Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences

Preface

The evolution of this volume is inseparable from my association with the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley—more particularly, my association with a number of scholars that were and are members of that Institute’s Group on Theory and Method in Comparative Studies. The Group was launched in 1965, as a kind of brainchild of David Apter, then Director of the Institute. Apter asked me to chair the Group, and I have done so ever since. Two subsequent Directors, Ernst Haas and Carl Rosberg, have given the Group their strongest support and nurturance. Cleo Stoker has managed its budget artfully, and the practical arrangements for the Group’s meetings have been handled at different times by Peggy Dechant, Frances Brown, and Mirtha Hernandez, all staff members of the Institute. The Group’s financial support derived from Ford Foundation funds granted to the Institute in 1965. I take this opportunity to thank those who have sustained the Group during its ten years of continuous existence.

During those years the Group had a membership of between ten and fifteen scholars from various social science departments at the University of California, Berkeley, perhaps two advanced graduate students as Research Apprentices, and occasionally a visitor from another university. We have met for dinner and discussion approximately every three weeks continuously for ten years. We have read and criticized one another’s work; we have invited visitors whose work in comparative studies has excited our attention; we have read and discussed critically many of the important studies in comparative social science that have been published during the past decade; and we have published Comparative Methods in Sociology,¹ which was organized and edited by my colleague and friend, the late Ivan Vallier.

One of the remarkable features of the Group is that, despite the duration and continuity of its membership, its individuals have steadfastly refused to adopt stereotyped and reiterated intellectual positions. Its discussions have been open and free-ranging, and forever taking unexpected turns. The morale of the Group has always been high, and, as a consequence, really hard-hitting criticism has been given and taken in an atmosphere of collegiality and friendship. And, most important, the Group has always insisted on observing the highest standards of scholarship in its critical work. It maintained this scholarly posture consistently through the turbulent 1960s and the sparse 1970s. For many of us it has been a haven for intellectual intercourse during a period when our academy was threatened by political and economic forces from many quarters.

It was in the context of the Group that many of the ideas in this book were invented, probed, refined, and solidified. Though the book is my responsibility, I feel that in many respects my colleagues in the Group have been collaborators. I shall not mention all those who have been members or visitors in the Group over the years, but I would like to thank those who discussed an earlier version of this book on the evening of January 23, 1975. These included Robert Bellah, Elbaki Hermassi, Leo Lowenthal, Arthur Stinchcombe (Sociology); Elizabeth Colson, Eugene Hammel (Anthropology); Reinhard Bendix, Carl Rosberg (Political Science); Martin Malia, Frederic Wakeman, Irving Scheiner (History); Albert Fishlow (Economics); Lawrence Dickey, John Zammito (graduate students, History); and Stephan Nowak (Sociology, University of Warsaw and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences). I should also mention Charles Y. Glock (Sociology), who was not present at that meeting, but from whose methodological wisdom I have profited over the years.

While the book thus emerged as a kind of cumulative product, the last phases of research and the drafting were done during 1973-1974, when I was away from Berkeley on sabbatical leave. I was sustained in inflation-ridden Europe that year both by sabbatical leave salary from the University of California and by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Incidental research expenses were carried by a small supplementary grant from the Institute of International Studies. About half of that year was spent in London, where I relied on the libraries of the British Museum and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I was an academic visitor. I should like to thank the staffs of both those libraries—and, during an earlier period, the staffs of the various libraries of the University of California, Berkeley—who responded with efficiency and cheer to my voracious demands for books and journals. Most of the actual drafting was executed over a period of months when my family and I were living in a villa named Ma Vie in Cagnes-sur-mer on the Côte d’Azur and in a villa in Maderno on the Lago di Garda in northern Italy. The year abroad was a glorious experience, and any notes of optimism to be found in the pages that follow should be discounted accordingly.

In November 1973, when my family and I were vacationing in Barcelona, thieves broke into our camper and absconded with a number of valuables, among them the only copy of my notes comparing the methodological positions of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. I experienced some pleasure at the thieves’ obviously cultivated intellectual tastes, but this did not match my consternation at the loss. In desperation I wrote to several graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Berkeley who had taken my course in sociological theory in which I had discussed the methodologies of the two scholars. Several students—Joyce Bird, Robert Dunn, Megali Sarfati Larsen, Maxine Raz, Lucy Sells, and Erik Wright—responded to the call and sent me xeroxed copies of their lecture notes. Pieced together, those notes seemed to make more sense and contain more insights than the original set that had disappeared into the Spanish underworld. I am certain that chapter three reads better as a result of the whole episode.

The crucial draft was completed more or less in isolation from professional colleagues, so I asked a number of people to give the manuscript a critical reading on my return to the U.S. The reactions of the members of the Group on Theory and Method in Comparative Studies suggested a number of needed revisions. In addition, the following people gave me benefit of their detailed reactions based on careful readings: James Beniger (University of California, Berkeley), Herbert Costner (University of Washington), Marshall Meyer (University of California, Riverside), Whitney Pope (University of Indiana, Bloomington), Frederic Pryor (Swarthmore College), and James Wood (University of California, Riverside). These readers’ comments were often penetrating. They led me to eliminate a number of inelegancies and bêtises, and in a number of instances spurred me to undertake a significant amount of revision. I thank them all, and add the customary disclaimer that they bear no responsibility for the final product.

NEIL J. SMELSER

Berkeley, California

Footnote

1 Ivan Vallier, ed., Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays on Trends and Applications (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

COMPARATIVE METHODS

IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

1

The Objectives of This Book

Human beings who organize into a society cannot remain indifferent to others who conduct their social life differently from their own. Why should this be so? The reasons are several. First, a group that has chosen a different pattern of morals and customs poses a threat to the home society; it suggests that their own morals and customs may not be right, sacred, or universal—as they are generally held to be. People usually respond to such a threat with hostility or disgust, which may in turn become an instrument used to punish or otherwise control those of their own kind who may be tempted to be different.¹ Or they may treat the threat as harmless but nonetheless alien or bizarre; this response, too, may be used for purposes of social control. Or they may invent some way to tolerate the threat of difference; that is, to trivialize it by incorporating it into a more inclusive universe of similarity. Alternatively, a foreign way of life may be an attraction as well, particularly for those who perceive the morals and customs of their own group as constraining or oppressive in some way. The worship of the noble savage or the life of pastoral simplicity is invariably accompanied—explicitly or implicitly—by a posture of alienation from contemporary society. The fascination with differences, in short, must be regarded as reflecting people’s ambivalence toward those forces of socialization and social control that work to produce sameness within the home society.

In this universal tendency to view differences in the mirror of domestic ambivalence lies another tendency—to distort those differences. Insofar as a group reacts to a different group in terms of its own preoccupations, it is not likely to perceive the way of life of the different group as that group experiences it. Or, to make the point in cognitive terms, insofar as a group insists on regarding the experiences of others mainly within its own categories of experience, it is likely to generate errors of understanding and prediction about the others, who invariably organize their experience and act on the basis of categories other than those of the home group.

Only recently in the history of human thought has this tendency for human groups to distort their perceptions of the different become widely appreciated. Correspondingly, serious efforts to overcome that distortion by inventing ways to understand differences in social life through categories that transcend a single group are also of relatively recent origin. Most of these efforts have been made in the social sciences, especially in anthropology, sociology, political science, and history. Such efforts have been labeled differently, such as comparative studies, cross-cultural analysis, and cross-national analysis. Whatever their label, however, they are a part of the common enterprise of describing, explaining, and developing theories about socio-cultural phenomena as they occur in social units (groups, tribes, societies, cultures) that are evidently dissimilar to one another.

My main objective in this book is to evaluate some of these efforts. I want to ask what kinds of problems arise in generating knowledge about dissimilar social units; how investigators have contrived to address these problems in their research; and how successful they have been in overcoming them.

I must qualify this statement of purpose immediately and in two ways. First, I do not regard comparative social science, or the study of dissimilar social units, as a species of inquiry independent from the remainder of social-scientific investigation. Comparative sociology, Durkheim observed, is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts.² Others have endorsed that view. Swanson, for example, remarked:

Thinking without comparisons is unthinkable. And, in the absence of comparisons, so is all scientific thought and all scientific research. No one should be surprised that comparisons, implicit and explicit, pervade the work of social scientists and have done so from the beginning: comparisons among roles, organizations, communities, institutions, societies, and cultures.³

To press this point further, I might note that even the act of applying general descriptive words to a situation—words such as densely populated or democratic—presupposes a universe of situations that are more or less populated or more or less democratic, and assumes that the situation being described lies somewhere in comparison with the others.

If that be true, then the analysis of phenomena in evidently dissimilar units (especially different societies or cultures) should have no methodological problems unique to itself. All methodological problems appear in the analysis of relatively similar units as well (for example, cities in the same region of the same country, white middle-class American males between the ages of 30 and 40), because such analysis involves comparing units that differ from one another in some respects. So the methodological problems facing comparativists are the same as those facing all social-scientific investigators. The main reasons for concentrating on evidently dissimilar units are that, on the positive side, these methodological problems—such as establishing equivalent measures, or controlling for third variables—stand out with great clarity when comparing dissimilar units, and that, on the negative side, the efforts to overcome them are likely to be plagued with more serious and transparent difficulties. On all other counts, however, the methodological observations ventured in this book are of general significance for the social sciences.

The second qualification is that my conception of methodology is broader than that which the term sometimes connotes. I conceive the term to refer to the critical evaluation of investigative activity in relation to the normative standards of scientific inquiry. Some of this evaluation concerns problems of research design, measurement, and other technical procedures—selecting appropriate indices to test given hypotheses, designing questionnaires for cross-national surveys, sampling, coding responses, and the like. I shall devote attention to these procedures as they are employed in studying evidently dissimilar social units. Methodological evaluation, however, should also focus on the conceptual aspects of scientific inquiry, because the adequacy of scientific research is affected by the philosophical assumptions and the theoretical frameworks employed by an investigator, and by the ways he moves between his body of conceptual presuppositions and his empirical research operations. Accordingly, I shall stress the methodology of theory construction—and touch on some issues in the philosophy of science—as these are related to the adequacy of efforts to generate scientific knowledge of a comparative character.

My main strategy in this book will be to examine critically a variety of comparative studies. Moreover, I shall move, by a series of stages, from considering illustrative studies that employ neither a self-conscious methodology nor sophisticated empirical measures or research techniques to considering illustrative studies that do both. I shall begin by summarizing and evaluating the comparative observations of Alexis de Tocqueville on the United States and France (chapter two). Tocqueville never wrote a methodology for his studies; he relied heavily on impressionistic data; and he did not develop a deliberately systematic theory to inform his comparative observations (though, as we shall see, his thought is quite well organized). Despite the relative informality of his work, however, we can identify certain definite methodological issues he faced because in fact he was attempting (though often implicitly) to generate comparative explanations. In addition, we can assess the ways he arrayed the data available to him to make his arguments.

At the next stage I shall examine the comparative research of two giants in the tradition of comparative studies, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Both these scholars issued ambitious methodological manifestos on the nature of sociological inquiry and the place of comparative work within it. In addition, both scholars conducted extensive comparative studies, which remain among the best, even though the quality of data and the research techniques available to them were inferior to those developed since their time. In chapter three I shall examine critically the programs for sociology enunciated by these two men, programs which are fundamentally opposed on several counts. As each turned to the exigencies of empirical investigation, however, each adapted his theoretical starting-points in several ways, and these adaptations brought the two scholars closer substantively and methodologically. In chapters four and five I shall examine many of their comparative empirical studies, identifying their research procedures, noting the problems each faced, assessing their attempted solutions to these problems, and noting the emerging patterns of similarities and differences between them.

In the remainder of the book I shall focus on comparative studies since the time of Durkheim and Weber. I do not intend to survey these studies historically, and I intend to illustrate rather than exhaust the different strategies and techniques that have been developed to improve comparative knowledge. I shall include, however, ample reference to the cross-cultural tradition as it has developed in anthropology over several decades; to the cross-national tradition as it has burgeoned in political science and sociology more recently; and to the continuing comparative efforts to study the process of modernization in its economic, political, and social aspects. I shall make some reference to the efforts of psychologists who study personality and conduct experiments on a cross-cultural basis. These several traditions of research have grown amid—indeed, have been made possible by—the improvement of data production, storage, and retrieval; the development of sophisticated inference procedures; and the increase in methodological and theoretical self-consciousness on the part of investigators. Chapters six and seven, then, will be a critical evaluation of portions of recent comparative research. Chapter six will concern methodological issues that arise in classifying, describing, and measuring empirical phenomena in evidently dissimilar social units. Chapter seven will concern methodological issues that arise in attempting to establish associations and causal relations in comparative studies, and to organize these into theoretical models that apply to dissimilar units.

I shall move, then, from the less systematic to the more systematic as the book develops. As the analysis proceeds, it will be possible to discern an extraordinary diversity of substantive concerns in comparative studies—how to explain variations in the social structure of grandparenthood, how to measure and account for cross-cultural differences in mental health, how to account for the rise and consolidation of democratic political systems, how to account for national differences in response to stressful situations, to name a few. Moreover, it will be possible to discern a bewildering array of specific strategies and techniques that have been developed to improve the quality of comparative analysis. Despite this diversity in substance, strategy, and technique, the methodological principles governing comparative investigation will turn out to be very few in number. More particularly, it will be possible to discern a striking continuity among all the comparative studies reviewed in this book—both classical and modern. This continuity stems from the fundamental fact that all the theorists and empirical investigators we shall examine were attempting to gain control over and manipulate various causal conditions in social life, and thus to establish a case for one or another selected condition. The specific methods of gaining control will be shown to vary greatly in type, in effectiveness, and in scientific utility, but all the methods to be studied can be understood—and, indeed, compared with one another—as efforts to explain social phenomena by establishing controls over conditions and causes of variations in those phenomena.

Footnotes

1 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1949), bk. 1, ch. 2. This observation is not different from Durkheim’s explanation of society’s response to crime and related forms of deviance.

2 Durkheim, The Division of Labor, p. 139.

3 Guy E. Swanson, Frameworks for Comparative Research: Structural Anthropology and the Theory of Action, in Ivan Vallier, ed., Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays on Trends and Applications (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 145.

2

Alexis de Tocqueville as Comparative Analyst

Alexis de Tocqueville has been widely hailed and extensively analyzed as a perceptive and brilliant commentator on American society;¹ as a profound prophet;² as a theorist of mass society;³ as an original thinker on the history and sociology of revolutions;⁴ and, to a lesser extent, as a political figure involved in and around the Revolution of 1848 in France.⁵ However, his work has not been extensively analyzed from the standpoint of comparative analysis,⁶ even though his comparative emphasis is widely appreciated.

In undertaking such an analysis, I intend to treat Tocqueville’s two classic works—Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution—as a single study in comparative sociological explanation. At first glance this may seem unjustified, because the publication of the two works was separated by more than 20 years, and because the former is primarily an attempt to describe, account for, and examine the consequences of the conditions of social equality in an entire nation; and the latter is an attempt to account for the rise, development, and consequences of a monumental historical event. Study of the works reveals, however, that in both of them Tocqueville was preoccupied with a set of intellectual issues concerning equality and inequality, freedom and despotism, and political stability and instability. Furthermore, the works constitute something of a double-mirror; Tocqueville’s analysis of the condition of America is continually informed by his diagnosis of French society, and vice versa.⁷ And finally, as I hope to demonstrate, a single perspective on social structure and social change informs his insights about each nation and renders the two nations comparable.

The chapter will be divided into three sections. In the first I shall outline Tocqueville’s view of Western social structure—with special reference to equality—and its historical development. In the second I shall outline his account of different conditions of equality and his account of the differences between the United States and France. And in the third section I shall identify his comparative strategies—the kinds of empirical data and logical argumentation he used to buttress his case.

Tocqueville’s General Perspective on

Society and Change

It is possible to discern in Tocqueville’s work an overriding preoccupation with a single issue, without reference to which most of his observations or insights cannot be appreciated. This issue is social equality versus social inequality.

In considering this issue, moreover, Tocqueville tended to think of two extreme ways of structuring equality in society—the aristocratic, in which equality was minimized, and the democratic, in which it was maximized. And though Tocqueville did not develop anything like a methodology of the ideal type, his use of the notions of aristocracy and democracy throughout his work suggests that they are, indeed, abstract concepts to which no empirical instance corresponds perfectly, but to which different degrees of historical approximation may be found.⁸

Tocqueville looked back to 11th-century France to find an approximation of the pure case of a society organized according to aristocratic values: the territory was divided among a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man; and landed property was the sole source of power.⁹ While unequal from the standpoint of distribution of wealth and power, France and other societies in medieval Europe were nonetheless regulated by a web of customs and understandings that inhibited the development of despotism.

There was a time in Europe when the laws and the consent of the people had invested princes with almost unlimited authority, but they scarcely ever availed themselves of it. I do not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, of the authority of high courts of justice, of corporations and their chartered rights, or of provincial privileges, which served to break the blows of sovereign authority and keep up a spirit of resistance in the nation. Independently of these political institutions, which, however opposed they might be to personal liberty, served to keep alive the love of freedom in the mind and which may be esteemed useful in this respect, the manners and opinions of the nation confined the royal authority within barriers that were not less powerful because less conspicuous. Religion, the affections of the people, the benevolence of the prince, the sense of honor, family pride, provincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion limited the power of kings and restrained their authority within an invisible circle. The constitution of nations was despotic at that time, but their customs were free. Princes had the right, but they had neither the means nor the desire of doing whatever they pleased.¹⁰

For an approximation of the pure case of democratic society, Tocqueville looked toward the United States of America. Writing in 1835, he saw America as the nation where the social evolution toward equality seems to have nearly reached its natural limits.¹¹ In direct contrast to aristocratic society, its laws of inheritance call for equal partition of property, which makes for a constant tendency [for property] to diminish and . . . in the end be completely dispersed.¹² Tocqueville commented on Americans’ love of money, but added that wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it.¹³

Tocqueville argued that democratic societies are likely to become despotic as men turn away from public affairs, as government becomes more centralized, and as public opinion develops into a tyranny of the majority. Yet Tocqueville found in America a number of social forces that allow a democratic people to remain free.¹⁴ He singled out various accidental factors contributing to this effect, such as the absence of hostile neighboring powers,¹⁵ but he emphasized laws and customs as the most important forces. Among the laws, he identified the principle of federal union, the institutionalization of townships, and the judicial system; and among the customs he stressed the presence of a common religion that encourages liberty, the separation of church and state, a common language, and a high level of education.¹⁶ Comparing the impact of laws and customs, he found the latter more decisive.¹⁷ He also regarded the freedom of the press and the presence of voluntary political associations as important mechanisms to forestall the development of despotism.¹⁸

Nothing stands out more clearly in Tocqueville’s work than his conviction of the inexorability of the Western historical transition from aristocracy to democracy, from inequality to equality. In 1832 he wrote that the development of the principle of equality is a providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.¹⁹ Writing in 1848, he professed not to be surprised at the events of the recent revolution in France, because of his long awareness of the universality and irresistability of the advance of the principle of equality.²⁰ And in 1856 he wrote that all our contemporaries are driven on by a force that we may hope to regulate or curb, but cannot overcome, and it is a force impelling them, sometimes gently, sometimes at headlong speed, to the destruction of aristocracy.²¹

Furthermore, Tocqueville found many of the roots of despotism, tyranny, and instability in the transition between aristocracy and democracy. If any single proposition dominates his interpretation of the cause of the French Revolution and its excesses, it is this: France had historical origins similar to many other European—and indeed American—societies. But in the 18th century France had experienced certain changes that had partially destroyed aristocratic society and partially advanced the principle of equality. It was this unstable mixture of the two principles that made for the dissatisfaction, selfishness and self-seeking, conflict, despotism, and diminished national morale that culminated in the revolutionary convulsion late in the century.²² One of the advantages that America possessed, moreover, was that it was able to start afresh, to establish a democracy without having to go through the pains of destroying an aristocracy. [America] is reaping the fruits of the democratic revolution which we are undergoing, without having had the revolution itself.²³

Two fundamental distinctions thus inform Tocqueville’s comparative work. The first is the distinction between aristocracy and democracy; the second is between either of these conditions, institutionalized consistently, and the social condition built on a mixture of both. The comparison between 18th-century France and 19th-century America, then, becomes one of a society that had proceeded part way along the transition from aristocratic to democratic, with one that had been born democratic, as it were, and manifested the characteristics of a democratic system in relatively pure form. Within this kind of comparison, furthermore, a number of specific questions emerged: By what historical process is aristocratic society eroded by the principles of equality? How does this contrast with the historical development of the principle of equality de novo?²⁴ What consequences for ideas and social outlook are generated by these two conditions of society?²⁵ What are the political consequences that follow from these ideas, particularly with respect to political revolution and the development of despotism?²⁶

Tocqueville’s Explanation of the

Differences Between France and

America

France versus America: equality obtained at the cost of aristocracy versus pure equality

Two historical trends were especially powerful in undermining the principle of aristocracy in 18th-century France, according to Tocqueville: the centralization and paternalization of government and the partial advance of certain social classes in French society toward equality.

Tocqueville devoted much of the early part of his work on the ancien régime to describing the extensive centralization of powers in the government in Paris.

We find a single central power located at the heart of the kingdom and controlling public administration throughout the country; a single Minister of State in charge of almost all the internal affairs of the country; in each province a single representative of government supervising every detail of the administration; no secondary administrative bodies authorized to take action on their own initiative; and, finally, exceptional courts for the trial of cases involving the administration or any of its officers.²⁷

Why had this centralization taken place? Tocqueville noted simply that the government merely yielded to the instinctive desire of every government to gather all the reins of power into its own hands.²⁸

Far as these tendencies proceeded, they had not gone all the way. Local assemblies still existed, though they had no real power;²⁹ those who had been previously in the ruling classes still possessed their ranks and titles, but all effective authority was gradually withdrawn from them.³⁰ The old aristocratic order was in a state of partial eclipse.

Other groups had also experienced changes in their social condition, but unlike the aristocracy—which was being edged out of its former position of influence—they had enjoyed partial advances. The bourgeois class had improved its situation with respect to wealth, education, and style of life, but it had failed to gain access to various feudal rights.³¹ The peasants owned more land than in times past and had been freed from the harshness of government and landlords, but were still subjected to certain traditional duties and taxes. In addition, in an age of industrial progress [the peasants] had no share in it; in a social order famed for its enlightenment they remained backward and uneducated.³²

Why should these changes have been unsettling to all these groups? To answer this question Tocqueville invoked—though only implicitly—a version of the social-psychological principle we now refer to as relative deprivation. The social changes experienced in 18th-century France produced a number of groups which were losing in some respects while retaining or gaining in others. For Tocqueville these inconsistencies were psychologically more unsettling than the social arrangements of aristocratic feudalism, for under that system men might have been worse off in some absolute sense, but their access to the good things in life was organized according to a consistent principle. On the basis of this assumption, Tocqueville