Theory Development in Comparative Social Research

Abstract

While questions of methodology and research design have received a lot of attention, less is known about theory development in comparative social research. As theoretical objectives and orientations are diverse, theorizing takes many forms, ranging from orienting statements and typologies to different kinds of causal propositions. After introducing different understandings of “theory” and associated types of research questions, the article discusses the interplay between empirical research and theory development in comparative social research. Using examples from different fields of application, I argue that theory development in comparative research can be hampered by placing too much emphasis on general micro-level theories, but also by a lack of theoretical abstraction, that intertwines mechanism sketches with historical and contextual details of the particular macro-level phenomena under investigation. The article calls for a greater focus on meso-level theorizing, as it has the greatest potential to produce theoretical knowledge about contextual variation in causal mechanisms and to motivate the development of theoretical models that are explicit enough to be systematically revised across studies.