Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 673
These arguments for the concentration of analytical efforts on leader nations,
on systems wielding ‘significant power in world politics’, raise intriguing issues
of research strategy. First of all, what intellectual reasons are there for restricting
the endeavours of comparativists to the analysis of conflict and innovation in
the major power centres? It would not seem difficult to make as good a case
for concerted research on processes of diffusion and reception: after all, most of
the units open to comparative study are ‘follower’ nations rather than leaders.
Secondly, political innovation surely cannot be treated as a function of size
alone. Two small polities, Greece and Israel, generated the greatest innovations
of the ancient world. In the modern world, small polities such as Iceland,
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden have fostered institutional innovations
without any direct counterpart in the larger leader units. Talcott Parsons, in his
theoretical statement on differentiations among modern societies, has gone so
far as to assert that innovations have been more likely to occur in isolated units
at the peripheries of major power systems: the Italian city states, the Dutch
provinces and the English monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
offered ‘sanctuaries in which new developments could mature before having to
encounter the more severe tests of broader institutionali~ation’.7~
Whatever the merits of this argument, the smaller nations constitute worthy
objects of comparative study: they have managed to survive a world dominated
by larger and stronger units; they have developed their own distinctive institu-
tions; there are enough of them to allow detailed studies of variations along
several different dimensions. Whether it wil prove fruitful to apply the models
used for the larger nations and world powers to all these smaller units remains
doubtful, even if we disregard the ‘micro-states’ currently studied by the
United Nations Institute for Training and Research.66 In our comparative
analysis of the development of party systems, Seymour Martin Lipset and I
have fitted sixteen European systems, eleven smaller and five larger ones, into
the same core model of explanation,7* but this does not necessarily succeed for
other dependent variables.
In fact, we have become convinced that a good case can be made for Moore’s
rejection of small-polity comparisons if they cut across major cultural areas of
the world: ‘leader’ nations can be meaningfully compared independently of the
larger cultural contexts, but smaller units tend to be so heavily dependent on
their surroundings that it wil be more fruitful to compare them area by area
rather than indiscriminately across continents. This certainly goes for com-
parisons of political and religious institutions, organizations and behaviours,
but would also seem to be true for other elements of social structure: ecological
configurations, social and economic stratification, educational institutions and
achievements. Our comparisons of democratization processes and party-politi-
cal development in Western Europe suggest that the smaller units are more
likely to become structured along cultural dimensions than the larger ones :
linguistic/ethnic boundaries cut across Belgium, Switzerland and Finland and
have deeply affected the internal politics of Ireland, Denmark and Norway;
conflicts over religious identities have found distinctive institutional expressions
in the Low Countries, in Switzerland and in Austria. Similar lines of cleavage