Above all, this paper is intended to give you an opportunity to refine your research proposal further. It will do so by asking you to focus on the rationale for a cross-national comparison in your proposal.
The paper should build on and include your draft proposal (possibly in
an abbreviated version).
Given the research question/policy analysis
that your draft suggested (or some revision thereof), how and why
would you select an additional case to include in the comparison? The
inclusion of an additional case should be motivated by the causal
relationship that your proposal aims to address. Given the
methodological readings we completed in Parts I & II of the
course, how would an additional case strengthen your analysis?
The discussion should be realistic in that you should identify a particular country and discuss its characteristics in terms of the research question you are posing. This discussion should suggest whether you see this additional case as a contrasting, confirming, or complicating case for your analysis. The discussion does not need to consider the practical implications of broadening the comparison (i.e. adding a year to your dissertation or adding significantly to the work required for a policy analysis), including language and access to data, unless this is something that you would like to discuss with particular relevance to the type of data you might use in the analysis.
Take a very simple/simplistic example: Say, you are proposing to investigate the role of the developmental state in economic growth by comparing Japan and South Korea. In considering this question, you realize that someone might object that it is a development state plus democratization that leads to economic growth. In order to test this alternative explanation or in order to investigate whether developmentalist policies should be predicated upon democratization, you might discuss the inclusion of a case that had a developmental state and high growth, but only very limited democratization (nominations anyone?). You might then argue that the inclusion of this additional case would make your comparative analysis more powerful a) because you can test an alternative, highly plausible explanation, and b) because an additional case would allow you to refine your conceptualization of what elements of a developmentalist state might result in economic growth. Note, however, that the discussion of the additional case is predicated upon a clear research question with some suggestion of (alternative) explanations.
Your discussion should include (or, possibly, end with) an evaluation of the potential pay-off in terms of the power of the comparative analysis proposed relative to the realistic practical costs of this broadening, however.
For some research questions, a seemingly "obvious" additional comparative suggests itself, but upon considering this addition more careful in terms of the comparative logic of your analysis, you may decide that this comparison would not give your argument additional leverage. Your discussion might thus focus on an argument on why that particular additional case would not strengthen the comparison.
For some research question, there appears to be no real country that would mitigate a significant weakness that you see in your own proposal, because you may be unable to exclude a particular alternative explanation because it does not exist. In that case, you may want to discuss a hypothetical ideal comparative case that would strengthen your analysis. Be aware, however, that this leads you in the direction of a highly stylized discussion of causal analysis which may not be that productive.
This paper counts for 20% of your final course grade.
Last updated: February 2007