ABSTRACT
Sociology lags considerably behind political science in its comparative research on European societies. The reason lies partly in the dependence of modern social science on quantitative data bases. These tend to be collected nationally, by national agencies, and the informal phenomena studied by much sociology are highly vulnerable to different national definitions. Some of the same problems beset political science, but there are more formal institutions that, even when they differ across countries, can at least be understood in relation to each other. The situation has begun to improve in recent years, as more data are collected by the European Commission, and as a number of large, multinational research projects have been launched. There is now a European Sociological Association, and two major general journals (European Sociological Review and European Societies) that carry the continent’s name in their titles, in addition to some specialised ones in related fields (like urban studies).
