Social Networks in Comparative Perspective

In a sense, the study of comparative politics is the study of the role that context plays in structuring behavior. Institutional contexts, such as the nature of the electoral system or the existence of an independent judiciary, drive differences in electoral outcomes or in human rights across nations. Individual-level contextual factors such as norms, culture, or ethnic or religious identity can be determinative in understanding when social movements will flourish, and which cleavages will lead to political parties or to ethnic strife. Variation in context leads to variation in political outcomes and behavior across peoples and across nations, and provides comparative politics with its richness. Context also leads to dissent among scholars, as we engage in internecine methodological warfare over the best way to understand the complexity induced via the inclusion of contextual factors in our theories and in our data (Mahoney and Goertz 2006). Quantitative approaches tend to look broadly but shallowly, effectively averaging across complexity in order to make generalizations across cases. Qualitative approaches tend to look narrowly but deeply, yielding a weaker argument for generalization to other cases, but a stronger one for truly understanding the determinants of behavior in the case in question. Because practitioners of each methodologica