COMPARATIVE

POLITICAL
INSTITUTION
A.Y. 2020-2021
2° SEMESTER – LESSON 2 – 16-02-2021
Davide Vittori
Methodology:
what we do and
how we do it
 • Comparative politics is essentially based on
few crucial questions.
• Why we compare? Previous class
• What we compare? The object of our research
• How? Which methods do we use
Methodology
Very important: the “what” influences the
“how”.
The “why” influences the “what” and the
“how”.
Methods in political
science…
• …before political science.
Aristotle, Πολιτικά, Book II: A comparison
of 3 regimes, Sparta, Crete and Carthage
“Carthage also appears to have a good
constitution, with many outstanding
features as compared with those of other
nations, but most nearly resembling the
Spartan in some points. For these three
constitutions are in a way near to one
another and are widely different from the
others—the Cretan, the Spartan and,
thirdly, that of Carthage” [1272b] 
Methods in political •Speculative, but also comparative
science…

Rulers Ideal Corrupted

One Monarchy Tyranny

Few Aristocracy Oligarchy

Many Polity Democracy

Methods in political
science…
•Speculative and normative, but also comparative

One factor of liberty is to govern and be governed

in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to
have equality according to number, not worth, and
if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the
multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the
decision of the majority must be final and must
constitute justice, for they say that each of the
citizens ought to have an equal share; so that it
results that in democracies the poor are more
powerful than the rich, because there are more of
them and whatever is decided by the majority is
sovereign.
[Aristotle, Politics, Book 6, section 1317b]
Methods in political •Speculative and normative, but also comparative
science…
Methods in political
science…
•Less speculative and much more
oriented toward methods
John Locke (1632-1704) comparison is
the “foundation and origin of all
mathematics and every demonstration
and certainty”.

•Comparison as a testing procedure:

“comparing one idea with another with
regard to extension, degree, time and
place of the circumstances”.
Methods in political
science…
•Positivism: we can find THE truth. We
just have to find it, can’t we?

With Auguste Comte (1798-1857) we find,

for the first time, comparison being
explicitly understood as testing, as a
“moment of checking an inference
empirically”. It is viewed both as the
“comparison of neighbouring states in
various parts of the Earth” (comparison in
a spatial, synchronic sense), and as the
“historic comparison of cognitive states of
the same society” (comparison in a
temporal, diachronic sense).
Methods in political
science…

•Social science “begins”

•Tocqueville (1805–1859) - Democracy in
America – first-case study analysis. “A new
political science is needed for a world altogether
new” [Intro]. “Comparative”.
•Durkheim (1858-1917) – Suicide - method of
concomitant variations. Starting from aggregate
data to find recurrent patterns.
•Weber (1864-1920) - The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism – comparativist, even
though not explicit as in Tocqueville.
Methods in political
science…
•Social sciences “begin”

•Social sciences – as autonomous

disciplines
•History: not a mechanical evolution
from one stage to another one (Marx
would disagree with it).
•Science is guided by theory.
•Theory can be “tested” empirically.
•Causal explanations (?) - Mill
 What political scientists usually do find their
“what?”

1. Interest in the issue;

2. Relevance of the theme;
WHAT? MOST RELEVANT FIRST STEPS

CONCEPTS 3. Knowledge of the literature;

4. Empirically precise formulation;
5. Empirical testability of the formulation.
SECOND STEPS
 In order to translate the issues I have in mind
a potential “what”, I need concepts (which
you’ll hopefully get to know in these classes).
CONCEPTS: are the only way to translate
WHAT? phenomena in the real world into “abstract”
ideas.
Word

Real world
Meaning:
phenomenon
definition
 In order to translate the issues I have in mind
a potential “what”, I need concepts (which
you’ll hopefully get to know in these classes).
WHAT? CONCEPTS: are the only way to translate
CONCEPTS phenomena in the real world into “abstract”
ideas. Populism

Populism is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately Leaders and parties make
separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and the
‘corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the
claim against the “elite”,
volonté generale (Mudde 2004). “people” vs. “elite”
 WHAT?
CONCEPTS
Concepts are socially constructed: the need for intension changes
from culture to culture.

INUIT: several words to indicate what we know as «snow».

Why?

The same for concepts we are familiar with:

Table: a piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs
And complex phenomena: democracy.
The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving
at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to
decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote
(Schumpeter 1942).
WHAT?
CONCEPTS

Sartori’s rule for identifying a concept

-Of any empirical concept (i.e. testable proposition)

always, and separately, check (1) whether it is
ambiguous, that is, how the meaning relates to the
term; and (2) whether it is vague, that is, how the
meaning relates to the referent;

-Otherwise social science is meaningless…

WHAT?
CONCEPTS

-As a consequence of the previous rule

- Always check (1) whether the key terms are defined; (2) whether the meaning
declared by their definition is unambiguous; and (3) whether the declared meaning
remains, throughout the argument, unchanged.
-Always check whether the key terms are used univocally and consistently
 • Several concepts, especially in politics, are not directly
observable or empirical; e.g. populism, democracy,
racism.
We need definitions to find what they are and from
definitions we abstract the concept that we then
WHAT? measure.
• Operationalization is the process of determining how an
DEFINITIO empirical concept can be measured or only empirically
detected.

N • An operational definition incorporates the specification

of the field of empirical referents of the concept. That
is, it states how we propose to label, detect, measure or
otherwise identify a particular empirical concept. But
not all concepts lend themselves to an operational
definition. When such an operation is more complex,
we can resort to one or more indicators.
 • It’s the basis of social science. We need definitions to
find what they are and from definitions we abstract

WHAT? the concept that we then measure.

MINIMAL A minimal definition – or denotative definition in Sartori’s

terminology (2009: 107) – should set boundaries of a

DEFINITIO concept “sorting out the membership of any given

denotatum and […] deciding the cut-off point vis-à-vis
marginal entities”.
N Veeeeery, difficult right?
Well, it depends!
WHAT?
MINIMAL DEFINITION
EXAMPLE
Robert Dahl (1915-2014): minimal definition of
democracy.
Dahl, R.A. (1971), Poliarchy. Participation and
Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press).
A regime should be considered democratic if it has at
least the following: a) universal male and female
suffrage; b) free, competitive, periodic and fair elections;
c) more than one political party; d) different and
alternative sources of information.
Translate the definition into testable operationalization:
- How do we asses what is “universal”?
- How do we assess what does “competitive” or even
“periodic” means?
- How do we count parties?
- Alternative source of information: how to detect
them?
Methodology – From what to how.
Once we identify the object of our research…

What to compare is a We can identify two

crucial question that relates
to the object of our
research, but also to the
dimensions that we want to
compare.
dimensions of comparison:
• a spatial-horizontal domain;
example?
• a temporal-longitudinal span;
example?
 When we compare, we can use two basic methods:
1. Method of agreement: Two or more instances of an event
Comparing (effect) are compared to see what they have in common.
That commonality is identified as the cause.

to find 2. Method of difference: Two or more instances of an event

(effect) are compared to see what they all do not have in
common. If they have all but one thing in common, that

causes: basic +
one thing is identified as the cause.

approach to 3. Joint method of agreement and difference: A

combination of the methods of agreement and difference,
the joint method looks for a single commonality among
comparative two or more instances of an event, and the joint method
looks for a common absence of that possible cause.

politics 4. Method of residues: all known causes of a complex set of

events are subtracted. What is leftover is said to be the
cause.
Method of
agreement: example
Member / Oyster Beef Salad Noodles Fallen
•Suppose your family went out together for a Food taken ill?
buffet dinner, but when you got home all of you Mum Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
started feeling sick and experienced stomach
aches. How do you determine the cause of the Dad Yes No No Yes Yes
illness? Suppose you draw up a table of the food Sister Yes Yes No No Yes
taken by each family member:
You Yes No Yes No Yes

•What’s the cause of the illness?

•Source:
https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/sci/mill.php

•https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/encyc-
of-case-study-research/n205.xml
Method of
difference: example Member / Oyster Beef Salad Noodles Fallen ill?
Food
taken
•Suppose your family went out together for a
buffet dinner, but when you got home all of you
Mum Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
started feeling sick and experienced stomach
aches. How do you determine the cause of the Dad Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
illness? Suppose you draw up a table of the food Sister Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
taken by each family member: You Yes Yes No Yes No
•Which is the cause of the illness?
Source: https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/sci/mill.php
https://methods.sagepub.com/reference/encyc-of-case-
study-research/n206.xml
Joint method (agreement
+ difference): example
Member / Oyster Beef Salad Noodles Fallen ill?
Food
taken
•Suppose your family went out together for a
buffet dinner, but when you got home all of you
started feeling sick and experienced stomach Mum Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
aches. How do you determine the cause of the
Dad Yes Yes No Yes Yes
illness? Suppose you draw up a table of the food
taken by each family member: Sister Yes Yes Yes No Yes
You Yes No No Yes No

•Which is the cause of the illness?

•Source:
https://philosophy.hku.hk/think/sci/mill.php
Two examples related
to politics Political system
Presidential
Parties
Four
Coalition GVT
Conservative
Outcome
High environmental
Soc-dem standard
Liberal
Green

Presidential Four Conservative Low environmental

Soc-dem standard
Liberal
Radical-right

Political system Parties Coalition GVT Outcome

Proportional Four Conservative High environmental
Radical-left standard
Soc-dem
Green

Presidential Three Liberal High environmental

Radical-right standard
Green
 Mill’s methods can only reveal evidence of probable
Which are causes; they provide no real explanatory power.
Discovering instances of causation is an important

the main
step in understanding the world—but it is only part
of what we need.
We also need to understand how and why particular
problems instances of causation function as they do.
Answers to these questions take us beyond being
related to able to identify cause-effect relationships. We must
develop theories and hypotheses—the basis of
scientific reasoning.
the two https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/978
0199383405/student/ch14/guide/
methods
Methods:
Case-oriented
Case-oriented: meaning that we start from the cases we detect in the real
world to get to the cause of a particular phenomenon, i.e. illness or high-
environmental protection.
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
Low generalization – high knowledge
Single-case study (or Small-N cases): one or very few cases analysed in
depth.
Typical of pre-behavioural revolution. Yet, sometimes important even after
the behavioural revolution.
E.g. “States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia and China” (1979). Theda Skocpol (1947 - ).
Case-
studies
Focused on one single case.
In-depth analysis (1) Atheoretical case studies;
We cannot provide predictions or (2) Interpretative case studies;
generate laws from single-case. (3) Hypothesis-generating case studies;
Nor the evidence of a single-case
can be transferred to similar cases (4) Theory-confirming case studies;
without analysing them.
(5) Theory-infirming case studies;
Yet, they might be important for us
to know and to make inferences (6) Deviant case studies.
about the case we study.
Example
I want to study one Why Spain has no populist party (now it has one)?
deviant case…Spain, Focus on one country with few parties. Qualitative
where we have no analysis or mixed analysis.
“Nevertheless, academic research on this topic has
populist RR parties
paid little attention to Spain – a country where PRR
(relevant) until 2019 parties are almost non-existent despite the fact that
there is growing political dissatisfaction with the
political establishment and anti-immigrant attitudes are
similar to those in other European countries with more
successful PRR parties. In this article we are interested
in showing that scholars can draw important lessons
from a closer and more detailed look at the Spanish
case.”
YET…
Example •Within a case-study – large N descriptive analysis
The mainstream in
political science
Medium (Comparative) or Large-N (Statistical or
quasi-experimental) analysis.
Variable oriented cases: establishing generalized
relationships between variables.
Statistical or quasi-experimental nature of the
analysis.
Standardized data: data-matrix.
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Medium-N analysis – from a few to up to 50.
Large-N analysis – more than 50
In both cases, statistical analysis…
Yes, but stronger when N is larger.
Medium and Large-N
analysis
They are possible only when large dataset are available.
Large dataset are: costly (yet, in our times…), time-
consuming (yet, in our times…), difficult to handle (yet, in
our times…).
State agencies were the first collectors of large data, that
sociologist used for the purpose of analysing specific
phenomena in the society.
Now, almost everyone can scrap big data from the web.
Statistical techniques…once upon a time, there was a pen
and a basic calculator.
Large Dataset:
examples
•https://www.v-dem.net/en
/
Large Dataset:
examples
•http://www.worldvaluessur
vey.org/WVSContents.jsp
Large Dataset:
examples
•https://www.chesdata.eu/
Medium and Large-N
analysis
Software (free and not free) for statistical analysis.
Beautiful plots
Highly-advanced statistical analysis – Durkheim data can be
analysed in three minutes.
YET: are we losing our theoretical roots?
Example
• I want to study
individuals’ attitudes I cannot focus on few individuals, but I need a lot of them 
toward populism Large-N design (we will get to it).
Then my “what” forces me to choose the “how”.
This measure constitutes the basis for a series of questions that
have been adopted for a web-based survey conducted in the
Netherlands (N = 600). Snapshot of one case (yet, many
individuals, not longitudinal).
Example
Example
Summing Up 2
Summing Up 3