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A first observation is that the field of comparative politics increasingly seems to have been shying away from the attempt to understand the sources of political phenomena (politics as the dependent variable), including social power, and has increasingly focused on outputs and outcomes of political processes and political institutions (politics exclusively as an independent variable). However, some crucial issues seem to call for a rehabilitation of approaches rooted in political sociology.
Second, the subdiscipline has been focusing more on the question why political phenomena differ between units of analysis rather than on the question of the similarity of political experiences. This is a result of the much applauded professionalization of the subdiscipline, but - important as it may be to phrase research questions in terms of variation - many fascinating and relevant research issues concern questions of similarity. The methodological stress on 'variation' now seems to be such that posing issues of similarity have become illegitimate.
Finally, the field has difficulties defending itself against the reproach that - in the wake of a host of developments ending with '-ization' - its core concepts (such as 'country', 'state' or 'national political system') have lost their theoretical and empirical usefulness as units of comparative analysis. Prudence is called for in how matters of conceptual improvement and transformation are decided. Too often empirical verification of the '-ization' developments is lacking and too often conceptual 'innovations' are proposed in ignorance of the history of approaches and concepts in the field. There is a danger of reinventing poorer versions of the wheel time and again.
THE DISAPPEARING SOURCES OF POLITICS AND THE INSTITUTIONALIST PARADIGM
Comparative politics seems to have been shying away further and further from the study of the sources of political phenomena and has increasingly focused on the 'outputs, or even simply the outcomes of political processes and political institutions, and hence the attention to politics as an independent rather than a dependent variable' (Mair, 1996: 321).
Moreover, around the mid-1980s the field was captured by the neo-institutionalist revolution. By the mid-1990s the authoritative statement on the discipline by Goodin and Klingemann (1996a) signalled how far the institutionalist colonization had already proceeded. In the handbook they edited, politics was defined as the constrained use of social power, and...