ABSTRACT
Part I established why countries are compared and how comparison helps generate, test, and refine theories of politics. It established a general ‘architecture’ of comparative methods that includes the comparison of many countries, few countries, and single-country studies. It demonstrated how these three types of comparison use quantitative and qualitative techniques at different levels of analysis. Finally, it highlighted the key problems associated with comparison and suggested how best to overcome them. Throughout the chapters, concrete examples from the comparative literature were used to demonstrate these points. The chapters that make up Part II of this text use these different methods to interrogate popular research topics in comparative politics. The topics chosen have received wide attention in the comparative literature, are attractive to students of comparative politics, and are well suited to examine the different ways in which comparative methods can be applied to real world problems. In essence, the chapters in this part of the text compare comparisons in an effort to demonstrate the utility of different methods of comparison.
