Regional collaboration between states is increasingly vital to address the challenges of our time. Yet many regions struggle to collaborate effectively. Comparative regional law can contribute to effective regional collaboration. But it can also make a valuable contribution to the discipline of (comparative) law more generally, especially to rethinking the connection between law and the state, and better connecting our legal discipline to empirical methods. This contribution first sets out some key challenges for comparative regional law. For example, how to validly compare regions with vast and vital differences in history, (legal) culture, geography, language, and economies, and avoid pitfalls like EU-centrism or colonialism. As always in comparative law, no single perfect answer or method exists to address these challenges. Yet this contribution aims to help stock the comparative toolbox, so that researchers can pick and combine the proper methodological tools for the research questions they want to pursue. The main claim therefore is that, considering the nature of regional law, a functionalist method, complemented and checked by more critical methods, might often be a suitable approach. If done carefully, like two hedgehogs making love, comparing regional law can then produce academically and practically valuable results.

This chapter is intended to offer assistance for the linguistic description of writing systems throughout the history of one or, especially, several languages and provide a comparative description of the different units of writing systems. The first section establishes the definitions of the concepts of grapheme, graph, allograph and suprasegmental grapheme. The application of these concepts to English and Romance languages is exemplified by three models and methods of diachronic and comparative description of writing systems: Romance scriptology, cultural history of European orthographies, and comparative graphematics of punctuation. The second section discusses biscriptality, the phenomenon of employing two or more writing systems for the same language, not rare in the history of languages from different families, and related to different aspects of society and language users. With examples mainly from Russian and other Slavic languages, biscriptality is shown to be present on several levels of written language, and various applications of biscriptality are characterized with the help of dichotomies such as synchronic vs. diachronic biscriptality, monocentric vs. pluricentric biscriptality, and societal vs. individual biscriptality.

This chapter draws on the comparative and sociopragmatic methods in historical orthography research. After first introducing writing systems and describing orthography as a supportive discipline on the fringes of other disciplines, the growing interest in this discipline is explained. The chapter presents the adoption of the comparative method in Slavic studies and principal directions therein. Then, it summarizes theoretical preliminaries in historical sociopragmatics, primarily based upon research on English historical orthography. In what follows, the author offers an overview of the most important approaches in Slavic studies, pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics, illustrating the differences and synergies between them mostly with Russian, Czech and Polish material. Finally, the methods proposed are critically appraised and their applicability for prospective research is demonstrated.

Chapter 6 introduces a number of key methods and frameworks of analytical inquiry for approaching historical writing systems, including traditional approaches and more recently developed perspectives which lean towards a comparative approach. The first focus area explored in the chapter is that of philology: the chapter discusses how far philological approaches pertain to the study of orthography. The discussion also focuses on facsimiles and transcribed material for empirical analysis, while also pointing to the limitations stemming from digitally driven methods of research inquiry. The chapter discusses in particular the intratextual, intertextual and cross-textual analytical approaches, each of which has inherent advantages and disadvantages. The discussion then focuses on an overview of recently developed empirical frameworks of enquiry in historical orthography for a synergic perspective. Relevant topics in this section include, but are not limited to, comparative graphematics, which refers especially to the comparative analysis of individual orthographic units (e.g. punctuation features); and biscriptality, which includes bigraphism, biorthographism and bygliphism.

This chapter illustrates how to apply Bayesian reasoning when analyzing more than one case. The same principles that govern Bayesian updating with multiple pieces of evidence apply to Bayesian inference with multiple cases.

In the past few years, it has been possible to notice parallel developments in the study of both Latin and Greek late antique poetry, two neighbouring and growing scholarly fields. Recently published studies reveal an increased focus on the contemporary context and, in relation to that, on the ‘otherness’ of late antique aesthetics, when compared with the poetics of earlier periods that classically trained scholars have been taught to admire.1 Long considered poetry of bad taste from a period of decline, late antique poetry fascinates classicists today mainly because of its otherness, its productive reception of the classical period, its innovations in terms of literary forms, and the creativity with which it responds to the ‘seismic cultural changes’2 of late antique society.

In the past two decades comparative law scholars have rediscovered the importance of the debate on method. For a long time left in the background as a by-product of the old controversy on the epistemic status of the discipline, the ‘struggle for the methods’ has experienced a sudden revival. But does it really make sense to keep on engaging in a wearying confrontation among the various possible paradigms, once one recognizes that, as Patrick Glenn observed, ‘the history of comparative law is not one of adherence to a methodological norm but rather one of deviation and variety’? It makes sense, indeed, because ‘eclecticism’ as a theoretical perspective is itself the sign of the times and cannot strive for universal validity. Looking back at the history of comparative law, one is struck by the circumstance that throughout the formative era, the idea that obtained most credit in European intellectual circles was the opposite one, namely that ‘there is a comparative method’ (rectius: ‘Comparative Method’, as it was once written). This chapter is aimed at bringing back to light some distinctive traits of the original discourse on the ‘comparative method’ and highlighting the importance of the ‘scientific paradigm’ for the acceptance of comparative law as an autonomous subject of legal research.

In this chapter, I reconceptualize the twin concepts of “comparison” and “case,” by rethinking what political scientists often call a “single-case study.” I propose that much of the disciplinary ambivalence about so-called single-case studies is a product of a misconception regarding their nature, and that this methodological label is a misnomer for such studies. Drawing on my own research, I propose the term “site” rather than “case.” A site is a conjunctural intersection of various and heterogeneous processes, relations, and scales of political activity, some relatively enduring and some relatively ephemeral. The constitutive multiplicity of a site and the detailed empirical engagement it enables offer both inspiration and leverage for analytical claims. Conceptualizing the objects of our research as sites mitigates against the social scientific tendency to regard ongoing social processes in reified, monolithic, and static terms. In-depth empirical engagement with research sites draws our analytic attention to the social processes that provisionally result in spatial boundedness, enduring institutionalization, and individual and group identity formation – or, on the contrary, the events and processes that disrupt, modify, innovate, and transform them.

Many of the historical and contemporary phenomena in which social scientists are interested are difficult to study using traditional methods of comparative analysis.  Since most cases are complex systems – marked by interdependence and operating at multiple levels of analysis at once – controlling comparisons to adjudicate causality is fraught with difficulty.  This chapter argues that scholars can use historical archival research to help disaggregate the temporal and spatial properties of the phenomena we hope to compare while also tracing connections among those disaggregated elements.  Specifically, practices associated with archival inquiry – classifying, contextualizing, layering, and linking – allow us to identify the boundaries around subsystems that can be treated as relatively independent while identifying the hierarchical connections tying those substemic activities together. The chapter concludes by showing how William Tuttle’s masterful history of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 provides a template for comparing complex cases.

Comparison is a key tool in the social sciences. Scholars make comparisons across time and place to better understand our social and political worlds. A central technique that scholars use is often called ‘controlled comparison.’ Controlled comparisons rely on scholars holding possible explanations for the outcome of interest (e.g., revolutions or political participation) constant across different cases. This approach has been central to some of the most influential works of social science. It has helped scholars explain everything from divergent development outcomes to difference in regime type. Yet controlled comparisons are not the only form of comparison that scholars utilize to answer important questions. There is little guidance, however, for how to design or execute these comparisons or why research that does not rely on controlled comparisons can offer important insights. The goal of this edited volume is to begin to develop some of these guidelines. To do so, this volume explores two of the most fundamental questions in the study of politics: (1) why do scholars compare what they compare and (2) how do the methodological assumptions scholars make about why and how they compare shape the knowledge they produce? By answering these questions, the volume creates new resources for future students and researchers to draw upon in their efforts to advance knowledge.

If case study comparison is useful in the social sciences, it should be at least as useful as a way of understanding the political preferences and participation of individuals as it is for larger and more complex social categories such as organizations, parties, militaries, or states. Thus, qualitative comparisons involving the political preferences and activity of American billionaires will serve as a benchmark for the plausibility of various comparative frameworks. The chapter will demonstrate that applying Mill’s method-type comparison to billionaires generates inferential absurdities and also shows that regression-type logics of control are a poor fit for individual-level qualitative analysis. More feasible frameworks for understanding qualitative comparison at the individual level come both earlier and later in the inferential process. Cross-case comparisons are highly valuable for concept formation and theory building prior to any systematic effort at causal inference and also play a meaningful role in inferences about moderation effects after process tracing has been successful within each case. Furthermore, multi-case qualitative analysis that is not structured as explicit comparison can make crucial contributions to multi-method research on individuals.

What are the different ways in which we compare? Or to rephrase the query more precisely: What are the different ways in which we ordinarily use the word “compare”? This chapter distinguishes two ways of comparing, two uses of the word “compare,” to bring into clearer view a way of comparing that, despite being common to political science, often goes unnoticed. What are the two ways to compare? To compare juxtapositionally is to place similar kinds of things side by side to catalog their similarities and differences. To compare perspectivally is to draw an analogy between different kinds of things as a way to establish a vantage point from which to view one thing in terms of the other. Political science scholars who write about comparing usually focus their attention on comparing juxtapositinally – how to describe (and explain) patterns of similarity and difference across like kinds of things, events, processes, meanings, and so on. Yet political scientists routinely compare perspectivally as well. However, perspectival comparison has been the subject of far less methodological reflection in political science than has its juxtapositional cousin. By drawing attention to perspectival comparison, this chapter provides a set of starting points that political scientists may use to think more clearly about something that they would otherwise do unreflectively.

To what extent can an ethnographic sensibility enhance comparison? We argue that approaching comparison with an ethnographic sensibility – that is, being sensitive to how informants make sense of their worlds and incorporating meaning into our analyses – can strengthen comparative qualitative research. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility would enhance the quality of scholarly arguments by incorporating the processes through which actors ascribe meanings to their lived experiences and the political processes in which they are enmeshed. Because social science arguments often involve accounts of individual actors’ interests, ideas, or impressions, it is imperative to place such cognitive arguments in a broader cultural context. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility requires attention not only to that context but also to the political and social meanings which make that context intelligible. We elaborate these arguments through the lens of two comparative ethnographic works: a study of political mobilization in Bolivia and Mexico and a study of vigilantism in two South African townships.

Given the relative dominance of positivist epistemologies in political science, the most common mode of comparison is that of variation finding. Although such models can take many forms, the objective is to identify what factors or variables differ across the cases as a means to explain that variation. But other modes of comparative analysis are available. In particular, Charles Tilly’s notion of encompassing comparisons – examining similarities and differences across cases while recognizing that they are inextricably connected or related to some larger whole – may be a better model for explaining long-term political processes, such as state formation, colonialism, capitalism, or even the spread of massive protests across a large number of cases. In this chapter, I develop an encompassing comparison of the Arab uprisings. The approach does not see the uprisings as individual cases whose diverse outcomes yearn for explanation but rather as instances of mass resistance to larger, transnational processes, notably including securitization and neoliberalism. This is not to suggest that these processes caused the uprisings. But the idea is to explore the ways in which the different governments were connected to these larger processes and networks and the extent to which those supranational factors help explain the outcomes of the individual cases.

To rethink comparison, it is useful to begin with a more basic question: What are these things we compare when we do comparative research? Researchers are typically taught to think of a field site as a case (noun) that they will go out and study (verb). Cases are defined by virtue of the fact that they fall within a conceptually defined class: they exist “out there,” in a sense, before we even arrive. Valuable as it may be, this “realist” approach has often felt foreign to ethnographers and other practitioners of interpretive research. In the immersive work characteristic of interpretive research, we often enter research sites for practical and political reasons – or because of considerations related to language, cultural familiarity, funding, or something else. Even if we choose a site for primarily analytic purposes, we typically pursue research in ways that prioritize discovery and embrace changes in research interests, goals, and questions. For these and other reasons, we often wind up with an emerging study (noun) that we need to case (verb). As we develop accounts of experience-near concepts, relations, processes and practices, we repeatedly encounter the challenge of how to place them in dialogue with the experience-distant conceptual frameworks of our field. Examining what we have studied, we ask “what is this a case of?”

In an interview with Lisa Wedeen, one of the contemporary comparative political scientists whose work most consistently speaks to both political science and interdisciplinary audiences, the editors ask Wedeen to reflect on the role that comparison has played in her work. Wedeen is the author of three groundbreaking monographs on seemingly single cases – two on Syria and one on Yemen. Yet, in the course of the interview, it becomes apparent how profoundly comparative Wedeen’s work is. She discusses her comparison of “exemplary events” in her field sites as a method through which to draw broad lessons about politics from apparent ephemera. She discusses the comparisons she makes between ethnographic insights and political theory to tack back and forth between empirical and theoretical material with the goal of developing new ways to think about politics. And she discusses the ways in which these comparative practices make her work not just an empirical practice but also a political practice – one that makes the work of a comparative political scientist not just a career but a vocation.

The education of political and social scientific desire for area studies to be more like the disciplines or call it a day gives rise to doubts that in either event area studies have anything left to offer genuinely comparative inquiry. Their exotic charms, broadened horizons, and humorous vignettes notwithstanding, what can area studies really do for today’s determined comparativist? Are they irredeemably undisciplined or might they have discernible logics of comparison after all? What could justify the rubric of area studies as comparative method – and with what implications for rethinking how and why we compare? This chapter tackles these questions in three parts. In the first, it takes Asian studies as a sufficiently representative and capacious subcategory of area studies and critically reviews debates about the comparative qualities of political and social studies there. The second draws on the first to identify and challenge ontological and epistemological presuppositions of arguments discounting the inherently comparative qualities of area studies. The third makes a case for area studies not just as inherently comparative but also as a comparative method, one whose logics are unbound, deterritorializing, and found in translation. The chapter concludes not by calling for area studies to be reconciled with the disciplines but by comparing and celebrating their points of difference.