Comparative Research Designs and Methods

This course is part of the IPSAMOOC project, a joint venture Federica Weblearning - IPSA, the International Political Science Association. Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern empirical social science, once stated that the comparative method is the only one that suits the social sciences. But Descartes already had reminded us that “comparaison n’est pas raison”, which means that comparison is not reason (or theory) by itself. This course provides an introduction and overview of systematic comparative analyses in the social sciences and shows how to employ this method for constructi…