(Zuckerman and Lichbach)
Comparative politics was born of social theory (to read- Eckstein, 1963)
Eckstein says that comparative politics has the right to claim Aristotle as an ancestor because of the primacy put on politics among the sciences
To Research - the renaissance and the enlightenment. Many of the influentials (the progenitors) of the movement lived during these times. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Smith, Montiesquieu
The classic theorists of social science: Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Patero, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels - established the field's research agenda, mode of analysis, and contrasting theoretical visions.
The contemporary theorists "drew on this heritage to rebuild and invigorate the field".
Z&L are claiming 4 main movements. The early ancestors. The more direct progenitors of the renaissance and enlightenment. The classic theorists who formalised the structure. And the contemporary refiners.
"Comparatives want to understand the critical events of the day, a position that ensures the dreams of theory address the political world as it exists, not formal abstractions or utopias". Answering the Big Questions in the context of today.
Z&L's framework for academic enquiry and knowledge creation. Their epistemology (?).
1. Comparative politics has an ambitious scope of enquiry. No element of politics too obscure to study, no method of analysis irrelevant.
2. Comparatives assert an ambitious intellectual vision in that they approach these substantive concerns with general questions in mind. - - students of comparative politics examine a case to discover what it tells us about wider phenomena -- (so)
3. Comparatives therefore insist that analysis requires specific comparisons.
The comparative method is required to capture epoch-shaping developments that have global significance, unlike studies of single countries and abstract theorising. (i.e. you read everything you can about everything, and understand the fuck out of it).
It was in the 1960s that the founders of contemporary comparative politics initiated the most recent effort to merge theory and data in the study of politics. One of the guiding principles:
"The proper study of politics requires systematic comparisons".
So you need to use data in a systematic (scientific) way. Scientific theories and testable hypotheses come to the fore. But this is not to say comparative politics is limited to this approach (see Brown) - the comparisons and use of data must simply be "systematic".
The 3 competing traditions in comparative politics. 3 Schools of Enquiry
1. Rational choice theorists follow the path laid out by Hobbes, Smith and Pareto
2. Culturalists: Montiesquieu, Weber, Mosca
3. Structuralists: Marx, Weber
The culturists often have strong doubts about the ability to generalise to abstract categories and create explanations that apply to more than the case at hand.
Rational choice theorists seek to maximise the ability to produce universal laws that may be used in nomothetic explanations...
NOMOTHETIC: literally means "proposition of the law". In sociology, nomothetic explanation presents a generalized understanding of a given case, and is contrasted with idiographic explanation, which presents a full description of a given case.
... although the culturalists may be more concerned with idographic explanations than nomothetic ones. They maximise the importance of reliability of reasearch evidence.
The 3 schools focus on 3 respective ontological approaches. Rationalists study how actors use reason to make choices. Culturalists study the rules that actors are bound by. Structuralists study the relations among actors in an institutional context. Positivism, interpretivism and realism are the possible philosophies of the rationalist, culturalist and structuralist schools.
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