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Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (with Nicholas Rush Smith). Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Qualitative comparative methods – and specifically controlled qualitative comparisons – are central to the study of politics. They are not the only kind of comparison, though, that can help us better understand political processes and outcomes. Yet there are few guides for how to conduct non-controlled comparative research. This volume brings together chapters from more than a dozen leading methods scholars from across the discipline of political science, including positivist and interpretivist scholars, qualitative methodologists, mixed-methods researchers, ethnographers, historians, and statisticians. Their work revolutionizes qualitative research design by diversifying the repertoire of comparative methods available to students of politics, offering readers clear suggestions for what kinds of comparisons might be possible, why they are useful, and how to execute them. By systematically thinking through how we engage in qualitative comparisons and the kinds of insights those comparisons produce, these collected essays create new possibilities to advance what we know about politics.
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Reviews
'What a refreshing read this volume is. At a time when dominant ways of doing things are suddenly in question, this is a sophisticated wake-up call to the field of political science to study the world differently. The many rich contributions and Simmons' and Smith's masterful elucidation of them remind us that our purpose is to understand the world, not perpetuate the ways in which it is understood. Bravo to the editors and contributors for opening our eyes.' Katherine Cramer - University of Wisconsin-Madison 'The world gives us almost as many ways to compare and reasons to compare as places to compare. Rethinking Comparison embraces and even expands the existing pluralism of comparative approaches in political science. Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith assemble a brilliant and eclectic cast of characters to think anew about all the things we can do – including some things we should consider doing very differently – when we compare.' Dan Slater - University of Michigan 'This path-breaking volume shows scholars how to think and work 'outside the box' of Mill's logic of controlled comparison of nation-states, regions and organizations toward generative comparison of political processes, practices, meanings, and concepts. In chapter after chapter, the authors develop new conceptions of comparison that yield fundamental insights – new questions, concepts, categories, ways of viewing the world – not available under narrow conceptions of the comparative method.' Elisabeth Jean Wood - Yale University |
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Reviews"Too often, in the study of contention, the material and the cultural have been seen as incompatible forms of explanation. In this empirically rich, theoretically important book, Simmons shows how the material and ideational were fused to catalyze popular protests over water in Cochabamba and rising corn prices in Mexico. In doing so, she has made it much harder for scholars of contention to ignore the causal force of grievances or to depict material threats in strictly economic terms."
Douglas McAdam, Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Stanford University "In Meaningful Resistance, Erica Simmons shows how cultural and symbolic meanings related to subsistence goods shape patterns of social resistance to market liberalization. Drawing from rich ethnographic research on social protests around water privatization in Bolivia and corn prices in Mexico, Simmons skilfully weaves together material grievances and cultural meanings to explain the origins and dynamics of protest mobilization. This book breaks new ground in its theoretical integration of cultural and structural approaches to the study of social movements, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how material grievances become politicized. This is an important book that deserves to be widely read." Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University What a wonderful book! In analyzing protests in light of “the content of a movement’s claims,” Simmons poses a theoretical rallying cry to move past arguments that grievances are constant and therefore do not play a core explanatory role in explaining protest; and that grievances are solely material. Meaning matters. In this theoretically powerful and empirically rich political ethnography of the water wars in Bolivia and the corn protests in Mexico, Simmons highlights that water and corn are culturally imbued with both material concerns and community meaning, without which one cannot understand or explain the cyclicality of protests that emerge in these two cases. The book will compel scholars to rethink what grievances are, how they are constituted, when they are tapped, and how people do so in light of market-driven threats to subsistence resources. By addressing constitutive and causal processes, Simmons has written a beautiful, landmark book about contentious politics that reveals how “the politics of the everyday intersect with and shape the politics of the extraordinary.” Deborah J. Yashar, Princeton University Not since Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson has a scholar so convincingly shown the connection between material life and popular politics. Simmons’ examination of protests against neo-liberal attempts to privatize and utterly commodify water and maize is astute, subtle, and carefully reasoned. A model of theoretically informed comparative analysis. James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University |