Introduction to the Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Comparative Policy Analysis

Abstract

Comparative policy analysis (hereafter CPA) is an emerging area in social sciences and already a major one in policy studies. As of December 31, 2018, the Web of Science’s database registered 243 references of peer-reviewed articles, whose authors used “comparative policy” as descriptor (as key words, in the title or in the abstract). This is still less than “comparative politics” (776 references during the same period), but it is much more significant than “comparative public administration” (39 references), considering the same token. More important, though, is the upward trend of the literature explicitly referring to CPA as a descriptor of the substance and method of a research, as more than 56% of these titles were published after mid-2015.1 Given the multi-disciplinary nature of policy studies, the methodological challenges in CPA are arguably more complex than for other research areas in social sciences. Therefore, there is a greater need to provide an overview of the available methods, as well as their strengths and weaknesses for addressing theoretical issues like policy change, time and context in policy design, and so on. Hence, this handbook of methods for comparative policy analysis is intended to advance the understanding of methodology in the study of comparative public policies, as much as to broaden the array of methods and techniques considered by CPA scholars in their research design. The methods discussed in its 22 chapters, including this introductory study, consider not only the nature of public policies but also how to deal with the complexities of policy across political systems and across policy domains and across time. These methods are also of interest for practitioners, who face many policy problems of international dimensions and have a lot to gain from policy learning and policy diffusion, but often lack the methodological tools to deal systematically with the comparison of most-similar and most-different systems. The need for such a handbook has become especially pressing for two additional reasons. The first is the increasing diversity and complexity of available methods in social sciences, which makes their selection a challenging exercise for policy design in research and practice, beyond substantive issues. Some are of relatively recent vintage and have been adding significant analytic power to CPA, like the qualitative comparative analysis methods (QCA) (see Chapter 15 by Thomann). Others have been common in some disciplines but are now becoming more and more popular among policy scholars and practitioners, like process tracing (see Chapter 16 by Fontaine), focus groups (see Chapter 17 by Marier, Dickson, and Dubé), and ethnography (see Chapter 18 by Pacheco-Vega). Still others are actually decades old but have