Abstract
Comparison is nowadays recognized as a major scientific tool among social movement analysts. But if the development and the standardization of comparative methodology in the study of contentious politics is a positive sign of scientific maturity, the other side of the coin is that it is also quite often taken for granted. Relying on various examples and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, this chapter focuses on some of the shortcomings that researchers face when comparison becomes an analytical routine rather than, what French historian Marc Bloch called, a “divining rod” for social sciences. The chapter’s aim is to restore the undeniable and irreplaceable heuristic vocation of comparison by recalling some of the basic methodological rules that researchers should follow in order to make their results rigorous and convincing.
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Notes
- 1.
Author’s translation.
- 2.
Riot grrrl punk bands appeared in the American northwest during the early 1990s and developed a feminist and “queer” subculture with songs and fanzines that address problems pertinent to young white middle-class women such as sexual abuse, harassment, and body image (Moore and Roberts 2009: 284–288).
- 3.
Since the development of queer theory, which inspired some riot grrrl bands, the very definition of what a woman “is” has quite changed; if both movements fight for women’s rights, they do not even deal with the same “women.”
- 4.
See Gamson (1995) for a study of the sometimes difficult relationships between older “gay and lesbian” and newer “queer” movements in the United States.
- 5.
This example is taken from Emre Öngün’s doctoral dissertation on the transnationalization of Turkish social movements (Öngün 2008).
- 6.
This may be considered as following Wittgenstein’s warning against “a main cause of philosophical disease – a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example” (Wittgenstein 2001 [1953]: 593).
- 7.
See Dobry (2000) for an elaboration of this critique.
- 8.
That is what the authors demonstrate when they illustrate their theoretical framework with cases chosen in very different settings (e.g., in democratic and authoritarian regimes).
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Mathieu, L. (2013). What Do Social Scientists Do When They Do Comparative Work?. In: Andreosso-O'Callaghan, B., Royall, F. (eds) Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4653-4_16
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