New Approaches to Comparative Politics: Insights from Political Theory.

Edited by Jennifer S. Holmes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 176p. $55.00.

The primary purpose of Jennifer Holmes's collection is to give demonstration to a number of ways in which research and theorizing in the subfields of comparative politics and political theory are fruitfully informed by the concerns and methods of the other. Comparative politics is of use to political theory, for instance, in that it assists in sharpening concepts and clarifying the arguments political theorists want to make. Comparativists' traditional reliance on field research, specialized geographical expertise, and immersion in the data can serve as a vital spark to theoretical intuition—particularly useful in helping political theory to inquire into experiences that go beyond Western ways of knowing. Political theory is of interest to comparative politics in helping researchers to develop new concepts and frameworks for comparative analysis. Superficially, this might sound like the old division of intellectual labor in new bottles; but the volume overcomes that dichotomy by insisting that it is every bit as necessary for political theorists to get their hands dirty engaging in comparative empirical analysis as it is for field researchers to ground their inquiries in the larger debates developed in contemporary theory and the history of political thought. In both cases, this borrowing enables political scientists to ask more interesting questions, to gain greater clarity in the way we conceptualize political phenomena, and to achieve a more perspicacious understanding of our subject matter.

Beyond a simple meditation of research and analysis, this volume is situated in a long tradition of critical reflections on political science in the United States, a tradition perhaps most prominently associated with David Ricci's (1984) The Tragedy of Political Science. Chapters by Holmes and Michaelle Browers update Ricci's chronicle of the behavioral revolution's triumph—the project to make political science a “real science,” that is, to remake it in the image of the natural sciences—in recounting how both political theory and comparative politics reacted to their increasing marginalization in the discipline. The volume's authors expressly align themselves with the Perestroika movement, an internal rebellion in the American Political Science Association, which criticizes the APSA for defending and perpetuating an increasingly narrow and rigid theoretical orthodoxy, and by virtue of this, and a corresponding reification of methods over substance, to be courting political irrelevance (p. 7, passim). The contributors thus understand the discussion Perestroika has generated to have awakened new possibilities for the discipline—a new political science animated by the great questions of political philosophy and the political problems and struggles of the real world. As such, it is a reaction against the scientism of the age and an attempt to reclaim political science's “true roots,” which historically have been simultaneously philosophical, comparative, and engaged (p. 8).

It is important to note that the book is not a diatribe against particular methods or theoretical schools, as at least some of the authors count themselves as astute practitioners of quantitative analysis using advanced statistical techniques. All insist, however, that our various methodological tools be used in service of interesting questions—rather than our questions be tailored to the requirements of our preferred tools. From this angle, one can read the book's mission to transform the boundaries between subfields as an account of counterhegemonic challenge in the true Gramscian sense. As Holmes intimates in her plea to move beyond the old dichotomous debates within comparative politics between quantitative universalists and qualitative, idiographic area-studies folk (p. 1), the usual tendency in attacking hegemony is a reactive one: to decry the reigning system as bad, and to seek to overturn its defining features (or, as Ricci suggested [pp. 307–12], to quietly subvert hegemony from within through “deception” and “robinhooding”). This book takes a much different tack. The authors seek to articulate, and demonstrate in practice, a proactive counterhegemony, predicated on methodological pluralism and a commitment to a broader conversation, based on the concerns of the “real world” of politics and the priority of concepts and questions over methods.

The contributors to the volume range widely in their objects and geographical locus of study, the scope of their comparison, and the tools they bring to bear in seeking to answer the questions they pose. What unites them is precisely a focus on asking more interesting and useful questions—to enliven inquiry within political science, and simultaneously to make the discipline more relevant to nonspecialist and nonelite audiences. The approach offered is one that is made sensible through a decentered metaphor of “negotiation”—of finding a way to answer a pressing question, navigating the world equipped with a variety of tools and concepts to make sense of that world; of engaging in a more open “dialogue between ideas and evidence” (Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method, 1987); and of beginning or extending intercultural dialogues on conceptual frameworks, sharing and (partially) assimilating knowledge to engage in new ways of knowing. In this manner, as Browers argues (p. 16), concept formation is meaningful beyond assisting in the operationalization of variables for hypothesis testing; conceptual innovation of this sort is the offspring of understanding in a new way, itself a contribution to our knowledge of the world.

At one level, the project to find useful linkages between political theory and comparative politics is simply an admonition to engage in something like Ricci's “great conversation,” breaking down the barriers between subfields and disciplines as a means to diversify our intellectual gene pool. Browers (p. 18), for example, quotes favorably James Scott's warning (in Atul Kohli et al., “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” World Politics 48 [October 1996]: 37) about the dangers of disciplinary inbreeding; and several essays demonstrate the costs of a narrow theoretical inspiration. Kirk Bowman and Seán Patrick Eudaily's chapter interrogating the assumptions of “democratic peace” research, for instance, shows how an overreliance on Kantean categories and assumptions leads not only to spurious claims of why democracies do not fight each other but also indirectly to a vapidly ideological self-justification of imperial foreign policy (p. 118).

At another level, the volume's explorations between subfields and the political world is an epistemological injunction, directing attention to the uniquely recursive nature of knowledge flows in the social sciences. Alasdair MacIntyre, long ago, made the argument that humans' capacity for reflective agency is an inherent limiting factor in the pretension to lawlike generalizations in political science (“Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?” in MacIntyre, ed., Against the Self-Images of the Age, 1971). Here, a number of the authors make original contributions to this discussion by demonstrating empirically this recursivity between theorizing and human action. Ann Davies, for example, explores how concepts travel between the world of theory and practice, and back into theorizing, by tracing Enlightenment influences on republican state building, as well as subsequent scholarly evaluations of the liberal thought based on the practical governance choices of state builders (p. 35).

This mosaic of different approaches to asking and answering interesting questions, which political scientists sympathetic to the Perestroika movement will find compelling, is not, alas, likely to alter the opinions of those who see the discipline as the quest for a master science of human politics. The authors in New Approaches to Comparative Politics do not pretend to such an endeavor. The one thing that even sympathetic readers might miss, however, is a more sustained comparative analysis of the ways in which the various authors were able to fruitfully combine approaches. That is, the volume would have profited by extending the recursive moment between theory and comparative analysis one more time, to come back to more integrally theorize about the epistemological commonalties underlying these demonstrations of methodological pluralism—as well as the larger ontological implications of consulting a wider range of voices and interests in our conversations and processes of knowledge formation.