, it is the combined effect of various
conditions, their intersection in time and space, that produces a certain
outcome. Thus, social causation is often both multiple and conjectural,
involving different combinations of causal conditions. Third, a specific cause
may have opposite effects depending on context. For example, changes in
living conditions may increase or decrease the probability of strikes,
depending on other social and political conditions. . . . The fact that some
conditions have contradictory effects depending on context further
complicates the identification of empirical regularities because it may appear
that a condition is irrelevant when in fact it is an essential part of several
causal combinations in both its presence and absence state. (1987, p. 27,
emphasis added)

The point to remember is that other methods of inquiry (such as the

experimental method and statistical analysis) cannot, in general, adequately
deal with complex causality. Comparative (case-oriented) analysis, by contrast,
is especially—perhaps uniquely—suited for dealing with the peculiar
complexity of social phenomena (Rueschemeyer 1991). Why? Quite simply
because comparative analysis, to repeat a point made earlier, can and often does
deal with cases as a whole—meaning that a full range of factors can be
considered at once within particular historical contexts (which themselves vary
over time). This is especially apparent with regard to deviant or anomalous
cases. Comparative analysis can help explain why, for example, some
relatively poor countries—such as India, Mauritania, and Costa Rica—are
democratic, when statistically based studies would predict just the opposite. 9
To account for such anomalous cases (as many comparativists might argue),
we need to look very closely at the particular configuration of social, cultural,
socioeconomic, and political forces in these individual countries, and
understand how, from a historical perspective, these configurations emerged
and developed. We also need to understand how external forces and
relationships interacted with the domestic environment to produce the specific
results that they did. None of this is likely to be achieved, to repeat, without
considering the whole context of each individual case.
A second, strongly related advantage is that comparative analysis
(especially when carried out in a qualitative as opposed to quantitative manner)
allows the researcher to better understand or explain the relationship between
and among factors. Quantitative or statistical research, by contrast, does a very
good job in showing that relationships exist (for example, that capitalist
development is related to democratization) but does not generally do a good
job at telling us what the nature or underlying dynamic of this relationship is.
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 25

To use a metaphor from aviation, we might say that quantitative analysis shows
a strong correlation between engine failure and plane crashes, but it typically
does not tell us the exact reasons (or the chain of causal events leading to the
crash—since not all engine problems, even very similar ones, lead to the same
outcome, and vice versa). To find out the reasons planes crash, therefore,
investigators almost always have to look inside the “black box” or flight data
recorder (see Figure 1.6).10 They have to analyze the myriad factors—some of
which will undoubtedly be

Example: Example:
Capitalist growth Democracy

Statistical or quantitative analysis does a very good job of showing a correlation

between X and Y but typically does not explain why this correlation exists in the
first place. Getting inside the black box of explanation may be possible with sta-
tistical analysis, but qualitative analysis—and especially qualitative compara-
tive analysis—is usually much better suited for this task.

unique to individual flights—to determine the cause of any particular crash.

Even this may not be enough: quite frequently, investigators have to literally
reassemble the fragments of the destroyed plane to determine the chain of
causal events. To be sure, the cause is sometimes obvious and does not require
intensive investigation, but more often than not, the incident as a whole needs
to be examined in order to develop a complete explanation.

The Importance of Method and Theory

The metaphor of the black box is instructive, but we should be careful not to
take it too far, for comparative analysis is more than just opening up the black
box and analyzing its contents. It also involves—as might already be apparent
from my discussion of the two types of comparative research strategies—a
process of a priori conceptualization. At the most basic level, this simply means
that the selection of cases to investigate should not be purely random or
arbitrary but should be guided by certain criteria, some of which derive from
the particular research design we choose. Yet before we even get to the research
design, important choices have to be made regarding the factors (or variables)
26 Doing Comparative Politics

we consider significant in the first place. These choices are guided by theory.
In Chapter 3, I talk much more about theory. For now, then, let me highlight
one general point: theory has a bad reputation among students. Part of the
blame, I think, falls on professors who do not help students understand why
theory is not only important but is something none of us can do without
(whether in an academic discipline or in everyday life). As I will make clear,
we all theorize about the world, all the time. Yet just because we all theorize
does not mean we all do it equally well—this is especially true for those of you
who operate on the assumption that theories have nothing to do with the “real
world,” or that one can explain or understand anything simply by appealing to
the “facts” (a view reflected in the oft-heard statement “Let the facts speak for
themselves”). One way to rectify this problem is to simply become more
selfconscious and explicit about theory/theorizing; this has the added benefit, I
might add, of helping oneself become a more disciplined, critical, and analytic
thinker. Thinking theoretically about comparative politics, in this regard, has
value well beyond the confines of this particular subfield. The same can be said
about thinking comparatively, which is the topic of our next chapter.
To sum up, doing comparative politics requires, minimally, a clear-eyed
understanding of what comparative politics is, of what it means to compare,
and of the importance and necessity of theory. There is, of course, more to
doing comparative politics than just these three requirements, but they
constitute an essential foundation upon which everything else will stand.

Notes
1. Terms that appear in boldface type are defined in the book’s glossary.
2. This seems an obvious point about which most scholars would agree. Yet
thedistinction between US politics and comparative politics still exists in the United
States. There are, of course, plenty of reasons for this, one of which is that it is natural
for people to see their own country or society as separate and distinct from other places.
Nonetheless, there is no solid justification for the distinction. As Lee Sigelman and G.
H. Gadbois nicely put it, “the traditional distinction between American and comparative
politics is . . . intellectually indefensible. . . . Comparison presupposes multiple objects
of analysis . . . one compares something to or with something else” (1983, cited in
Sartori 1994, p. 14).
3. Most researchers in the field, as noted, can probably agree on a basic, butvery
general, definition of comparative politics (such as the ones listed in Figure 1.2). There
is far less agreement, however, on how the field should be constituted in terms of a
particular theoretical or even methodological approach. In a wide-ranging discussion on
the role of theory in comparative politics, for example, some of the leading names in
comparative politics and comparative analysis fail to achieve a consensus on what is or
should be the theoretical core of the field (see Kohli et al. 1995).
4. I should note, however, that there has never been unanimous agreement onthis
point. Indeed, one of the main areas of controversy in international relations theory
today revolves around the “democratic peace thesis” (Doyle 1995). The crux of this
 Getting Into Comparative Politics 27

argument is that liberal (or democratic) states do not go to war with other liberal states.
In essence, advocates of the democratic peace thesis argue that there is something
unique about the internal constitution of liberal states that changes their behavior in
relation to other liberal states.
5. For obvious reasons, I cannot provide a detailed and nuanced discussion
ofinternational relations theory here. Fortunately, there are a number of very good
introductory texts that do just this. One good book to start with is The Globalization of
World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (2014), edited by John
Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens (and now in its sixth edition).
6. Despite the fact that the field is defined in terms of particular method—thatis,
comparison—there are many scholars in the field of comparative politics who,
according to Giovanni Sartori, “have no interest, no notion, no training, in comparing”
(1994, p. 15). The reason, I might note, may have more to do with the ethnocentric way
the field has been defined than with the scholars themselves. To understand this point,
consider the fact that comparative politics (in the United States) has been defined, most
simplistically, as “studying other countries.” Thus, as Sartori put it, “a scholar who
studies only American presidents is an Americanist, whereas a scholar who studies only
French presidents is not” (p. 14). The US-based scholar who decides to study only
France, in other words, is only classified as a “comparativist” by dint of his or her
interest in a country other than the United States.
7. Later, Sartori stated his case more strongly. “I must insist,” he contended,“that
as a ‘one-case’ investigation the case study cannot be subsumed under the comparative
method (though it may have comparative merit)” (1994, p. 23, emphasis in original).
8. One prominent comparativist, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, seemed to agree with
me on this point. As he put it, “Even in single-case studies comparative awareness and
especially a longer time span of investigation can—logically analogous to cross-country
comparisons—make the structural conditions of different event sequences more visible”
(1991, p. 29).
9. Costa Rican democracy, especially, has been an issue of special interest
tocomparativists, since it constitutes, according to Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne
Stephens, and John Stephens, “the real exception to the pattern [of authoritarianism]
prevailing in Central America” (1992, p. 234).
10. Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens made a very strong argument onthis
point. They noted that, although cross-national statistical work has shown an undeniable
and very strong link (correlation) between capitalist development and democracy, this
correlation, by itself (and no matter how many times it is replicated), “does not carry its
own explanation.” “It does not,” they continued, “identify the causal sequences
accounting for the persistent relation, not to mention the reason why many cases are at
odds with it. Nor can it account for how the same end can be reached by different
historical routes. The repeated statistical finding has a peculiar ‘black box’ character
that can be overcome only by theoretically well grounded empirical analysis” (1992, p.
4).