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CONCEPTUALISING COMPARATIVE POLITICS
A Framework1
Anthony Petros Spanakos
τοὔνεκ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἀλλοειδέα φαινέσκετο πάντα ἄνακτι …
ᾤμωξέν τ᾽ ἄρ ἔπειτα καὶ ὣ πεπλήγετο μηρὼ
χερσὶ καταπρηνέσσ᾽, ὀλοφυρόμενος δ᾽ ἔπος ηὔδα.
(Odyssey XIII, 193–9)
In Book Thirteen of the Odyssey, the aged king returns to a homeland he does not recognise, ‘smites’ his thighs with his palms and ‘cries out despairingly’. Such despair can be productive, especially for scholars whose peregrinations lead them to revisit the concepts that are central in their research. Indeed, experience in the ‘field’ continually re-informs the concepts and theories that are eventually applied back to it. The sense of the inadequacy of extant scholarly accounts and the need to reflect on conceptual formation and application is especially invoked during times of crisis or political change.
The Arab Spring, beginning in December 2010, produced ‘unforeseen developments [that] pushed scholars of politics back to revisit dominant theoretical understandings of the drivers of regime change and stability’ (Sallam 2013, 248). Similarly productive for scholarly re-conceptualisation were the protests and responses in Beijing (and elsewhere) in China in 1989 (Zhao 2001). Of course, it is not only protest movements – whatever the mix of demands for accountability, democracy, liberties, better material conditions, reduced insecurity – which encourage scholarship but also, perhaps, their absence. Guillermo O’Donnell’s efforts at problematising and innovating concepts largely tried to explain the persistence of phenomena which resisted the expectations of full democratisation assumed by others (1994, 1996). Following studies of crisis which highlight the role of interpretation (Calhoun and Derlugian 2011, 18; Panizza and Philip 2013), scholarly efforts to understand politics – whether in ordinary or extraordinary times – involves revisiting concepts, theories and empirical accounts. Times of crisis, such as the Arab Spring or the Tiananmen protests, tend to encourage scholars to return to the concepts that are fundamental to their work, but careful study into periods of normalcy suggest similar reflection on concepts and how they may be used to understand and explain empirical contexts (see Mahoney and Thelen 2009; Rustow 1970; Wildavksy 2006, 203).
This chapter offers an apology and a framework for conceptual comparative politics. It first explores what concepts are and how they are conceived by scholars pursuing conceptual comparative politics. It then presents a typology about how concepts may be used, suggesting that concepts may be thought of as lenses, building blocks and scripts. It then introduces the chapters in the volume according to this typology.
Why Concepts?
Concepts make possible scholarly conversation (Sartori 2009b) including ‘creative confrontations’ across paradigms (Lichbach 2003). They are fundamental. Although this may seem a very banal point – most comparative politics work begins by stating relevant concepts – it is insufficient to write that concepts are important. Indeed, comparative politics scholarship often speaks of a particular concept as being ‘essentially contested’ but then does not give very much attention to the concept in the essay itself.
For some, the essential contestability is a function of being part of political discourse or because the component parts of the concept do not consistently align in a straightforward manner (Freeden 2004). A scholar who is sensitive to this will try to describe the concept in ways that recognise the elements within the concept and how those are brought out, challenged, validated or problematised by empirical analysis. Such scholars find the inconsistencies and tensions within the concept provocative and productive. More commonly, however, ‘essentially contested’ is an admission that members of different scholarly traditions will not accept the principles on which the scholar hopes to be judged and that such scholars are not the intended audience of the present work. If the contestability of a concept is based on methodological preference, then identifying a concept is a matter of choosing a reading public. Once that is done, the scholar can offer a definition that will be accepted by that public and then move on to describing how that concept – or its internal characteristics – will be operationalised. There is much space between these two positions.
Given the broad influence of King et al. (1994) as a discipline-wide methodological primer, there is a widespread preference in comparative politics for operationalising rather than problematising concepts.2 Indeed, dissertations are often encouraged to use the latest methodological tools (say, experimental methods) to test hypotheses at the expense of reflective thought on the concepts that will be used. Too often an article – even a highly praised one – strikes the reader as making perfect sense if one accepts the basic premises that ‘democracy’ is X. But proper operationalising requires deep reflection on the concept (what it is, what elements it contains), not simply how the concept should be measured (Brady and Collier 2004). That is, operationalisation relies on problematisation and vice versa (see Chapter 8, this volume).
This relationship is especially important in political science as all of its key concepts are ‘fuzzy’ (Schmitter 2008) and are the products of scholarly ‘translation’ efforts (Schedler 2012). As Gerring astutely notes, scholars may agree that democracies do not go to war with each other but they disagree over what a democracy is (2012). For some, this is a major problem to be overcome: one must identify common concepts and standardised methods to apply (Jouvenel 1963; King et al. 1994; Sartori 2009a). But for scholars operating in the tradition of conceptual comparative politics, the ‘fuzziness’ of concepts is a permanent condition because concepts are approximations of dynamic empirical conditions that need to be regularly revisited in light of new thought about and evidence from empirical events.3 The careful and reflective consideration of concepts by scholars conducting conceptual comparative politics not only takes place prior to and during the ‘research stages’ but is visible in their written production as well.
What is Conceptual Comparative Politics?
Comparative politics is a messy field where scholars are distinguished by a number of overlapping and cross-cutting interests: grand theory versus middle level theory versus single case studies; positivism versus interpretavism; large versus small N; quantitative versus qualitative versus interpretive versus mixed methods; country- versus region- versus issue-oriented research, among other distinctions (Brady and Collier 2004; King et al. 1994; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Munck and Snyder 2007; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012). Conceptual comparative politics does not have a clear preference for any of these positions and, indeed, scholars with any of these research preferences may produce conceptual comparative politics. The chapters included in this book reflect diverse methodological preferences found within comparative politics more broadly.4
Scholars engaging in conceptual comparative politics think of concepts as keys to empirical study. The metaphor is worth noting. A key opens the lock in a door – making available what lurks behind, bridging the here and there, known and unknown – but only a key with the proper shape does so. Moreover, a key separated from a lock becomes a charm, an object designed for aesthetic appeal, attracting wonder and desire for its appearance, not its function. Just as Sartori worried that improper concern with methodology could turn into ‘methodism’, CCP does not aim to make a concept into a fetish. Comparative politics relies on application or applicability: even Weberian ‘ideal types’ – ideal though they might have been – were meant to conform to some knowable, even if not empirical, reality (see Lichbach 2007).
If concepts are the keys, then the locks (and doors, treasure chests …) are the contexts into which the concepts are applied, from which the concepts gain value. That is, the concept alienated from its context has little value in comparative politics.5 As such, scholars must regularly engage concepts in contexts with the expectation that the concept approved by a dissertation committee or an internal review board will shift in the field. Rather than undermining the proposed project, the shift gives greater leverage as the research project more appropriately understands the context under study and the function of the concepts used. Similarly, scholars must be sensitive to the possibility that recent revisions of a concept may not be more valuable for understanding a contemporary investigation into a puzzle. As such, scholars often go ‘back’ to earlier concepts when they offer new explanations.6
Conceptual comparative politics, therefore, signals not only a commitment to deep reflection on the concepts that are fundamental to comparative politics, but an understanding that such a reflection is incomplete without consideration of the contexts into which it is applied.7 This involves a tension as conceptual comparative politics both wants to explain and understand a concept (whether ‘objectively’ or ‘intersubjectively’) and it also recognises that concepts are contestable and their applicability is uneven over time and space. This tension allows conceptual comparative politics which is oriented towards both big data and small Ns, positivism and interpretivisim, grand theory or case studies. What is most definitive is not the methodological choice but the relationship of engagement with concept and context.
What are Concepts?
A concept may be understood as a set of meanings associated with a given word to which logical rules apply (Sartori 2009b, 66). Concepts may be more or less abstract, applicable to more or fewer events and situations, and contain components that are more or less precise and distinct. Such components may be more or less reconcilable rendering the concept more or less contestable (see Gallie 1956; Schedler 2010, 15–16). In a scholarly study of ‘democracy’, democracy is a signpost identifying a semantic space containing consensual understandings of the concept as well as a sense of openness where divergence is possible. Concepts in this way facilitate scholarly conversations as they ground it in mutually comprehensible language while allowing for space for new interventions to emerge.
Returning to ‘democracy’ there may be no precise object to which the concept can be applied. Its meaning comes from interpretations of empirical phenomena as well as theoretical elaborations. The absence of a ‘real world referent’, however, does not mean that democracy can be applied to anything. A certain amount of scholarly agreement about democracy or, at least, some of its definitional components, is necessary for a discussion of democracy. At the same time, those definitional components may change over time (the US government at various times in its history would not qualify given current definitions of democracy, see Allen 2004). Research which understands and analyses democracy in different contexts can help identify which elements of democracy are true by definition, which are necessary, which are sufficient. At the same time, research on democracy can also generate, elucidate and test hypotheses based on the properties of democracies (Sartori 2009b, 90). Whereas the first wonders whether a ‘free press’ is necessary in order for something to be a democracy (perhaps a study of the 2013 law to loosen press constraints in Burma) and the latter asks whether democracies provide better protections for ethnic minorities (perhaps a study of religious minorities in Syria and Turkey), both rely upon democracy, among other key concepts.
Some scholars work with ready-made concepts and choose to make their contribution to the field through hypotheses that they treat with a battery of different methodological techniques. Their study may discover something about democracy but that is not its purpose. The concept is incidental to the study itself. This sort of approach certainly has a place in comparative politics but it is not conceptual comparative politics. Conceptual comparative politics requires reflection about one or more critical concepts through empirical study. Conceptual comparative politics does not assume that a concept can be taken ‘off the shelf’ and applied without reflection. Similarly, it does not assume that concepts appear in the beginning of a book as one ‘lays out the argument’ and then recede into the background while the book’s main contribution is being made. Concepts remain a central part of conceptual comparative political inquiry.
How Concepts May Be Used
Within comparative politics, and even among scholars doing conceptual comparative politics, there are important different positions on how concepts are used. Before laying out a typology that aims to capture these differences, it is worth briefly exploring two distinct positions on conceptual precision and/or ambiguity which underlie the different conceptual uses that will be identified by the proposed typology. Namely, scholarly positions on precision and ambiguity contribute to the different ways scholars engaged in conceptual comparative politics use concepts.
Some scholars see a trade-off between precision and ambiguity (Gerring 2001; Sartori 2009a). On this view, the higher a concept is on a ‘ladder of abstraction’ the more members it contains but the less specific information it gives about the population. ‘Animal’ is more inclusive but provides less information than ‘human being’. The more precise one can be about a concept, on this view, the more directly one can identify a causal mechanism. Amartya Sen (2000) famously argued that democracy prevents famine. A scholar seeking precision may argue that it is a specific aspect of democracy (or causal sequence) that has this effect (for example, it is freedom of press that prevents famine not democracy itself, or it is only parliamentary democracy that has this effect). Parsing out definitional criteria that do not contribute to the causality of hypothetical claims helps make the causal argument better and may facilitate comparative inquiry.
The more precise the conceptual definition, the easier it is to apply to a causal argument. Here parsimony is important though elsewhere it may be unprofitable. Concepts have multiple components which can, and often do, move in different directions. For some scholars, it is not so important what specific element of a concept is most causally relevant but how the richness of the concept helps make sense and explain a set of events.
However difficult it may be to find a precise, operationalisable definition of democracy, the ‘peopl...
