From Soviet Studies to Comparative Politics: the Unfinished Revolution

Abstract

In the 1950s, political scientists in the United States became increasingly interested in comparative analyses of political systems. In large part, this trend reflected a belief that political science should not stop at the American borders — other nations after all could provide interesting and important contrasts to the American variant of politics. However, the attractveness of comparative politics also had to do with its methodology. Comparative approaches offered scholars an opportunity to expand both the variables they could study and the controls they could build into their research designs. Thus, the appeal of comparative politics was that it would put an end to ethnocentric and unsystematic approaches to the study of political institutions and behaviour (Almond, 1966; Almond and Powell, 1966; Merritt, 1970, pp. 3–23).