Theories of CoD – the fi t of political institutions to societal contexts

There is growing dissatisfaction over the fact that the huge but also heterogeneous amount of evidence generated by the traditional camps of comparative research – comparative case studies and large N statistical techniques – so far has not been integrated into a more coherent set of propositions that link the various causal accounts of CoD (Munck 2000: 19ff.; Munck 2001). Many of the existing theories and the evidence on which they are based are either very general and simplifying, or too spatially bound and complex and, thus, diffi cult to generalize.