As the field of the discipline devoted to empirical inquiry into the full range of political experience, comparative politics has long had to accommodate aspirations toward a universal science of politics with the vast diversity of political contexts across time and space. Both postwar modernization theory and the rational choice theory of the 1990s challenged the institutionalized traditions of area studies that have continued to support interdisciplinary scholarship based on knowledge of specific languages, cultures, and histories. However detailed or extensive contemporary global data sets may become, analysis of them invokes the same dilemmas. Among the world regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where most people live, the profound divergences in historical experiences and contemporary societies make these tensions especially acute. In this volume, political scientists from Europe and the United States discuss and debate how to adapt inherited approaches to comparison to grapple with these divergences.
The editors and contributors argue for what they call “Comparative Area Studies,” a fusion of context-sensitive comparison within world regions with comparison of similar contexts outside of that region. On the one hand, they argue that comparisons should be grounded in contextual knowledge of some country or region, including aspects of the history, language, culture, and society beyond those that have usually been the focus of political science itself. On the other hand, cross- or interregional comparisons are seen as providing a way to understand both how political phenomena within a single world region may be distinctive, and the more general properties of those phenomena. At points, the volume reads as a sophisticated restatement of the conventional wisdom about contextual variation that continues to shape the choice of cases for comparison. As the editors note in their introduction (p. 17), comparisons within single regions continue to dominate the multimethod and case study scholarship that remains the mainstay of the comparative field.
The main thrust of the volume, however, is to offer a variety of rationales, protocols and examples for comparisons that extend between world regions with distinct cultures and histories. Essays by Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Laurence Whitehead, Christian von Soest and Alexander Stroh, and Rudra Sil lay out numerous ways in which cases from culturally and geographically distinct regions can be leveraged to broaden the reach of theory and testing. Summaries of monographic studies highlight diverse examples of contextualized cross-regional comparison: election law reform in Europe and the United States (Amel Ahmed), anticorruption campaigns in Russia and China (Cheng Chen), separatism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (Benjamin Smith), natural-resource booms and institution building in Latin America and Africa (Ryan Saylor), and local production models in Wenzhou, China, and among immigrants from that region to Italy (Calvin Chen). Essays by Mikko Huotari and Jürgen Rüland and André Bank draw on the examples of Southeast Asia and the Arab Spring to demonstrate how regionwide comparisons with the rest of the world can illuminate transnational commonalities within a single region.
At the same time, the collaborators emphasize careful attention to context. They contrast their approach with mixed methods that start from analyses of global databases, or from abstract analytical narratives. The comparative case studies showcase impressive demonstrations of numerous ways in which contextual variations among world regions have been deployed to generate, develop, and validate theories. Each project is also grounded in primary research, usually including fieldwork or the gathering of archival evidence, in at least one of the regional contexts. The contributors make a strong case that this empirical depth has been essential to solidly grounded new scholarly findings. Readers interested in the details of how the authors deploy this strategy of contextualized research will also find it useful to consult the full monographic versions of the case studies summarized in the volume.
Despite this common agenda, the approaches of the contributors to comparison diverge along key dimensions. As Sil notes in his concluding essay, area-sensitive comparisons can draw on various levels of expertise about regional political contexts and a range of approaches to knowledge that vary from nomothetic to idiographic. The comparative projects highlighted include a comparative ethnographic study (Calvin Chen) as well as macrohistorical case studies (Cheng Chen, Smith, Saylor).
The frameworks the contributors adopt for comparison also treat the properties of the areas they study in various ways. For Smith and Saylor, world regions furnish part of the context for cross-national comparison. For Whitehead and Huotari and Rüland, they comprise the central unit of analysis, and even patterns of national domestic politics largely reflect regional historical legacies and influences. For Calvin Chen, Smith, and Berg-Schlosser, both regions and countries serve as contexts for multilevel comparisons of subnational cases. Another underplayed divergence, evident in the essays by Huotari and Rüland and Calvin Chen, is the degree to which the authors rely on approaches to research and knowledge from disciplines beyond political science, such as history, cultural studies, and ethnography. A more explicit dialogue among the authors of the methodological essays and the comparative case-study chapters would have helped bring out the implications of these variations in approach.
Although the essays couch their analyses mainly in general methodological terms, the substantive questions they raise have become increasingly critical to the development of global research programs across the comparative field. In familiar domains like parties, elections, and political regimes, as well as the study of policy, social movements, the economy, culture, and cities, comparative politics scholarship has begun to bridge the divides between developed and developing country research that grew out of modernization theory. At the same time, persistent regional differences in historical legacies, in contemporary societies, and in ongoing processes like diffusion continue to pose critical challenges for these and other research agendas. Even in an era of expansive theories and global data sets, the contributions of this volume emphasize how middle-range hypotheses and empirical specifications are essential to meeting these challenges, and how local knowledge is indispensable for research on global themes.
In addressing these issues, Comparative Area Studies poses challenges that future generations of comparative research will need to confront. Researchers in the field may take issue with the balance that various authors strike between contextualization and theory, or even with whether it is possible for an integrated methodological framework to reconcile these often contradictory concerns. But anyone who grapples with the fundamental issues that the contributors address, and everyone who seeks a guide for how to design comparative research, will benefit from a close reading of this instructive collection.
