Area Studies, Comparative Politics, and the Role of Cross-Regional Small-N Comparison (original) (raw)
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Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 2007
Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel bietet eine Einführung in jüngere Debatten über Area Studies und ihren weniger bekannten "Cousin" Vergleichende Area Studies. Obwohl aus politikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive verfasst, beziehen sich viele der in dem Artikel behandelten Aspekte auch auf andere Disziplinen. Wir zeigen zunächst einige der Entwicklungen und Debatten auf, die auf die Area Studies seit Ende des Kalten Krieges eingewirkt haben. Im Anschluss weisen wir auf einige zeitgenössische Verständnisse von Area Studies hin und präsentieren unsere eigene Definition von Vergleichenden Area Studies. Die Bedeutung sowohl von Area Studies als auch Vergleichenden Area Studies wird in einem weiteren Schritt herausgearbeitet. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit gilt im Folgenden zwei methodologischen Herausforderungen, vor denen Vergleichende Area Studies stehen: der Gebrauch von Konzepten und die Auswahl geeigneter Forschungsstrategien. Eine Zusammenfassung der zentralen Punkte schließt das Papier ab.
2018
Area studies scholarship, while it has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge, risks becoming marginalized in the absence of concerted efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance to social science disciplines as they now stand. This chapter introduces a volume designed to showcase comparative area studies (CAS) -- a broad approach that explicitly seeks to leverage both the in-depth local knowledge of the area studies tradition and the use of the comparative method to generate portable "middle range" theories. CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research, but draws them together into a coherent strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse locales with cross-regional qualitative research on questions that matter to social science disciplines. This approach is not intended to subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to "middle range" theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences. The remainder of the volume is divided into two parts. The first part of the volume considers - from different vantage points - the epistemological, methodological and practical issues underlying CAS and cross-regional comparative research. While acknowledging the challenges and risks involved, the authors emphasize the distinctive gains from extending one's field of vision beyond one’s primary area of expertise. The second part of the volume presents studies that demonstrate how creatively designed contextualized comparisons across two or more regions can produce novel insights into research questions ranging from protests and rebellions to anti-corruption campaigns, resource booms, and the organization of production. A final chapter recasts the significance of CAS in light of current methodological debates over the role and utility of qualitative research, suggesting that contextualized comparison across regions can partly compensate for some of the blind spots in the most common forms of qualitative and mixed-method research. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the pursuit of area expertise and the search for social scientific knowledge need not be a zero-sum game as long as we make a conscious effort to connect scholarly debates taking place within separate area studies communities to each other and to theoretical debates unfolding in social science disciplines.
Comparative Politics and Area Specialization: The Hidden Costs of Analytic Transparency
Chinese Political Science Review, 2016
New transparency initiatives emerging from Western political science make an ill-fitting standard for global comparativists who serve as experts in countries and regions-that is, area specialists. This study explores the origins of the current push for greater research transparency, including its underlying norms and genesis in the natural sciences. Noting its strict adherence to a model of deductive proceduralism, I then show how area-focused comparative political scholarship clashes with newfound demands for analytic transparency due to fundamental differences in its real-world practice-that is, how explanations are constructed and evidence is analyzed. Rather than a linear step-by-step approach emphasizing hypothesis confirmation, much area studies work thrives through iterative engagements between theory and evidence in which researchers craft persuasive explanations by repeatedly revising propositions, reconsidering data, and questioning assumptions over time. Squaring this reality with the idealization of enhanced transparency means one of two things: the diminishment of area studies within comparative politics, or the collective lying of many scholars when it comes to divulging how they came to their ultimate causal conclusions.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both ar...
Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, 2020
The tremendous value of Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is difficult to overstate, as CAS scholars appear to accomplish the impossible: reaching broad-ranging conclusions from cross-case comparisons spanning two or more geographic regions, while still incorporating the sort of deep and detailed knowledge of people and places that is the hallmark of classic area studies. CAS researchers not only showcase the approach's great strengths; they also encourage more work along these lines, since CAS contributions comprise only around 15 percent of recent works in comparative politics (Ahram, Köllner, and Sil 2018, 17). With this encouragement comes some welcome advice, including a push for more precisely conceptualized variables so that they are portable across contexts, admonitions against the assumption that geographic proximity defines the full population of cases to which one's theory applies, and a reminder that idiosyncratic factors are no less important than systematic condit...
in A. Ahram, P. Koellner & R. Sil, eds. COMPARATIVE AREA STUDIES: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (Oxford University Press), 2018
This chapter, published in Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (Oxford University Press, 2018), defines cross-regional contextualized comparison and distinguishes it from other, more typical modes of small-N qualitative analysis, namely area-bound comparative inquiry (where cases are chosen on the basis of one's primary area of expertise) and macro-comparative inquiry (which follows the quasi-experimental logic of Mills' methods as a basis for case selection and inferring causal generalizations). The trade-offs between these approaches are not purely methodological (between building on one's accumulated area expertise and leveraging the comparative method). They have a practical dimension as well, since one strategy is more likely to result in sustained engagement with one's primary area studies community while the other is more likely to result in hypotheses dealing with big questions of interest to social science disciplines. While these trade-offs can never be overcome, the strategy of contextualized comparison of cases drawn from different regions offers a distinctive means for triangulating insights. This approach still depends on first acquiring area expertise, but it permits extrapolating from one's experience in doing research in one's primary area to navigate the complexities and contending historical records and sources when delving into other cases that hold promise in terms of facilitating some analytic leverage. This type of context-sensitive approach cannot produce elegant law-like generalizations, but it can produce middle-range theoretical arguments whereby causal mechanisms and linkages can be identified as relevant across some population of cases, but with the actual causal stories of each case requiring careful attention to context conditions followed by the adjustment of concepts, measures, and observations (in the manner anticipated in Locke and Thelen's classic 1995 argument about contextualized comparison in the study of labor politics). This approach is thus at once more expansive than area-bound small-N studies (e.g. a study of three countries in the Middle East or in Eastern Europe), and more context-sensitive than traditional Millean macro-comparative approaches (e.g. Skocpol's 1979 classic study of social revolutions, which explicitly deploys Mills' methods). The value of cross-regional contextualized comparison can be understood in both analytic and dialogical terms: (i) there is the expanded probability of hitting upon theoretical insights and equivalences based on expanding one's familiarity to new cases with their own complexities; and (ii) given the requirement of deep engagement with the relevant area studies communities for each of the case studies, there is the possibility of providing bridges between separate area studies researchers tackling similar problems as well as between area studies communities and social science disciplines writ large.
Comparative Area Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Foundations and a Practical Application
Vestnik RUDN. International Relations, 2020
In recent decades, area studies have been transformed from mostly descriptive ethnographic and historical accounts to theory-oriented and analytical approaches. They retain some of their depth and cultural specificity, but have been widened in a comparative sense to come up with some broader social scientific explanations. This has been enhanced by more recent systematic comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related procedures, which are particularly suitable for medium-N studies of specific regions at the macro-level and cross-area analyses in contrast to more common statistical approaches. This paper discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent methodological developments. As an illustration, it provides an example of an ongoing large international “cross-area” research project concerned with successful democratic transformations in different world regions and more recent threats to democratic stability and some of ...
The Survival and Adaptation of Area Studies
SAGE Handbook of Political Science, 2020
In the post-Cold War era, there have been significant changes in resource streams, disciplinary trends, and the wider academic environment, and these have undoubtedly produced new kinds of challenges and pressures for area specialists housed in political science. However, viewed from a global perspective, it is clear that reports of the "death" of area studies have been greatly exaggerated. Rather area studies scholarship has continued to adapt to new environments, with cross-area research also expanding in directions that supplement area-based scholarship and highlight the latter's resilience and ongoing utility.