10 - Comparative Analysis for Theory Development

Summary

What does it mean to advance women’s status and well-being? And how should we think about the role of the state in bringing about that advancement? Our work analyzes the approach and role of the state in promoting women’s empowerment, drawing on large-N country-level data and in-depth case studies of state action in the United States, Norway, and Japan. Our three country cases vary greatly in terms of the state’s approach to women’s rights; we picked them because we believe them to be extreme examples of how state action is driven by different visions of what women’s empowerment is about. Conducting fieldwork in these different contexts allows us to study some of the variation in people’s views of both state action and empowerment. It sharpens our awareness of important assumptions that underlie studies of empowerment. It also helps us determine the right questions to ask. To the extent that we study causal relationships, we do so based on large-N data within cases, not across them. And rather than assume that the same causal patterns apply across cases, we draw on our fieldwork to better understand why the same policies produce vastly different effects in different contexts. This chapter is a reflection on some of the goals of comparative studies that are unrelated to drawing causal inferences, and how to think about research design and case selection to achieve these goals.