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Comparative Historical Analysis

Course Dates and Times

Monday 17 – Friday 21 February 2019, 09:00–12:30
15 hours over five days

Markus Kreuzer

markus.kreuzer@villanova.edu

Institution:

Comparative historical analysis (CHA) is an umbrella term covering the work of a wide range of scholars investigating macro-historical questions and thus placing time at the centre of their social inquiry.

This course teaches you how to use time in your analysis. It covers four elements:

It differentiates CHA from experimental, variance-based and other social science approaches that background time.
It differentiates two distinct notions of time within CHA. Some CHA scholars focus more on elements of physical time (duration, tempo, timing, sequences) while others concentrate on historical time (focus on events, concepts and periodisations to analyse how the past is qualitatively different from the present).
It discusses the methodological contributions of three variants of CHA:
a) macro-causal analysis (time-spotting and theorising)
b) historical/eventful analysis (concept elucidation, periodisation, qualitative changes)
c) longue durée analysis (time series, trend analysis, natural experiments).
It asks students to complete a small final project.

Tasks for ECTS credits

2 credits (pass/fail grade). Attend at least 90% of course hours, participate fully in in-class activities, and carry out the necessary reading and/or other work prior to, and after, class.

3 credits (to be graded) As above, plus complete short daily assignments to assess the mastery of material covered in the readings or in class.

4 credits (to be graded) As above, plus complete a short written assignment requiring integration of material covered during earlier classes. Assignments will be discussed in the final class.

Instructor Bio

Markus Kreuzer is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He has worked on the origins of European and post-communist party systems, qualitative methodology and comparative historical analysis.

He teaches a module on comparative historical analysis at the yearly Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research hosted by Syracuse University. Markus is the author of various articles, and the following books:

Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy – France and Germany 1870–1939 (Michigan 2001)
The Grammar of Time: Using Comparative Historical Analysis to Study the Past (Cambridge, forthcoming)

Why CHA Is Exciting and Relevant

Comparative historical analysis is exciting because it appeals to our intrinsic fascination with history, grapples with the continued emergence of modernity, and is central for understanding important theoretical debates in political science.

CHA traces its lineage back to nineteenth-century giants like Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Hintze, who sought to understand the emergence of the four hallmarks of modernity: capitalist market economy, bureaucratic states, democratic governments, and globally interdependent order. These four themes remain central today and continue to produce some of the most widely cited works in political science. These works are exciting for four reasons:

They are problem-driven and place contemporary issues in a historical context to elucidate more fully cross-national differences.
They are interdisciplinary and invite a dialogue across disciplines, methodologies and theoretical perspectives.
They are exploratory and seek to update existing explanations. They consequently maintain a more even balance between theorising and causal inference techniques.
They deal with time, which is one of the least explored dimensions in political science and poses some of the most challenging ontological problems for established methodologies.

CHA and the Centrality of Time

What makes CHA distinct is its placement of time at the centre of social inquiry. It stipulates that cross-national variations are frequently the result of differences in historical trajectories, sequences in which events unfold, as well as their timing and tempo.

Paul Pierson slyly remarked that ignoring time in social inquiry produces results as unsatisfactory as cooking a meal without paying attention to the sequencing of adding ingredients and the duration of cooking time. Time, however, is complex; it is not a singular thing with well-established properties that fit easily into the more established frequentist and experimentalist methodologies. CHA consequently is less defined by specific, highly formalised techniques, that characterise more traditional methodologies, and more by a repertoire of analytical skills.

This course is built around five such skills that are necessary to effectively analyse time: time spotting, time differentiation, periodising historical time, configuring natural time, and temporal causal mechanisms.

Time Spotting Theories vary greatly in their ontological presuppositions and hence the degree to which they background or foreground time. The ability to discern those ontological presuppositions is a crucial first step to spot time and with it a wide range of temporal confounders. Identifying such confounders, in turn, is crucial for updating existing theories.
Differentiating Time CHA is built around two distinct notions of time: natural and historical time. Natural time focuses on the more objective, clock-like dimension of time like duration, tempo, timing or sequencing. Historical time, in turn, compares historical contexts to discern qualitative changes over time. The ability to differentiate these two notions of time is crucial to understand the ways different CHA scholars configure them in their analysis.
Periodising Historical time concentrates on events with distinct dates. CHA lumps those events into broader temporal categories, called periods, according to continuities and discontinuities among those events. Periods thus permit us to compare historical contexts and make inferences about qualitative changes that occurred between them.
Trend Analysis Time series orders measurements chronologically and generates trends. CHA employs a distinct vocabulary to analyse such trends and to assess what sort of historical changes they do and do not track.
Explaining Time Using historical and natural time serves to properly describe historical processes and cross-sectional temporal dynamics that ultimately also need to be explained. CHA employs a wide range of temporal causal mechanisms to explain macro-historical outcomes.

Applying Time The very modular nature of CHA requires an understanding of how the prior five analytical skills can be combined and applied to produce analytically clear and causally robust explanations.

You should be familiar with one or more of the historically informed social science literatures, such as democratisation, origins of the state, historical sociology, diplomatic history, globalisation, American political development, historical institutionalism, varieties of capitalism.

Day	Topic	Details
Day 2	2.1. Theory & Time 2.2. Elements of Time	*Differentiating Time* For centuries, people believed that history followed a pattern of God-ordained, repeating cycles. Analogously, large segments of social science reduce history to a cycle of equilibria and disequilibria. And most experimental-based form of analysis exogenised time altogether. The ability to see time and differentiate between physical and historical versions of time, therefore, is an acquired skill that requires specific training. It furthermore is crucial for understanding how CHA differs from other methodologies and for differentiating the three distinct forms of CHA that Skocpol and Somers identified in their influential article.
Day 1	1.1. What Makes CHA Exciting? 1.2. Dimensions of CHA	Relevance and Dimensions of CHA We begin by reviewing CHA’s distinguished scholarly lineage and placing its contemporary contributions in a long-term intellectual context. This context elucidates the two key dimensions of CHA. First, the continuity of key themes, like the transformation of markets, social structures, states, political regimes, or international order that have and continue to reshape the broader context within which the more mundane, day-to-day politics unfolds. Second, each of these themes are deeply historical because they involve processes of change that make the present qualitatively different from but also highly interdependent with the past. Studying these themes from a historical perspective therefore is theoretically highly relevant.
Day 3	3.1. Macro-Causal Analysis 3.2. Time Spotting and Theorising	*Macro-Causal Analysis* Macro-causal analysis uses both physical and historical time as heuristics to elongate the time horizon of what Paul Pierson called short/short explanations. It employs a variety of time spotting strategies to explore temporal confounders that existing short/short explanations background. It uses those confounders to update existing theories.
Day 4	4.1. Historical Analysis 4.2. Periodising & Concept Elucidation	*Historical Analysis* Historical analysis focuses on events that have specific dates and arrays those events into chronologies. These chronologies become the starting point from comparing historical contexts to figure out how the past is different from the present and at what particular moments that past underwent significant qualitative changes. Historical analysis employs periodisation schemes to break the past into continuities and discontinuities. It also uses events to evaluate the temporal validity of concepts.
Day 5	5.1. Deep History 5.2. Student Projects	*Deep History* Deep history is grounded in economic history, which regularly uses time series to analyse long-term, secular trends. We explore the terminology used in time series and evaluate how it is and is not able to track historical changes. *Student Projects* CHA is very modular and thus requires an understanding of how its various building blocks can be combined. You will be asked to apply the elements of CHA by selecting one of these three options: Take an existing project (i.e. research paper, dissertation prospectus) and recast it in more explicit CHA terms. Propose or select from a list of CHA articles and explicate how the scholars configured the elements of CHA. Propose or select from a list of non-CHA articles and explicate how they background time and what implications such backgrounding has for the validity of your findings.

Day	Readings
Day 1	1.1. Jørgen Møller State Formation, Regime Change and Economic Development (New York: Routledge, 2017): 12–28 1.2. Matthew Lange Comparative Historical Methods (London: Sage, 2013): 22–39 1.3. Paul Pierson. 2004 Politics in Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press): 1–10. (Don't read 10–17 yet) 1.3. William Sewell. 2005 Logics of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 1–18
Day 2	2.1. Skocpol, Theda, and Margaret Somers. 1980 The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(2): 174–197 2.2. Aminzade, R. (1992) Historical Sociology and Time Sociological Methods and Research, 20(4), 456–480
Day 3	3.1. Jørgen Møller State Formation, Regime Change and Economic Development (New York: Routledge, 2017): 98–106 [Skocpol], 107-21 [State Formation] 3.2. Pierson, P. (2003) Big, Slow-Moving and Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics In J. Mahoney & D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 177–207 3.3. Falleti, T. G., & Mahoney, J. (2015) The Comparative Sequential Method In J. E. Mahoney & K. Thelen (Eds.), Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis: Resilience, Diversity, and Change Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 211–25 (skip 225 to 39)
Day 4	4.1. Capoccia, G., & Ziblatt, D. (2010) The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies Comparative Political Studies, 43(8–9), 931–68
Day 5	5.2. No readings. Final Projects Due

Software Requirements

Hardware Requirements

Literature

No additional

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