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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes The Comparative Method: Weaknesses and Strengths
The principal problems facing the comparative method can be succinctly stated as: many variables,
small number of cases. These two problems are closely interrelated. The former is common to
virtually all social science research regardless of the particular method applied to it; the latter is
peculiar to the comparative method and renders the problem of handling many variables more
difficult to solve.
Before turning to a discussion of specific suggestions for minimizing these problems, two general
comments are in order. First, if at all possible one should generally use the statistical (or perhaps
even the experimental) method instead of the weaker comparative method. But often, given the
inevitable scarcity of time, energy, and financial resources, the intensive comparative analysis of
a few cases may be more promising than a more superficial statistical analysis of many cases. In
such a situation, the most fruitful approach would be to regard the comparative analysis as the
first stage of research, in which hypotheses are carefully formulated, and the statistical analysis as
the second stage, in which these hypotheses are tested in as large a sample as possible.
In one type of comparative cross-national research, it is logically possible and may be advantageous
to shift from the comparative to the statistical method. Stein Rokkan distinguishes two aims of
cross-national analysis. One is the testing of “macro hypotheses” concerning the “interrelations of
structural elements of total systems”; here the number of cases tends to be limited, and one has to
rely on the comparative method. The other is “micro replications,” designed “to test out in other
national and cultural settings a proposition already validated in one setting.” Here, too, one can
use the comparative method, but if the proposition in question focuses on individuals as units of
analysis, one can also use the statistical method; as Merritt and Rokkan point out, instead of the
“one-nation, one-case” approach, nationality can simply be treated as an additional variable on a
par with other individual attributes such as occupation, age, sex, type of neighborhood, etc.
Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein make a similar distinction between truly “cross-
national studies” in which total systems are the units of analysis, and “multi-national but cross-
individual research.”
The second general comment concerns a dangerous but tempting fallacy in the application of the
comparative method: the fallacy of attaching too much significance to negative findings. The
comparative method should not lapse into what Johan Galtung calls “the traditional quotation/
illustration methodology, where cases are picked that are in accordance with the hypothesis—and
hypotheses are rejected if one deviant case is found.” All cases should, of course, be selected
systematically, and the scientific search should be aimed at probabilistic, not universal,
generalizations. The erroneous tendency to reject a hypothesis on the basis of a single deviant case
is rare when the statistical method is used to analyze a large sample, but in the comparative
analysis of a small number of cases even a single deviant finding tends to loom large. One or two
deviant cases obviously constitute a much less serious problem in a statistical analysis of very
many cases than in a comparative study of only a few —perhaps less than ten—cases. But it is
never-the less a mistake to reject a hypothesis “because one can think pretty quickly of a contrary
case.” Deviant cases weaken a probabilistic hypothesis, but they can only invalidate it if they turn
up in sufficient numbers to make the hypothesized relationship disappear altogether.
After these introductory observations, let us turn to a discussion of specific ways and means of
minimizing the “many variables, small N” problem of the comparative method. These may be
divided into four categories:
1. Increase the number of cases as much as possible: Even though in most situations it is impossible to
augment the number of cases sufficiently to shift to the statistical method, any enlargement of
the sample, however small, improves the chances of instituting at least some control. Modern
comparative politics has made great progress in this respect as a result of the efforts of the
field’s innovators to fashion universally applicable vocabularies of basic politically relevant
concepts, notably the approaches based on Parsonian theory and Gabriel A. Almond’s functional
approach. Such a restatement of variables in comparable terms makes many previously
inaccessible cases available for comparative analysis. In addition to extending the analysis

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