Comparative Research Agenda Research Articles

The Economic Psychology of Tax Compliance and Charitable Giving: A Comparative Analysis and Research Agenda

Finding mechanisms to promote prosocial spending behavior is fundamental to the well-being of our societies and is more urgent than ever in a time of key global challenges, including social and economic inequalities. Tax payment and charitable giving can be seen as two complementary ways to financially provide for the common good and, like many other social dilemmas, they both involve a conflict between what is good for oneself and what is good for others. The aim of the present article is to perform a comparative analysis of the main determinants of tax behavior and charitable giving to identify some common antecedents to gain insight to promote pro-social financial decisions at large. Despite the intrinsic differences, several commonalities were found, thus suggesting a transcending common core. By identifying well-established literature and under-investigated areas, a new research agenda is formulated.

Rethinking labour migration: Covid-19, essential work, and systemic resilience

Many of the ‘essential workers’ during the Covid-19 pandemic are migrants, playing an important role for the continued functioning of basic services – notably health services, social care, and food supply chains. We argue that this role should be taken into account when assessing the impacts of migrant workers and in the design of labour migration and related public policies. Existing studies highlight how the employment of migrant workers in essential services is shaped by interests of employers, sectoral policies, and national institutions. Considerations of how migrants may affect the systemic resilience of essential services – in a pandemic or similar crises – are pervasively absent, not only in policy-making but also in research. Drawing on several disciplines, we outline the concept of systemic resilience and develop implications for the analysis and regulation of labour migration. We call for shifting the focus from the role of migrants in specific occupations and sectors in particular countries to transnational systems of production and service provision. To study how migrant workers affect systemic resilience, we propose an agenda for comparative research along three lines: comparing migrants to citizens within the same system, comparing migrants’ roles across systems, and comparing strategies for resilience adopted in different systems.

Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda

AbstractThis article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

Towards a comparative research agenda on in situ urbanisation and rural governance transformation

This article explores how rural settlements urbanise, and how rural governance transforms in the process. The question is motivated by the significant contribution that smaller urban centres are projected to make to the world’s future urban growth, the majority of which will occur in the global South. Many smaller centres are emerging through in situ urbanisation, wherein a rural settlement becomes urban. Given the importance of small town growth, the article proposes a comparative research agenda with the aim of exploring and comparing the institutional transformations occurring in ‘transitional spaces’, the governance complexities these transformations present and the consequences for establishing urban planning systems in historically rural settlements. The agenda is operationalised in sub-Saharan Africa through a case study of Karonga Town, an emerging urban centre in Malawi. The agenda draws on a varied body of case-study research on small town growth and rural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa generally and Malawi specifically. The agenda has the potential to make a significant contribution to the literature seeking to reveal the informality in different governance landscapes and the forms of urbanisation in which these landscapes are embedded in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Nine new Pristionchus (Nematoda: Diplogastridae) species from China.

The model organism Pristionchus pacificus and the genus Pristionchus, Kreis, 1932 have been intensively studied in the last decade with contemporary work focusing on the development, evolution, ecology, behavior, neurobiology, and genomics of this group of organisms. In particular, mechanistic studies on the development and evolution of mouth-form plasticity, predation and associated self-recognition processes enabled unique insight into life history strategies and the evolution of novelty. These studies include a comparative research agenda making use of the 39 available species of Pristionchus, all of which can be studied in living cultures. Sampling efforts revealed that Asia represents a biodiversity hotspot for Pristionchus worms. However, previous samplings have a bias towards northern and island areas, largely for logistic reasons. Here, we report on two extensive sampling trips to the Yunnan and Shaanxi provinces in Mainland China. We report the isolation of nine new Pristionchus species by morphology, morphometrics, mating experiments and genome-wide sequence analysis.

Translating land justice through comparison: a US-French dialogue and research agenda.

In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists.

Worlding and provincialising smart cities: From individual case studies to a global comparative research agenda

The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies are a critical strategy for understanding phenomena in context, yet they present their own epistemological and ontological limitations. We argue for a more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda focused on the comparative analysis of smart cities, an agenda that foregrounds the conjunctural geographies of relationships and processes shaping these cities.

From meditation to action – a research agenda for studying informal global rule-making: remarks on ‘Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”’

AbstractFriedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.

Lawyers, judges, and the obstinate state: The French case and an agenda for comparative politics

In the field of comparative politics, France is often taken to exemplify the resilience of the centralized modern state. Stanley Hoffmann popularized this thesis by highlighting the French state’s “obstinacy” despite post-war reform efforts. This article revisits Hoffmann’s obstinate state thesis by tracing how lawyers and judges shaped French political development. I demonstrate that continuity in French officials’ claims to centralized power belie a deeper story of how legal actors catalyze institutional change in unlikely places: in civil law countries without a history of judicial review, in authoritarian regimes without regard for judicial independence, and in seemingly monolithic states without much room for democratic self-governance. These findings compel a comparative research agenda placing lawyers and judges at the center of the study of political development.

Estados Unidos como una nación en desarrollo: consideraciones sobre las peculiaridades de la historia estadunidense

Recientemente, se ha sugerido que la partida económica de los Estados Unidos después de la Guerra Civil marcó una “segunda Gran Divergencia”. Comparado con la “primera” —el surgimiento de Gran Bretaña durante la Revolución industrial—, esta segunda Gran Divergencia es curiosamente poco entendida: debido a que los Estados Unidos siguen siendo la plantilla para las narrativas de modernización, su trayectoria es más fácilmente aceptada como preordenada que interrogada como un resultado histórico poco probable. Pero ¿por qué el desarrollo debería haber sido problemático en todas partes, excepto en los Estados Unidos? Este artículo argumenta que falta una explicación sólida para el ascenso de los Estados Unidos: no se puede encontrar en una literatura de historia económica centrada en las dotaciones de factores ni en la historiografía americanista internalista, que a menudo reproduce relatos de modernización sobredeterminados inspirados por Max Weber. La vía de investigación más prometedora, argumentamos, es preguntar cómo las instituciones políticas estadounidenses configuraron lo que debería llamarse adecuadamente un Estado de desarrollo estadunidense. Tal perspectiva abre una amplia agenda de investigación comparativa que provincializa a los Estados Unidos desde la perspectiva de las experiencias de desarrollo en otros lugares.

The Real Estate Frontier

AbstractAfrica's major cities are experiencing dramatic transformation as a result of growing real estate investment. This article explores whether existing theories can explain the dynamics of urban redevelopment in an African context, and how African cases can inform new theorizations of real estate driven urban transformation. Examining the utility of theories of gentrification and speculative urbanism for understanding urban redevelopment in Accra, Ghana, it argues that urban redevelopment in this city has been shaped by its particular (post)colonial history of state land acquisition and urban planning. Rather than simply identifying empirical variation on established theories, however, the article draws on recent research on commodity frontiers to propose an original theorization of urban redevelopment in Accra in terms of the production of a ‘real estate frontier’. This real estate frontier is characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city. The article concludes by calling for a comparative research agenda to better understand real estate frontiers globally.

Lawyers, Judges, and the Obstinate State: The French Case and an Agenda for Comparative Politics

In the field of comparative politics, France is often taken to exemplify the resilience of the centralized modern state. Stanley Hoffmann popularized this thesis by highlighting the French state's obstinacy despite postwar reform efforts. This article revisits Hoffmann's obstinate state thesis by tracing how lawyers and judges shaped French political development. I demonstrate that continuity in French officials' claims to centralized power belie a deeper story of how legal actors catalyze institutional change in unlikely places: In civil law countries without a history of judicial review, in authoritarian regimes without regard for judicial independence, and in seemingly monolithic states without much room for democratic self-governance. These findings compel a comparative research agenda placing lawyers and judges at the center of the study of political development.

The United States As A Developing Nation: Revisiting The Peculiarities Of American History*

Abstract It has recently been suggested that the economic departure of the United States after the Civil War marked a ‘Second Great Divergence’. Compared to the ‘First’, the rise of Britain during the Industrial Revolution, this Second Great Divergence is curiously little understood: because the United States remains the template for modernization narratives, its trajectory is more easily accepted as preordained than interrogated as an unlikely historical outcome. But why should development have been problematic everywhere but the United States? This Viewpoint argues that a robust explanation for the United States's rise is lacking: it can neither be found in an economic history literature focused on factor endowments nor in internalist Americanist historiography, which often reproduces overdetermined accounts of modernization inspired by Max Weber. The most promising avenue of inquiry, we argue, lies in asking how American political institutions configured what should properly be called an American developmental state. Such a perspective opens up a broad comparative research agenda that provincializes the United States from the perspective of development experiences elsewhere.

Overcoming the dependent variable problem in studying food policy

The development of a comparative food policy research agenda has been hampered by the dependent variable problem of how to delineate the policy field. Through a concise literature review, we show that the existing literature has conceptualised food policy as policy outputs, institutional orders, or discursive constructs. Focusing on the policy outputs, we define food policy as a set of policy outputs adopted to address one or more food system activities (production, processing and packaging, distribution and retailing, and consumption) with the explicit aim of affecting food system outcomes in a desired direction. The paper develops a heuristic encompassing four dimensions along which food policy outputs may differ: (i) policy scope, (ii) targeting of policy efforts, (iii) type of policy instruments applied and how these are calibrated, and (iv) integration of the various components of the policy complex. These four dimensions can be applied to characterise individual food policies and compare across countries and time. Comparing and tracking the development of food policy along these dimensions would allow for addressing follow-up questions about impacts and what explains policy change.

Commentary: An agenda for comparative regional development research

Commentary: An agenda for comparative regional development research

Educational System Building

Recognizing that there are many different sorts of school systems in the United States and noting the absence of comparative research on these systems, we sampled six such systems—two public, one not, and three at various places on the border between public and private—for a comparative study of educational system in the United States. In this introduction, we motivate the research and discuss our research questions in order to situated the four papers in this special issue. The first three papers capture how different systems inhabit their environments similarly and differently, exploring the relationship between environments on one hand and the system–instruction connection on the other. The fourth paper sketches a comparative research agenda that would include more school systems, in and outside the United States, as they try to improve instruction.

Reconstructing Media Culture: Transnational Perspectives on Radio in Silesia, 1924–1948

This article contributes to a growing scholarship in the field of transnational radio history that attend to radio as a border-crossing medium. Within this burgeoning field, however, there is a persistent tendency to privilege radio produced by national broadcasters in capital cities. In this article, our focus on radio in Silesia seeks to intervene in current discussions of transnational and regional media history. From 1924, radio in German-controlled Silesia was established amidst ongoing border disputes after World War I. Despite the geopolitical significance of this region – and its radio programming, infrastructures and industry between 1924 and 1948 – it has largely been written out of both German and Polish radio historiography. Our analysis focuses on the institutional, technological and socio-political components necessary to understanding radio culture with a transnational and regional lens, taking the example of Silesia as a context of significantly altered population demographics and governance. Taking into account the conditions of radio institutions, industry and the materiality of infrastructures, we examine how radio in Silesia served as a political symbol in the context of ongoing border disputes and linguistic nationalism. As this article suggests, the case of Silesian radio challenges notions of a clear-cut ‘1945 divide’ in radio history, and our analysis will acknowledge how the material culture of radio figures in the complex situation of German, Polish, Russian and Jewish relations, and against the background of looting operations, property transfer and population expulsions in the early post-war period. This case is critically considered for its potential contribution to a more a layered, comparative research agenda on radio in Central Europe before, during and after World War II.

Saharan Zion: state evasion and state-making in modern Jewish and Sahrawi history

ABSTRACTBased on a comparison between Jewish and Sahrawi nationalism, the article introduces James Scott’s theorization of state-evading and state-making societies to the study of Zionist state formation. Given the state-evading features of Jewish Diaspora life (physical dispersion, segmentary kinship, acephalous social structure), the article argues that Zionism might best be compared to the state-making projects of other state-evading communities (including Kurdish, Berber, and Sahrawi nationalism). As an example for this comparative research agenda, the article explores the case of Sahrawi nationalism: While POLISARIO, the national liberation movement of Western Sahara, was consciously modelled after Third World insurgencies in Algeria and Palestine, the Sahrawi proto-state (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) applies a model of state-driven nation-building that corresponds closely to the statism (mamlakhtiyut) of the Zionist state-in-the-making.

Center-Right Political Parties in Advanced Democracies

This review proposes a comparative research agenda on center-right parties in advanced democracies, bringing together research in American and comparative politics. Political scientists have recently closely examined the decline of the center-left and the rise of the radical right but have paid less attention to the weakening of center-right parties. Yet cohesive center-right parties have facilitated political stability and compromises, while their disintegration has empowered radical challengers. After presenting an overview of right-wing politics in Western democracies and weighing different definitions of the electoral right, we discuss two factors that shape variations in center-right cohesion: organizational robustness of center-right partisan institutions and the (un)bundling of conservative mass attitudes on different policy dimensions. Last, we argue that a full account of the rise of the radical right cannot focus solely on the strategies of the center-left but must incorporate also the choices, opportunities, and constraints of center-right parties.

Gebietsschutz in Europa – Herausforderungen für wissenschaftliche Kooperation. Erfahrungen der Forschergruppe NeReGro

This paper addresses development and experiences of an international group of researchers with a focus on area protection in Europe. Under the acronym "NeReGro" (for "New regional development and large protected areas") four university research groups in geography from Switzerland, Austria and Germany practice successfully a rather lose, informal way of collaboration for almost20 years. Core subject of their joint activities is the considerable change experienced in area protection in Europe for quite some time. This is especially mirrored by large protected areas, many of which carry out a multitude of functions beyond the classical tasks of nature conservation. A considerable part of this research appears relatively isolated though, relatively disconnected and with limited mutual recognition. The development of NeReGro well illustrates the benefits that can be generated instead from ways of systematic collaboration for research on protected areas at large. These regard the development of a comparative international research agenda, the recognition of the societal implications of area protection, and the enhancement of the local-regional research perspective by a global view. Besides the added value of collaboration visibale through the work of NeReGro, the case of the research group equally illustrates limits of collabation similarly characteristic for protected areas research in Europe at large. Against this background, the consistent development of appropriate forms of research collaboration at European scale are demanded in order to meet future challenges caused by planning and management of protected areas.