Methods in comparative politics

In one of the few contributions to this volume on an essentially quantitative discipline, Mathew Wong writes about comparative politics. He provides an overview on the key concepts and methods in comparative politics and takes a strikingly different perspective from the other contributions. Wong points out that small N studies or case studies are strongly criticized in his discipline. Comparative politics scholars deal, almost exclusively according to Wong, on questions of ‘Whether’ and ‘Why’: Whether a democracy produces a superior economic performance to dictatorships? Why authoritarian regimes democratize? However, questions of ‘Should’ are seldom touched upon in comparative politics, and neither are value-based judgements: Should Country A democratize? Should every country have a just political system? These questions are, according to Wong, taken up by political philosophers and political theorists. Wong points out that research questions in comparative politics are nowadays often theorized as causal relationships, i.e., how X (the cause) affects Y (the consequence). As a result, methodological evolution and innovation in the field of comparative politics are limited to the choice of tools to uncovering causal relationships. It was moreover only in recent decades that comparative politics started to take comparison seriously, with the introduction of comparative case studies (small-N) and statistical studies (large-N). The recent rise of such experimental methods are nevertheless no exception to the methodological tradition: they are part and parcel of the pursuit for truly causal inferences.