Progress outside of paradise: Old and new comparative approaches to contentious politics

• Author: Sidney Tarrow
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024297
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(10) 1885–1901

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024297

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Progress outside of

paradise: Old and new

comparative approaches

to contentious politics

Sidney Tarrow

1



Abstract

Descriptive or ethnographic studies were once the stock-in-trade of the

comparative politics of non-Western areas and illiberal states. The last few

decades have seen a dramatic growth in quantitative—or at least systematic—

studies of these systems. This marks real progress, but, in the process, some of

the advantages of ethnographic and “unit-contextual”studies have been lost.

The contributors to this symposium have used ethnographic methods—often

in combination with other methods—to examine and compare episodes of

contentious politics in a number of these countries. Drawing on some of the

“classics”of comparative politics, this article emphasizes both the continuities

and the departures of the new generation of “ethnography plus”research

efforts represented in this symposium.

Keywords

contentious politics, Middle Eastern politics, Latin American politics, Russian

politics, ethnographic approaches

1

Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Sidney Tarrow, Department of Government, Cornell University, White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-

0001, USA.

Email: sgt2@cornell.edu

Two decades ago, Doug McAdam, this author, and Charles Tilly took on a bro ad

program of research on contentious politics: trying to examine what we called

“the dynamics of contention”though paired comparisons of various forms of

contention in fifteen (count them!) different countries coming from Western

Europe, the United States, the former Soviet space, China, and Africa (McAdam

et al., 2001).

1

We were betting that although much would be lost in the way of

empirical detail and theoretical precision, taking on such a task would allow us to

address three major failings in the study of contentious politics:

1. The segmentation of the “field”of contention into the study of separate

forms (e.g., strikes, protests, revolts, revolutions, civil wars, terrorism,

etc.), without making serious attempts to compare across these fields;

2. The failure to address directly the question of whether there are

common mechanisms and processes of contention in various forms of

these avenues of contention;

3. The tendency to focus both theory and research on the “advanced”and

mainly democratic states of Europe and America, leaving the study of

much of the world to area specialists, historians, and anthropologists.

Some readers thought Dynamics was an expression of hubris on the part of

the authors, and they were not all wrong: McAdam and I could claim expertise

on only one or two major democratic states. [Tilly (1984) had already charted

his domain as Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons.] Al-

though we were prepared to address the first two problems, the hardest nut to

crack was applying the universal categories of our program to parts of the

world—and to types of states—on which we had done no original work and

were dependent on what we could learn from other peoples’writings.

The unpreparedness of the Dynamics authors for this herculean task was

not only the result of excessive chutzpah—although we had plenty of that!—

but of the fact that the field of social movement studies was largely based on

theory and research limited to industrial democracies, and especially the

United States—the last great bastion of single-country studies—and seldom

employed comparative methods. Conversely, few area studies specialists

writing about contentious politics in their areas were familiar with the social

movement field as it had developed in the West. Moreover, ethnographic (or

interpretivist) methods in these areas blended poorly with the positivist in-

stincts of scholars working in the West.

At the turn of the century, the field of comparative politics seemed to be

heading towards large-N studies; to rationalist-inflected work; and to the early

glimmerings of experimental methods. But that was then, and this is now. In

the two decades since the publication of Dynamics of Contention, there have

been enormous strides in theoretically grounded, ethnographically based work

on contentious politics in non-western and illiberal states, not least from the

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