What is Comparative Social Change? Part I: The Comparative-Historical Method
University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin decided to give me a Master of Science degree in Comparative Social Change, so here let me sketch it out.
People often talk about how seldom they use their degrees. Programmers have philosophy degrees, cooks have electrical engineering degrees, cab drivers the world over have doctorates. It’s true that much of the work done in the world is irrelevant to the more specific educations people may have received at the university level. However, it should be said that most people with a degree in a subject can tell you in general what that subject is.
In a lot of graduate schools now, and I especially noticed this when I applied to European programs from my undergraduate home base in San Diego, have specialized master’s degrees that are quite a bit more tailored and specific. While doctorates are by their nature highly tailored, a subject that does not have a master-level licensure - marriage and family therapy, social work, divinity do have higher degrees but they are not necessary usually for obtaining some sort of related credential - can be a fairly general step towards ultimately a doctoral degree. In a lot of places they won’t even give you a master’s if you’re not at least planning on going further. The tailored master’s is an attempt to take subjects like sociology, politics, and history and make it seem like someone has studied what’s on the label enough that they can have a self-standing expertise.
So I have a degree from two universities in Dublin, Ireland, jointly awarding a MSc in Comparative Social Change. This is a very new degree, in 2017 when I entered I was the second cohort. While comparative method degrees exist in many places (comparative literature is ancient as a discipline), this degree with capitalized words may make you think I have arcane knowledge of Comparative Social Change.
I don’t, but also I am qualified to the point where I can try to define what it is and maybe through that, become an expert in it. Sometimes you have to create your own job from scratch, yeah?
The Comparative-Historical Method
Methods of using comparison at some scale and level of detail is ubiquitous. Since 2021, a search for “comparative study” in Google Scholar yields 528,000 results. To really understand something we have to have benchmarks and methods of similarity and difference. Thus the case study is fundamental to many disciplines but had significant limitations- some disciplines rely on them heavily (practical medicine, whatever they teach people at $110,000/year MBA programs).
My introduction to comparative study in a specific way was when I took an upper-level methods elective in undergrad for the comparative-historical method. While sociology since its inception has used methods both comparative and historical (Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is one that subverts a lot of people’s stereotypes about him in terms of largely being full of tables of industrial data), a lot of people would say its archetype is Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979).1 Coming at a key point in social history, at the end of the post-war boom period and the beginnings of neoliberalism under Jimmy Carter, and the election of Thatcher in that year, Skocpol’s work is revelatory because it does stuff you assume large scale statistical work does, but does it using a much less rigidly mathematical approach.
In terms of subjects of comparison, a relatively small number are selected- three is very common and in Skocpol’s work, five is possibly where it stops becoming useful. Compared to a lot of political science research, which might be medium-N (say, just short of 30 countries in the European Union) or large-N which it shares with psychology, which can be thousands of subjects and orders of magnitude more distinct values to correlate and control. It bridges the case study and many types of ethnography; ethnography can have a small-N focus, for instance multiple social or demographic groups in a city or region, or multi-site ethnography though that is prohibitively expensive and I’ve rarely seen it done, especially at the doctoral level.
The two traits I’d say define the comparative-historical method compared to say, history of a more traditional type, and large-N research with levels of significance, is:
The richness of exploration of each case, which seeks to avoid issues of correlation without any sort of theoretical explanation (is it an incomplete understanding? is it somewhat extraordinary noise?).
Using techniques of comparison, contrast, and absence, many different factors and variables are placed in a causal sequence, trying to be as exhaustive as possible. The critique (which I’ll bring up at the end) is that quantitative researchers with dozens or hundreds of data points per subject, will say that certain simplifications invalidate the method being causal.
The C-H method has been immensely influential in the last half-century of sociological research. As Lange (2012) states, in the intro methods text I read for this class, though the number of scholars of this method is very small, is has an outsized number of high prizes by the American Sociological Association (ASA) and other bodies.2 I think because doing the method properly, rather than as a supplement in a more mixed-methods approach, is difficult. Indeed, I think it is of limited use if not committed to in its tedium and rigor.
Limitations
Skocpol’s work does show some important practical limitations in the discipline- she did not read Mandarin and with the Cultural Revolution still wrapping up, a lot of important information was unavailable in translation and there was not nearly the historiography that helps contemporary scholars discuss China from about 1890 to the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. With regards to Russia, a lot of key information only became widely circulated with the fall of USSR a decade later. This is the issue of doing any kind of work with very recent history, but in a small-N model, having one or two cases that may be systematically incomplete raises the question of how much causal inference you can draw. The comparative-historical method works by being as exhaustive as possible- if there is a sequence of factors in time, and these dozens of factors can be compared in cases of similarity and contrast, the insight is quite strong. Academia is a process of progressive work, and so much work on modern revolutions is comparative-historical in some way (for instance, the work of Charles Tilly around this same period).
Looking Towards Part II
So I’ve outlined what I think is the most important component of sociology and the use of a comparative framework towards understanding comparative social change. To be fair, comparative social change also uses large-scale surveys and medium-N comparisons (like OECD nations). However, looking ahead, here are some points I think makes CSC distinct from simply comparative methods about social change among many topics.
CSC tends to use archetypes to reduce the points of comparison. For instance, instead of taking about every advanced economy’s welfare state, one might choose the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and Japan because they represent, in general, the approaches that can be meaningfully differentiated. This involves justifying reducing cases of analysis, but also creates richness and reduces noise between functionally very similar situations. It also reduces the amount of specialist knowledge needed, and avoids things like Skocpol encountered with the availability of high-quality sources about each case.
CSC is thoroughly modern in outlook. Compared to world systems theory forwarded by Immanuel Wallerstein and others, which tend to look at the entire history of a truly global society around 1500 CE and the rise of post-feudal economic models3, CSC rarely includes as a substantial portion anything that is prior to the Industrial Revolution- I would say in most elements prior to the failed revolutions of 1848 are best explored via other methods. While in some sense I would say much of CSC is post-World War II, the beginning of the welfare state in the decades before and after World War I is important, as well as the origins of nationalism (which I covered here).
CSC is at least on its surface international and avoids centrality of major sociological centers. CSC is attempting to counter the hegemony of American and British attitudes about history and what is “constructive” social change. This is challenged by the general English-language dominance, difficulty getting deep enough information from the Global South to match up with standardized surveys and data sets for advanced economies. CSC could benefit from being more distinctly post-colonial.
CSC is a lens or perspective rather than a method. In the short time the CSC program in Ireland has existed, people have done dissertations of case studies, international statistical analysis, content analysis, intra- and -international, and incorporated insight from ethnic studies, religious studies, political science, and various schools of economics. This is probably why it is slippery and why there is not much authoritative literature- knowing what CSC is has only some link to being able to do it well.
See you in Part II.
Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge University Press.
Lange, M. (2012). Comparative-historical methods. Sage.
WALLERSTEIN, I. (1974). The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(4), 387-415.