Beyond the Usual Suspects: New Research Themes in Comparative Public Policy

Abstract

The principal paradox of comparative public policy has remained over the years: there is no clear and broadly shared definition of the field. This article engages with the debate about what comparative public policy is from a distinctive perspective. Drawing from a systematic analysis of published research articles that maps out the usual comparative suspects, it reflects on what comparative public policy does and does not do in terms of comparative scope and country range, and the extent to which the limitations in the comparative scope matter for cumulative knowledge, theory building and the consolidation of the field. The article discusses different strategies to address the challenge of extending the range of comparative analysis.

Keywords:

• comparison
• case selection
• cumulative knowledge
• public policy
• theory building
• institutionalization

Notes

1. Other fields in political science experience similar debates about fuzzy boundaries. The discussion about bridging and integrating various research traditions has made the definition of subfields more fluid. The research community has organized within the discipline of political science, with institutional representation (IPSA Research Committee 30 in Comparative Public Policy), institutional venues in major international conferences and the ICPA-Forum, the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, and major international (EU-funded) research. While we acknowledge that the policy scholarship is multidisciplinary, we concentrate our analysis here on the field of public policy within political science.

2. With the exclusion of Regulation & Governance.

3. The analysis covers research articles only. Any other types of articles or contributions are excluded. The introduction and conclusion of symposia and special issues are also excluded when they could be identified as such from their titles. Articles proposing a temporal comparison are excluded from our analysis, critical case studies are included as long as they are situated in a comparative puzzle. A number of articles did not provide information about the number of countries and/or the countries themselves, and they are excluded from this analysis.

4. The countries were coded up to a maximum of 24 countries. The articles that include more than 24 countries were coded as large-N studies and the countries investigated in these do not appear in the country mapping. Articles including comparison with international organizations are excluded from the country mapping; articles including comparison with/about the European Union are excluded from the map.

5. This concentration of a limited number of countries in our sample of research articles is in line with qualitative and quantitative assessments of other subfields of the discipline at other times (see for instance: Urwin and Eliassen 1975; Daalder 1987; Page 1990; Rose 1991; Anckbar 1993; Hou et al. 2011).

6. Articles investigating England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales – separately or jointly – are coded as “UK” for the purpose of the mapping exercise. Other reconciliations include, for example, West and East Germany classified as Germany, Czechoslovakia classified as Czech Republic.

7. The point is not to contest the validity of studying the usual comparative suspects; most of these are heavyweights on a number of comparative dimensions. Post-industrialized states are likely to be more complex in their organizational and policy structures. There is no doubt that these are fascinating cases for comparative research. We are more interested in the imbalance in the country range.

8. The “Other” category includes articles with authors located at the European University Institute or Central European University, articles on the EU by scholars based outside Europe, articles including more than ten countries in the study and articles for which no information was provided about the authors’ location. Articles authored by scholars not affiliated to an academic institution have been removed from this analysis.

9. There are a number of variations across journals. The correspondence between authors’s countries and countries of study is, overall, the highest for Policy Studies Journal and the lowest for The Journal of European Public Policy. This variation is in line with the greater number of countries that are studied in the journal.

10. The abduction, torture and murder of Giulio Regeni, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who was studying trade unions in Egypt, will always remind us that social science fieldwork can be dangerous.

11. See for instance the discussion by Chau and Yu (2011) on the ethnocentric bias in the comparative study of social welfare.

12. These barriers add up to the increasing inequality of university infrastructures and research support.

13. Other disciplines such as economics, development studies and sociology have proved to be more inclined to study public policies outside the post-industrialized world. There is nevertheless a lack of shared attempts at cumulative knowledge and theory building which remain shaped by disciplinary lenses and practices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Social Sciences, Research Development Program.

Notes on contributors

Isabelle Engeli

Isabelle Engeli is Reader (Associate Professor) at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on party competition and policy change, regulatory dynamics in biotechnology, the politics of gendering policy attention and action and the comparative turn in policy research

Christine Rothmayr Allison

Christine Rothmayr Allison is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. Her two main fields of interest are comparative public policy, focusing on the fields of biotechnology, biomedicine and higher education, and courts and politics, in particular the impact of court decisions on public policy making in North America and Europe. Together with Isabelle Engeli, she recently edited a book on Comparative Policy Studies: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges (Palgrave 2014).

Éric Montpetit

Éric Montpetit is professor of political science and vice-dean of professors at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Université de Montréal. His current work is on the politics of scientific expertise and he is an active member of the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST). His most recent book, In Defense of Pluralism, was published by Cambridge University Press. A full list of his publications is available at ericmontpetit.ca.