Author Meets Critics: "Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

"Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry" edited by Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2021) provides a fresh perspective on the nature and value of analytic comparisons. Challenging the controlled, Millian method as the central form of comparative analysis for "small-n" research, Simmons, Smith, and the authors of the volume, call for a less rigid and more malleable form of comparison that engages broadly and creatively with a range of methods and ontologies - interpretivist, historical, ethnographic, statistical, positivist - that can help extend the meaning and power of comparative analysis. This roundtable seeks to engage with the significant insights advanced in the volume. The discussants in the roundtable are all scholars who have pursued comparative work that is rooted in both theory and in-depth case studies and who bring different ontological perspectives to the table.

Sub Unit

• Division 46: Qualitative Methods

Chair

• Erik Martinez Kuhonta McGill University

Presenters

• Rudra Sil University of Pennsylvania

• Nhu Truong University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Edward Schatz University of Toronto

• Giovanni Capoccia University of Oxford

• Erica S. Simmons University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Nicholas Rush Smith CUNY-City College