A “Commensurability” Question? The USA in Comparative Area Studies Perspective

• In Event: Rethinking Africa, Eurasia & the West: Regions, States & Comparative Area Studies

Abstract

The development and organization of American Political Science in the 20th and 21st century has worked consistently against the inclusion of the United States in comparative research. Since its emergence as an organized subdiscipline of political science (Adcock, 2006), the emphasis within the field of American politics on the uniqueness on American institutions and history has become widespread (Hartz, 1955; Kingdon, 1999; Lipset, 1996; Schuck & Wilson, 2008; Shafer, 1991; Sombart, 1976; Turner, 1921) leading to the isolation of American politics from comparative perspectives (Morgan, 2013; Stepan & Linz, 2011, p 842). Robert Lieberman in his comparative study of racial inclusion points out a high cost of this isolation by highlighting the difficulty of disentangling the potential causal linkages in the situations of convergence of several putative causes towards the same outcome without achieving variation in different factors and outcomes (Lieberman, 2011, p 12-13). Indeed, many scholars have underscored the advantages of comparative and transnational approaches to the study of American politics on topics like democratization (Morgan, 2013), the development of electoral institutions (Ahmed, 2018), and race and ethnicity (Kuo, 2019). Moreover, the growing concerns regarding the stability of democracy in the United States has inspired many to reach for a comparative lens to understand recent political development (Ziblatt and Levitsky, 2018; Kuo, 2019). Yet, the endeavor to compare the United States with countries located in a different regional cluster, exposed to considerably dissimilar political and economic forces and legacies generates an important problem of commensurability between the United States and the other cases under comparison. This study seeks to develop a two-layered strategy, combining most similar and most different case selection, to tackle that significant methodological question. This strategy is meant to parse out the “noise” in order to identify the dimensions along which commensurability can best be assessed and measured. For the first phase, we suggest that researchers select the second case from another region in a way that these two cases will be comparable across the scope dimensions relevant for the main puzzle of the study. For the second phase, they should integrate a shadow case from the same region of the second case into the comparison in a way that the second and third cases will show commonality across many of the factors that should be controlled in the research design. This complementary, two-layered comparison will hopefully provide a new strategy for researchers aiming to rigorously study the United States in a comparative area studies framework by allowing them to examine variation in their overarching research design, cross-validating their inferences, and increasing their reliability

Authors

• Fatih Umit Cetin, Umass Amherst

• Amel F. Ahmed, University of Massachusetts, Amherst