ABSTRACT
As chapter 2 demonstrated, there has been considerable debate among
comparativists concerning the adoption of an appropriate approach to the
discipline. In many ways this debate has come to resemble the ‘‘dialogue
of the deaf’’ of a decade earlier between modernizers and dependency
Each of these approaches has in its own way shed much light on pre-
viously unexplored angles, and each has deepened and enriched the level of
analysis by its critique of the one before. But, as previously demonstrated, arguments over which line of inquiry best provides a method of comparison
continue to rage in books, in university lecture halls, and in scholarly jour-
nals. As some of the quotations presented in chapter 2 indicate, at times the
debate has lost sight of the issues at hand and has degenerated into one-
upmanship and name-calling. Successive generations of scholars appear to
have learned little from those who preceded them. Earlier state-centered
analyses drew attention to the importance of political institutions and their
forms, but their insights and contributions were largely neglected by the behavioralists. The behavioralists pointed to the significance of social forms,
only to be overlooked by neo-statists.
