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Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis. Edited by Mahoney James and Thelen Kathleen . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2015. 324p. $94.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.
Special Book Review Section: Methodology
This volume is a successor to James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer's 2003 Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, with entirely new content. Like its predecessor, the book focuses on the substantive, theoretical, and methodological contributions of comparative historical analysis (CHA). Mahoney and Thelen define CHA as the study of large scale, complex, important, and enduring outcomes through deep case-based research that pays attention to processes and the temporal dimension of politics. They argue that these attributes enable CHA to improve our understanding of politics in ways that complement statistical, experimental, and quasi-experimental approaches.
In particular, the editors argue that CHA counteracts three dangers evident in the recent focus on social science experiments (pp. 8-11). First, CHA addresses important issues that are ethically or financially difficult to study in experiments. Second, CHA's focus on slow-moving structures balances the focus in experiments on micro factors like information that are easily manipulated. Third, CHA focuses on theory-generation as well as theory testing.
One limitation of the introduction and of several other chapters is that they over-emphasize forms of path dependence that involve increasing returns and institutional lock-in. This neglects self-eroding processes and reactive sequences through which institutions are weakened or even reversed, which Mahoney and Tulia Faletti discuss in a later chapter (pp. 220-223).
The substantive section of the book includes chapters by Stephan Haggard on the developmental state literature, Jane Gingrich on the research program that resulted from Gost Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, and Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way on CHA research on authoritarian durability. Each chapter constitutes an excellent literature review that will prove useful in graduate courses on comparative politics.
The third section of the book focuses on the theoretical contributions of CHA. Here,...