ABSTRACT
When Aristotle gathered data on the “social constitutions” of 158 Greek city-states, he set an important and enduring precedent for future comparativists. The apposite units should be from the same generic type of polity and at the same level of aggregation. Also, they should be more or less self-sufficient and possess a distinctive identity. Since then, almost all theorizing and empirical analysis in comparative politics has followed this model and focused on supposedly “sovereign” states whose populations shared a supposedly unique “nationality.” It was taken for granted that only these “sovereign-national” polities possessed the requisite capacity for “agency” and, therefore, could be treated as equivalent for purposes of comparison.
