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Abstract
This article reflects on the design and organization of cross-national comparative research in social and public policy, based in our own experience of leading and taking part in projects of this kind. We acknowledge recent criticism of comparison conceived as the measurement of similarity and difference between discrete national units, and note the political as well as methodological difficulties such work entails. We describe our attempts to overcome them, calling for both (1) a critical theory of comparison and (2) a critical practice of comparison. We outline ways of working based on the collective interrogation of case studies, and conclude by formalizing an approach to comparison conceived not as cross-national experiment but as international encounter.
Acknowledgments
Eric Mangez was Co-Director and Richard Freeman a team leader in the consortium project KNOWandPOL, funded by the European Commission 2006–2011 under its Sixth Framework Programme (contract number 028848-2). The views set out here are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
Notes
1. Paper dated 21 February 2007.
2. In the KNOWandPOL project, we tried to translate these concerns into the very organization of the project through shared leadership, polycentric decision-making processes, iterative collaboration in writing the project specifications and so on.
3. There are obvious parallels with the ways of working adopted by certain international conferences: the European Consortium for Political Research, for example, hosts annual Joint Sessions of Workshops, in which participants join a panel of 12–15 for the duration of the meeting, each giving a paper and each taking part in the discussion of every other.
4. The position of each actor against the other is based on a so-called ‘force-based’ algorithm: nodes that interact with each other are put close together, whereas those that don't are pulled apart. The different coloring indicates two clusters based on policy sectors that the software perceives in the data.