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666 Stein Rokkan
country, and organized local as well as nationwide surveys on lines comparable
to the very successful ones carried out in the United States.57 Finally, Philip
and Betty Jacob were able to finance the organization of an elaborate four-
nation study of ‘values in local government’: this project covers the USA, Poland
Yugoslavia and India and has generated an impressive array of memoranda,
conference reports and initial analyses.
III. THE DECISIVE CHALLENGE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF TYPOLOGIES OF ‘MACRO’
SETTINGS FOR VARIATIONS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
It is easy to be overawed by this bustle of initiative, and it is equally tempting
to puncture the pretensions of some of these studies. There can be little doubt
of the value of these many projects as training exercises. They do help to widen
the horizons of social scientists and they serve essential heuristic functions in
generating new insights into new hypotheses about each of the societies
covered. Nor can there be much doubt as to the value of a number of these
projects as data gathering enterprises. Without such initiatives our stock of infor-
mation on each society would be appreciably poorer. But how about the pay-
off for social science theory? Have any of these projects of comparative inquiry
led to distinct advances in the formulation of coherent sets of propositions
concerning the sources of variations in social structures and human behaviours ?
Thus far in this account we have only incidentally touched upon issues of
social science theory: we have presented an outline of the hierarchies of varia-
tions studied through cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons, and have
described developments within three distinct traditions of comparative research.
The decision to treat these matters of methodology and research organization
at such length was essentially motivated by editorial considerations: our aim
was to add a cross-disciplinary perspective to the presentations in the longer
chapters devoted to the individual social sciences in the first part of this volume.
Our discussion of the hierarchies of variations and our account of the different
styles of comparative research cuts across most of the fields covered in this
volume: for this very reason there is very little overlap with any of the dis-
ciplinary chapters. There is bound to be much more overlap, however, in any
account of advances in social science theory. Several of the disciplinary
chapters deal extensively with styles of theorizing and analyze the impact of
comparative cross-cultural and cross-national studies on the development of
conceptual frameworks and the construction of models of explanation. Thus
Paul Lazarsfeld reviews developments in the field of macro-sociology and
stresses the importance of systematic comparisons for the codification of
propositions and ‘theory sketches’ at the level of entire national societies.
William Mackenzie in his chapter on trends in political science gives pride
of place to the tradition of systematic cross-polity comparison : the style
pioneered poetically by Herodotus and philosophically by Aristotle and renewed
with such vigour two millenia later by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. In the
context of this collective volume, it would therefore make little sense to at-
tempt a broad review of the implications of comparative research for the devel-