In this chapter, I reconceptualize the twin concepts of “comparison” and “case,” by rethinking what political scientists often call a “single-case study.” I propose that much of the disciplinary ambivalence about so-called single-case studies is a product of a misconception regarding their nature, and that this methodological label is a misnomer for such studies. Drawing on my own research, I propose the term “site” rather than “case.” A site is a conjunctural intersection of various and heterogeneous processes, relations, and scales of political activity, some relatively enduring and some relatively ephemeral. The constitutive multiplicity of a site and the detailed empirical engagement it enables offer both inspiration and leverage for analytical claims. Conceptualizing the objects of our research as sites mitigates against the social scientific tendency to regard ongoing social processes in reified, monolithic, and static terms. In-depth empirical engagement with research sites draws our analytic attention to the social processes that provisionally result in spatial boundedness, enduring institutionalization, and individual and group identity formation – or, on the contrary, the events and processes that disrupt, modify, innovate, and transform them.

What are the different ways in which we compare? Or to rephrase the query more precisely: What are the different ways in which we ordinarily use the word “compare”? This chapter distinguishes two ways of comparing, two uses of the word “compare,” to bring into clearer view a way of comparing that, despite being common to political science, often goes unnoticed. What are the two ways to compare? To compare juxtapositionally is to place similar kinds of things side by side to catalog their similarities and differences. To compare perspectivally is to draw an analogy between different kinds of things as a way to establish a vantage point from which to view one thing in terms of the other. Political science scholars who write about comparing usually focus their attention on comparing juxtapositinally – how to describe (and explain) patterns of similarity and difference across like kinds of things, events, processes, meanings, and so on. Yet political scientists routinely compare perspectivally as well. However, perspectival comparison has been the subject of far less methodological reflection in political science than has its juxtapositional cousin. By drawing attention to perspectival comparison, this chapter provides a set of starting points that political scientists may use to think more clearly about something that they would otherwise do unreflectively.

To what extent can an ethnographic sensibility enhance comparison? We argue that approaching comparison with an ethnographic sensibility – that is, being sensitive to how informants make sense of their worlds and incorporating meaning into our analyses – can strengthen comparative qualitative research. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility would enhance the quality of scholarly arguments by incorporating the processes through which actors ascribe meanings to their lived experiences and the political processes in which they are enmeshed. Because social science arguments often involve accounts of individual actors’ interests, ideas, or impressions, it is imperative to place such cognitive arguments in a broader cultural context. Adopting an ethnographic sensibility requires attention not only to that context but also to the political and social meanings which make that context intelligible. We elaborate these arguments through the lens of two comparative ethnographic works: a study of political mobilization in Bolivia and Mexico and a study of vigilantism in two South African townships.

Given the relative dominance of positivist epistemologies in political science, the most common mode of comparison is that of variation finding. Although such models can take many forms, the objective is to identify what factors or variables differ across the cases as a means to explain that variation. But other modes of comparative analysis are available. In particular, Charles Tilly’s notion of encompassing comparisons – examining similarities and differences across cases while recognizing that they are inextricably connected or related to some larger whole – may be a better model for explaining long-term political processes, such as state formation, colonialism, capitalism, or even the spread of massive protests across a large number of cases. In this chapter, I develop an encompassing comparison of the Arab uprisings. The approach does not see the uprisings as individual cases whose diverse outcomes yearn for explanation but rather as instances of mass resistance to larger, transnational processes, notably including securitization and neoliberalism. This is not to suggest that these processes caused the uprisings. But the idea is to explore the ways in which the different governments were connected to these larger processes and networks and the extent to which those supranational factors help explain the outcomes of the individual cases.

To rethink comparison, it is useful to begin with a more basic question: What are these things we compare when we do comparative research? Researchers are typically taught to think of a field site as a case (noun) that they will go out and study (verb). Cases are defined by virtue of the fact that they fall within a conceptually defined class: they exist “out there,” in a sense, before we even arrive. Valuable as it may be, this “realist” approach has often felt foreign to ethnographers and other practitioners of interpretive research. In the immersive work characteristic of interpretive research, we often enter research sites for practical and political reasons – or because of considerations related to language, cultural familiarity, funding, or something else. Even if we choose a site for primarily analytic purposes, we typically pursue research in ways that prioritize discovery and embrace changes in research interests, goals, and questions. For these and other reasons, we often wind up with an emerging study (noun) that we need to case (verb). As we develop accounts of experience-near concepts, relations, processes and practices, we repeatedly encounter the challenge of how to place them in dialogue with the experience-distant conceptual frameworks of our field. Examining what we have studied, we ask “what is this a case of?”

In an interview with Lisa Wedeen, one of the contemporary comparative political scientists whose work most consistently speaks to both political science and interdisciplinary audiences, the editors ask Wedeen to reflect on the role that comparison has played in her work. Wedeen is the author of three groundbreaking monographs on seemingly single cases – two on Syria and one on Yemen. Yet, in the course of the interview, it becomes apparent how profoundly comparative Wedeen’s work is. She discusses her comparison of “exemplary events” in her field sites as a method through which to draw broad lessons about politics from apparent ephemera. She discusses the comparisons she makes between ethnographic insights and political theory to tack back and forth between empirical and theoretical material with the goal of developing new ways to think about politics. And she discusses the ways in which these comparative practices make her work not just an empirical practice but also a political practice – one that makes the work of a comparative political scientist not just a career but a vocation.

This chapter examines the trajectory of a research project on militant organizations’ adaptation that began as a “classic” case comparison and was “re-cased” into an explicitly network-based comparison of intra-organizational networks. In doing so, it outlines a method of comparison focused primarily on roles, relations, and emergence rather than on organizational form or behavior. The chapter starts by discussing the project’s initial research design, which proposed a study of militant organizations across three Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that largely adhered to Millian logic. The project dedicated extensive research time to establishing a pre-invasion “control” by seeking to demonstrate pre-shock organizational uniformity across the communities under study. However, the evidence gathered often complicated or contradicted logics of control, independence, causality, and identification that undergird dominant approaches to comparison. Rather, it repeatedly indicated that complex, relational, often contingent interactions among geographic environment, communities’ interpretations of violence, and organizational structures influenced outcomes of interest. The chapter leverages this experience to establish core tenets of a broader approach to studying organizational change in comparative perspective.