POLS 373 Foundations of Comparative Politics

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POLS 373 Foundations of Comparative Politics

• Lecture 2 September 29, 2005

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The Basics of ComparingThe First Lesson

• Thinking without comparison is unthinkable. And,
  in the absence of comparison, so is all
  scientific thought and scientific research.

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The Basics of ComparingGeneral Point

• The comparative method entails two main
  predispositions
• First, a bias towards qualitative as opposed to
  quantitative analysis
• Second, a bias toward interpretation and context
• Taken together, this means that researchers who
  use the comparative method tend to take history
  very seriously

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The Basics of ComparingThe Importance of History

• Q What does it mean to take history seriously?
• A Taking history seriously means 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
  between the past and the present

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The Basics of ComparingSome Important Questions

• Q Why Compare?
• Answer No. 1 We compare to test our claims or
  arguments about social, political or economic
  phenomena. Another way of saying this is that we
  compare to control.
• Comparing to control, however, is not the only
  purpose of comparing, as some scholars claim.

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The Basics of ComparingSome Important Questions

• Q Why Compare?
• Answer No. 2 We also compare to understand and
  to explain.
• Comparing to understand implies that the
  researcher is primarily interested in a single
  case and uses different cases or general theories
  as a way to learn more about the case he/she is
  studying.
• Researchers who want to explain something through
  comparison begin with the assumption that the
  sheer complexity of real-world cases make control
  a worthwhile, but impossible to achieve goal. At
  the same time, they believe we can use
  comparisons to build theories step-by-step or
  case-by-case.

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The Basics of ComparingThree Purposes, A Summary
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The Basics of ComparingSome Important Questions

• Q What is Comparable? What Can We Compare?
• A It depends. It other words, the question, what
  is comparable, does not have a fixed answer. The
  answer always depends on the purposes of the
  researcher and the research question.
• To illustrate, consider the saying, Youre
  comparing apples to oranges. The implication, of
  course, is that apples and oranges are not
  comparable, but
• is it really the case that you cannot compare
  apples to oranges?

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The Basics of ComparingComparing Apples to
Oranges
Depending on the question you are asking, apples
may not be comparable to oranges, but they also
very well could be
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The Basics of ComparingComparing Apples to
Oranges
If, for example, you want to know which fruit is
healthier for children, comparing apples and
oranges makes perfect sense (in fact, research
has shown that oranges are generally better for a
childs overall health than apples), but
if we want to compare the suitability of
different kinds of apples for apple pie, then
comparing apples and oranges makes no sense at
all.
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The Basics of ComparingSome Important Questions

• Q Is a comparison between the US and Haiti
  appropriate?
• A In principle, yes, but we can only really
  answer this question until we know what the
  purpose of the researcher is.

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The Basics of ComparingSome Important Questions

• Back to the initial question What can we
  compare?
• A The answer is entities whose attributes are
  in part shared (similar) and in part non-shared.
  
• This means that countries are comparable, because
  they all share some attributes, but also differ
  in other ways, fruits are comparable for the same
  reason. On the other hand, countries and fruits
  are NOT comparable, because there are no shared
  attributes.

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The Basics of Comparing

• One more point
• Comparisons need not be limited to countries
  events (like a war or revolution) are comparable
  political or social institutions are comparable
  (e.g. the executive branch, the military,
  economic agencies) policies are comparable, and
  so on. We can call all of these cases.

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The Basics of ComparingAdvantages of Comparing

• The most important advantage is ability to deal
  with complex causality.
• Okay but, what is complex causality?

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The Basics of ComparingAdvantages of Comparing

• Complex causality. An explanation
• 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 affects
  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 (source
  Charles Ragin)

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The Basics of ComparingAdvantages of Comparing

• Second advantage of comparing
• The comparative method is not only better at
  dealing with complex causality, its better at
  dealing with causality period. The comparative
  method allows us to open the Black Box of
  explanation in a way that other methods--at least
  other methods available to social scientists--do
  not.

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The Basics of ComparingAdvantages of Comparing
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 statistical analysis, but
qualitative analysis is usually much better
suited for this task.
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Learning to Compare, Comparing to Learn

• Comparing and Critical Thinking
• Broadly speaking, critical thinking is concerned
  with reason, intellectual honesty, and
  open-mindedness, as opposed too emotionalism,
  intellectual laziness, and closed-mindedness.
  This, in turn, involve a number of concrete
  practices, including, most importantly,
  following evidence where it leads considering
  all possibilities relying on reason rather than
  emotion being precise considering a variety of
  possible viewpoints and explanations weighing
  the effects of motives and biases not rejecting
  unpopular views out of hand being aware of and
  self-reflective about one's own prejudices and
  biases, and not allowing them to sway one's
  judgment.

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Logic of Comparative Analysis

• To do comparative analysis properly, one
  absolutely, positively must have a grasp of the
  logic of comparing.
• One of the simplest way to develop this grasp is
  to become familiar with two basic strategies,
  called the MSS and MDS designs

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisThe Most Similar
Systems Design

• The MSS Design. As the name implies, this design
  is based on comparing two or more very similar
  social systems.
• More importantly, though, its based on matching
  up and them comparing two more systems that share
  a whole range of similarities, but also differ in
  at least a couple of important respects.

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisThe Most Similar
Systems Design

• To Repeat Differences are key to the logic of
  the MSS Design!
• But what needs to differ?
• Short Answer Between at least two cases, the
  independent variable and the dependent variable
  must be different.

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisDependent and
Independent Variables

• Independent variables can be defined simply as
  those which act on or affect something, while
  dependent variables are those that are being
  affected or acted on. Put more simply
  independent variables are the cause of a certain
  outcome, while the dependent variable is the
  outcome itself.

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisDependent and
Independent Variables

• An Example. Democracy can only emerge and thrive
  in a society when the society is unified.
• What is the dependent variable?
• Democracy.
• What is the independent variable?
• Societal unity

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisDependent and
Independent Variables

• Other Important Points
• First, all social science arguments require an
  independent and dependent variable. That is,
  regardless of the theoretical or methodological
  approach you use in an analysis, you have to be
  able to identify and DV and IV(s).
• Second, in a social science argument, both
  variables need to be defined as precisely as
  possible.
• Third, you need to be able to specify, in as much
  depth and detail as possible, the relationship
  between the independent and dependent variables.
  This generally includes identifying other
  important or contributing variables as well

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Logic of Comparative AnalysisMost Similar
Systems Design Example
In this MSS design, the researcher compares
Canada and the U.S.A., which are considered most
similar systems. This means, in part, that the
researcher expects to find a range of
similarities between the two cases. At the same
time, the logic of the MSS design dictates that
there be at least two key differences or
dissimilarities. Specifically, the dependent
variable should be different between the two
cases (it is), and there should be at least one
significant difference with regard to the
presumed independent variable. Identifying this
key difference is often the major objective of
the researcher.
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Logic of Comparative AnalysisMost Similar
Systems Design A Bad Example
The argument is that both cases have a
developmental state (independent variable, x),
and both cases experienced a very high rate of
economic growth (dependent variable, y).
Therefore, x is the cause of y But, how do we
know that x is the key independent variable, or
even a significant independent variable? What
about Culture----- y or Skilled workforce
----- y? Based on MSS design with no variance
on the dependent variable (y), we cannot say that
other variables are insignificant. Therefore, we
cannot determine the validity of the main argument