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scaling down: subnational comparative case studies in comparative politics and chinese politics

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Abstract

This article contributes to our understanding of merits and weaknesses associated with the subnational comparative case study. Despite its methodological strengths and the increasing importance of subnational units in politics, the subnational comparative case study remains underutilized in comparative politics. The root cause of the method’s merits lies in the substantive importance of subnational units in politics; at the same time, however, the difficulty of abstracting theory from local specificities hinders the wide utilization of this method. Through examining some important studies in comparative politics and Chinese politics that use comparative case studies, I identify problems in case selection and in achieving generalizability in research design of subnational comparative case studies.

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Notes

  1. Path-breaking studies in comparative politics include, for example, Skocpol’s (1979) comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China in social revolutions; Hall and Soskice’s (2001) discussion of the varieties of capitalism; Esping-Andersen’s (1990) analysis of three worlds of welfare capitalism; and Evans’ (1995) research on developmental states.

  2. Other keyword searches, such as ‘local government comparative methods’ and ‘comparative case studies of local politics’, give similar results.

  3. Other relevant SNCCS work includes Hagopian (1996), Heller (2000), McMann (2006), O’Donnell (1999), Gibson and Suarez-Cao (2010).

  4. For the discussion of uneven regional coverage in CP, see Munck and Snyder (2007) and Sigelman and Gadbois (1983).

  5. Munck and Snyder (2007) summarize the direction of comparative politics in three leading journals of CP during the 1989–2004 period and find sub-Saharan Africa is studied in 12.4 per cent of their articles, the Middle East and North Africa in 11.5 per cent, and Eastern Europe in 10.8 per cent (Munck and Snyder, 2007: 10).

  6. In cross-national subnational comparative analyses, Canada, Germany, and United Kingdom are most frequently studied. In within-nation subnational comparative analyses, the countries most frequently studied include India, China, Argentina, Mexico, and Russia.

  7. There are some good cross-national subnational comparative analysis, such as Boone, 2003; Eaton, 2004, 2011; Farrell, 2005; Goldfrank, 2007; Jones Luong, 2002; Karapin, 1999; and O’Donnell, 1973. For example, Eaton (2004) argues that the structural power of governors over national legislators within their parties and the subnational intra-elite conflicts are the common explanatory variables for the politics of decentralization in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

  8. For example, SNCCS has been used in Chinese politics to investigate policy implementation (Chung, 2000; Li, 1997; Remick, 2002; Solinger, 2004), labour politics (Hurst, 2009; Lee, 2007), political economy (Rozelle, 1994; Segal, 2003; Thun, 2006; Tsai, 2002; Whiting, 2001; Breznitz and Murphree, 2011), state-society relations (Hockx, 2005; Read, 2007), public goods provision (Knapp, 1996; Tsai, 2007a), political and economic reforms (Steinfeld, 1998; Yang, 1997; Burns and Wang, 2010), village elections and democracy (Levy, 2007; Zhang, 2008), poverty reduction (Donaldson, 2007, 2011), and environmental protection (Li, 2011; Tang et al, 1997).

  9. Some SNCCS analysts in CP employ a similar strategy. For example, in constructing his paired comparison, Varshney establishes similarity in ethnic demographic proportions as the control, based on the theory that the demographic distribution of Muslims has significant political consequences for communal conflicts in India (Varshney, 2002: 8).

  10. In his study of laid-off workers’ politics, Hurst (2009) first defines four regional categories that vary in the pattern of job loss (a key dependent variable) based on his previous research. He then selects one or two representative cities where he could get research access from each regional category for comparative case study analyses.

  11. For the difficulties in fieldwork in politically closed system, please see the special issue on Area 45(4).

  12. Good references in answering such questions in the CP literature include Locke (1995), Sinha (2005), Snyder (2001b), and Varshney (2002).

  13. The nine case study types are: typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential, crucial, path-way, most-similar, and most-different (Gerring, 2007: 86–150).

  14. Examples that use mixed methods in SNCCS work include, Putnam et al (1993) and Tsai (2007a).

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Melanie Manion, Samantha Vortherms, David Weimer, and participants in the Chinese Politics Workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for helpful comments. Financial support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is gratefully acknowledged. All errors remain my own.

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  1. Division of Social Sciences, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    cai (vera) zuo

  2. Department of Political Science, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 220 Handan Rd, Shanghai, 200433

    cai (vera) zuo

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zuo, c. scaling down: subnational comparative case studies in comparative politics and chinese politics. Eur Polit Sci 14, 318–339 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.26

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