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Theory Sí, Data No! A Decade of Cross-National Political Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert Burrowes
Robert Burrowes
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

Macro-Quantitative Analysis, edited by John V. Gillespie and Betty A. Nesvold, should be welcomed by students of cross-national empirical theory and research. It places important reference materials at the fingertips of the analyst, and should stimulate him to take stock of the state of his art. Moreover, it should prove a boon to teaching. I find it hard to conceive of an undergraduate or graduate course on cross-national theory and research which would not benefit from this volume.

Type
Review articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , October 1972 , pp. 120 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960), 58.Google Scholar

2 Gillespie's presentations of the configurative point of view also contains gestaltist elements which were not central to the original argument. The argument of Hechscher and others was based more upon the uniqueness of each political system than upon the complex interrelatedness of the various aspects of a political system. Moreover, a further confusion inheres in Gillespie's attempt to equate the configurative and cross national approaches with “emergentist” and “reductionist” explanations respectively. Gillespie is stretching the meanings of these two kinds of explanarion well beyond those intended by May Brodbeck and omer philosophers of the social sciences who have used these terms in the debate over the connection between psychology and the “group sciences” (for example, sociology, economics, and political science). Neither “methodological individualism” (with its descriptive and explanatory reductionism) nor “metaphysical holism” (with its descripdve and explanatory emergentism) is properly linked solely with either the cross-national approach or the configurative approach. Both approaches offer many examples of each of these two philosophical starting points. See Brodbeck, May, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York 1969)Google Scholar, Part IV.

3 I am not familiar with the third abridgment, a previously unpublished paper by the Feierabends. Although the length of Gurr's study with Ruttenberg necessitated abridgment, the various fragments strung together in Macro-Quantitative Analysis do not do justice to the original. The portions deleted include much of Gurr's admirable theoretical explication and all of Ruttenberg's operationalizations of the independent and intervening variables.

4 Lerner, Daniel, “Communication Systems and Social Systems: A Statistical Exploration in History and Policy,” Behavioral Science, II (October 1957), 266–75Google Scholar; See also Lerner, , The Passing of Traditional Society (New York 1958)Google Scholar, Part I.

5 Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” American Political Science Review, LUI (March 1959), 69–105.Google Scholar

6 Cutright, Phillips, “National Political Development: Measurement and Analysis,” American Sociological Review, XXVIII (April 1963), 253–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Neubauer, Deane E., “Some Conditions of Democracy,” American Political Science Review, LXI (December 1967), 1002–09.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 For example, see Cnudde, Charles F. and Neubauer, Deane E., eds., Empirical Democratic Theory (Chicago 1969).Google Scholar

9 For a discussion of this point, see Burrowes, Robert, “Multiple Time-Series Analysis of Nation-Level Data,” Comparative Political Studies, II (January 1970), 467.Google Scholar A notable exception to this is the recent work of Arthur Banks. See Banks, Arthur, “Modernization and Political Change: The Latin American and Amer-European Nations,” Comparative Political Studies, II (January 1970), 405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Banks, Arthur, Cross-Polity Time-Series Data (Cambridge, Mass. 1971).Google Scholar

10 See Smoker, Paul, “A Time Series Study of Sino-Indian Relations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, XIII, No. 2 (1969), 172–191Google Scholar; see also Burrowes (fn. 9), 467 and 475.

11 Ibid., 467.

12 Haas, Michael, “Comparative Analysis,” Western Political Quarterly, xv (June 1962).Google Scholar

13 Holt, Robert and Richardson, John Jr, “Competing Paradigms in Comparative Politics,” in Holt, Robert and Turner, John, eds., The Methodology of Comparative Research (New York 1970), 58.Google Scholar

14 Young, Oran, “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” World Politics, XXI (April 1969), 486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 This becomes especially apparent with a reading of Gurr's theoretical article, “Psy chological Factors in Civil Violence,” World Politics, xx (January 1968), 245–78.

16 For example, Gurr has elaborated his model of civil strife to include the concept of “legitimacy.” Cutright has moved on to the policy-output side of his model of political development in his studies of national differences in income distribution and social security systems. The more recent of the two papers by Flanigan and Fogelman focuses on the conditions of successful democratization, a problem which is barely touched upon in their earlier article.

17 Burrowes, (fn. 9), 468.Google Scholar

18 The Feierabends' Cross-National Data Bank, which includes virtually all kinds of domestic political events, contains only approximately 4.0 events per nation/per year (or .13 events per nation/per year/per each of thirty categories). The event data upon which Gurr, Rummel, and Tanter have based their analysis are similarly sparse. For a discussion of the paucity of domestic data relative to external data, see Robert Burrowes with Spector, Bert, “I Dreamt I was Coding Event Data in My Matrix Form Brain,” a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Pittsburgh, April, 1970.Google Scholar

19 For differences between the Feierabend data and data drawn from the Hispanic American Reports, see Doran, Charles F. and others, “A Test of Data Reliability: Global versus Regional Sources,” Rice University, October 1971 (mimeo).Google Scholar For source comparison studies of external event data, see Burrowes, Robert, “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall…: A Source Comparison Study of Inter-Nation Event Data,” in James Rosenau, ed., The Comparatine Study of Foreign Policy (forthcoming 1973)Google Scholar; and Hog-gard, Gary, “Differential Source Coverage and the Analysis of International Interaction Data,” University of Southern California, January 1971 (mimeo).Google Scholar

20 The dilemma facing the scholar who uses macro-quantitative analysis is seen in the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators and A Cross-Polity Survey. Its title notwimstanding, most of die numeric measures in die former are conspicuously non-polirical; those that are political, moreover, are riddled with missing data and are often of only peripheral theoretical relevance. The latter, by contrast, is addressed to many of the concepts considered most important by students of comparative politics; unfortunately, the nominal and ordinal scales which measure these concepts are extremely insensitive and of dubious reliability.

21 Torgerson, Warren S., Theory and Methods of Scaling (New York 1958)Google Scholar, chap. I.

22 This point is debatable. Mosteller and Bush have noted in passing that poor data may require the most powerful techniques. However, my guess is that political analysts and social psychologists are thinking in terms of different orders of magnitude when they talk about “measurement error.” See Frederick Mosteller and Bush, Robert R., “Selected Quantitative Techniques,” in Lindzey, Gardner, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology: Vol. I, Theory and Method (Cambridge, Mass. 1954), 331.Google Scholar

23 As noted above, only two studies in Macro-Quantitative Analysis extensively use ordinal-scale techniques. For whatever reason, these techniques have been more widely used by students of international politics. See David Singer, J., ed., Quantitative International Politics (New York 1968).Google Scholar

24 Dahl, Robert, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review, LV (December 1961).Google Scholar