Comparative Historical Method Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The comparative historical method approaches social science research involving the over-time exploration of long processes within as well as between a small number of cases. The goal is to arrive at generalizable theories concerning the origins of macro phenomena, such as revolutions, the welfare state, and political regimes. This method contains two essential elements. First, because comparative historical studies focus on slow-moving structural changes, they are, according to Edwin Amenta’s 2003 article “What We Know about the Development of Social Policy,” necessarily “situate[ed] within the relevant historical contexts.” This means that the practitioner “takes a sophisticated approach to historiography, thinks seriously about issues of process, timing, and historical trajectories, and gains a deep understanding of the cases” (94). Second, because the aim is theory building, the researcher also engages in explicit comparisons across cases to transcend the idiosyncrasies of any single case. Cross-case comparisons are vital for theory building, since, as Dietrich Rueschemeyer notes in the 2003 article, “Can One or a Few Cases Yield Theoretical Gains?,” “Going beyond the boundaries of a single case can put into question seemingly well-established causal accounts” (332). This allows the researcher to evaluate hypothesized cause-and-effect relationships identified in the first case by assessing how these variables play out across a small number of similarly contextualized cases.

The comparative historical method has a long pedigree, going back at least as far as sociologist Max Weber and historian Otto Hintze, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in their writings on the origins of the modern state. In a generation of scholars from the mid to late twentieth century, political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. wrote that the democratic-, fascist-, and communist-regime types were determined by interactions between the state’s premodern regime and its process of industrialization. Later, sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol used the cases of France, Russia, and China to demonstrate that social revolutions were driven by a complex interplay of elite splits, economic dependency, and international threats. In the 1990s, sociologist Rogers Brubaker explained the differences between modern French and German citizenship policies as the outcome of different legacies of nation-building. Similarly, political scientist Kathleen Thelen has examined vocational training regimes in contemporary Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, showing the marked differences among them result from nineteenth-century employer-union-artisan political settlements. A casual review of this scholarship suggests that comparative historical analysis is particularly well-suited for testing hypotheses that emphasize the importance of founding moments, path dependence, critical junctures, and causal complexity in explaining macrophenomena.

There are at least three major criticisms of the comparative historical method. The first, made against all small-n studies (or studies with a small studied population), is that there are simply too few cases (or data points) to arrive at generalizable inferences. The second problem relates to the comparability of cases, in that it is extremely difficult to identify those cases with a comparison that can adequately control for confounding variables, particularly when it comes to large-scale processes or superstructures. Finally, given the massive scope of their subject material, practitioners of the comparative historical method must rely to an unusual degree on secondary sources, which may result in biased conclusions.

Nonetheless, practical steps can be taken to minimize these concerns. Attending to the causal mechanisms within each case—often called process tracing—generates additional data points within each case, lending greater validity to the causal inferences derived from historical case analysis. Biases in the secondary source material might be guarded against by investigating the scholarly debates surrounding these sources and allowing the researcher to construct the least tendentious account of the case. Lastly, triangulating or drawing on several different sources can increase confidence in the validity of the researcher’s interpretation of key events in each case.

Bibliography:

Amenta, Edwin. “What We Know about the Development of Social Policy.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 91–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. Shaping the Political Arena. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Lustick, Ian S. “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias.” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (September 1996): 605–618.
Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. “Comparative Historical Analysis.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 3–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Moore, Barrington, Jr. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Pierson, Paul. “Big, Slow-Moving, and . . . Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 177–207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich. “Can One or a Few Cases Yield Theoretical Gains?” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 305–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Thelen, Kathleen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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