ABSTRACT
Traditionally, urban political science has employed variables-oriented approaches with cities or neighborhoods as units of analysis in sets of paired case studies or regression analyses. In a small-N studies, the “most similar systems” approach involves comparing cases that are almost identical with the exception of a factor the scholar hypothesizes may explain variation in outcomes across cases. The literature on multi-level governance has long explored the interactions between tiers of government, examining how higher tiers of government can constrain or enable actors within cities, and cities have become collective actors on the international stage. Traditional approaches to small-N comparison and regression analysis describe relationships between variables of interest through analyzing correlations in small or large datasets. The last two decades have witnessed important shifts in the use of comparison as an analytic technique within urban political science.
