Is comparative politics dead? Rethinking the field in the post-Cold ...

HOWARD J WIARDAin the political sphere; certainly democracy is the only system of government thatenjoys widespread global legitimacy. No regime wants to be called `corporatist’or `Marxist±Leninist’ anymore; both of these system alternatives have beendiscredited. In addition, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cold warcon¯ ict between capitalism and communism has largely run its course, and thereis only one real superpower left. The success particularly of the East Asianeconomies and the failures of Cuba, Nicaragua and Eastern Europe demonstratedthe advantages of private market initiatives over a totally controlled system.Obviously, there is and will continue to be debate between advocates of freermarkets and state downsizing, and those who would preserve statism and a largerwelfare state, but increasingly these involve the politics of compromise andmoderation (socialist governments in the UK and Portugal following free marketstrategies, right-of-centre governments (under Kohl) in Germany and Spainexpanding welfarism, virtually everyone else also seeking to combine free-marketpolicies with strong social programmes) rather than the politics of either/or.The great systems debates of the past are largely over, and with that changehas come a decline in interest in comparative politics. A paradigm shift is underway: whereas in the 1960s the parabola that is the rise and fall of comparativepolitics was on the way up; today it is on the way down. Graduate students areless interested in the ® eld because the excitement of new research ® elds and newtheoretical frameworks has died down and, since the 1970s, there seem to be nogreat conceptual innovations or breakthroughs comparable to those of earlierdecades. As such states as Spain, Portugal and Russia have (in varying degree)become democratic, joined Europe, and become `normal’ countries, they havealso become more boring. The `thrill’ in comparative politics is gone; there arestill a host of interesting and important issues to study but the great systemsdebates of the past appear to be over. There has been a certain `decline ofideology’ ; 4 there is a certain `end of history’ . 5 So the questions we seek to assesshere are how and why the ® eld went from exciting to boring, whether comparativepolitics is in fact dead, and what subjects are still interesting and worthyof study.Comparative politics: the queen of the disciplineIn 1955 Roy Macridis had launched a diatribe against traditional comparativepolitics. 6 He accused the ® eld of being formal±legalistic (studying formalinstitutions over non-formal political processes), descriptive rather than analytic,case study-orientated rather than genuinely comparative, and Eurocentric with itsemphasis on Great Britain, France, Germany and the Soviet Union. Macridis’ scritique had a strong effect on the `Young Turks’ beginning to write in the ® eldin those days. In addition, the revolution then occurring in political science moregenerallyÐ behaviouralism, the study of decision making, the emphases oninformal actors such as political parties and interest groups, research on publicopinion and political processesÐ also had a profound impact on comparativepolitics. 7Along with the Macridis critique, in the late 1950s and early 1960s came thesudden emergence onto the world scene of a large number of new nations. The936