ITALIAN POLITICS & SOCIETY The Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society No. 60, Spring 2005 http://www.congrips.org P R E S I D E N T C O N T E N T S Carol Mershon University of Virginia Symposium V I C E P R E S I D E N T Raffaella Nanetti University of Illinois Temi e Voci E X E C U T I V E S E C R E T A R Y / T R E A S U R E R Richard Katz Epistulae The Johns Hopkins University P R O G R A M C H A I R Research Dossier Carolyn Warner Arizona State University E X E C U T I V E C O M M I T T E E Note e Notizie Franklin Adler Macalester College Maurizio Cotta Book Essay and Reviews Università di Siena Julia Lynch University of Pennsylvania Membership Survey Simona Piattoni Università di Trento Supplement Alan Zuckerman Brown University C O - E D I T O R S Anthony C. Masi Filippo Sabetti Department of Sociology Department of Political Science McGill University McGill University 855 Sherbrooke St. West 855 Sherbrooke St. West Montreal,Quebec Montreal, Quebec Canada H3A 2T7 Canada H3A 2T7 [email protected] [email protected] A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S This issue of Italian Politics and Society has been published ITALIAN POLITICS & SOCIETY with the support of McGill The Review of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society University No. 60, Spring 2005 D E A D L I N E S A N D F O R M S F O R M E R P R E S I D E N T S This newsletter is distributed twice a year, usually in the Norman Kogan (1975-77); Samuel Barnes (1977-79); Gianfranco Pasquino (1979-81); spring and autumn. 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Turati’s Rifare l’Italia! 2 SYMPOSIUM SPRING 2005 SYMPOSIUM Are Single-Country Studies Obsolete? Pepper D. Culpepper John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University n some of the conventional sub-fields of comparisons. political science— “American politics” springs to Perhaps the most widely used “great book” in Imind—the question of whether single country graduate courses on comparative politics in the studies are obsolete would be dismissed as absurd. United States is a single country study: Robert Generalizable findings about important intellectual Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, a book familiar to questions ranging from the origins of bureaucratic every reader of this publication (España-Nájera et autonomy (Carpenter 2001) to the role of mass and al. 2003). This book has, rightly, generated elites in public opinion and social movements (Lee substantial praise and criticism, and I have no 2002) have been the subject of recent, rigorous intention of repeating either here (cf. Tarrow 1996, monographs that look only at the United States. Boix and Posner 1998). Instead, let us use the There is no change in tastes or technologies on the example of Putnam’s study to highlight the features horizon that will render such studies obsolete in the of single country studies that can be so appealing to foreseeable future. scholars of comparative politics. For a specialist in comparative politics, though, Putnam exploits the possibilities for the question posed for this symposium-are single- comparison that exist both sub-nationally (among country studies obsolete?—is slightly harder to Italian regions) and temporally (Italian regions dismiss out of hand. It should not be. Comparative today vs. Italian regions in past time periods). Sub- politics is fundamentally about using comparison national variation among administrative units is across different units of analysis to delineate the the most easily available strategy to practitioners of causal mechanisms that explain variation among a single country studies, and it has the great virtue political, social, and economic outcomes in those of holding many other potentially causal variables units and beyond them.1 Those units of analysis are constant. Multi-country studies using regression often individual countries, since many variables of techniques can throw in a vector of control interest are defined at the level of the nation-state, variables, including country dummies, to deal with as are the statistics that track them. Yet the this problem; but, so often, the institutional and appropriate unit of analysis for any theoretical cultural features that make the country dummies question should always be determined by the significant are themselves integral to the causal content of that question. The greater ease of story that is being told. Sub-national comparison is acquiring comparable quantitative indicators, and no silver bullet in this regard, especially in a the potential for exploiting both temporal and country as internally heterogeneous as Italy, but it spatial variation through regression techniques that is a valuable asset of the country study. use pooled cross sectional time series, are Temporal variation is also useful, particularly technological advances that may well have given since many contemporary debates in political impetus toward the perceived obsolescence of the science are concerned with issues of sequencing single country study. While both national and contingency in causal analysis (Pierson 2004, comparisons and advanced statistical techniques Sewell 1996). Putnam uses this temporal variation using such data have moved knowledge forward in to great effect, both to demonstrate that social a variety of fields of inquiry within comparative capital at time t0 is a better predictor of economic politics, neither has rendered obsolete the potential development at t1 than vice versa, and to illustrate for generating important and generalizable findings his argument for the origins of divergent patterns of from single country studies. In the remainder of civic engagement hundreds of years before the this essay I will review some of the important regional reforms he studies. In the area of advantages of these studies over multi-country comparative politics in which I work most SPRING 2005 SYMPOSIUM 3 extensively-comparative political economy-we can framework adopted by Hall and Soskice-have observe these same sorts of strategies at work. profoundly different local institutional contexts. Indeed, in comparative political economy, one And it is local institutional context that proved to important debate is whether national level be decisive in determining the ability of these “varieties of capitalism” are even appropriate units regions to nurture companies bent on pursuing of analysis, given the heterogeneity within the innovation in the computer and electronics units.