Short Description of the Book by the Authors:

This book consists of three parts which represent in our view the basic stages of any theory-driven empirical-analytical research in the social and, in particular, the political sciences. The book is written with the purpose of serving as a course-book for undergraduates. In each chapter there is an introduction to its contents, and at the end there is a list of the main topics covered, which may help both teacher and student to find the information she or he needs. In addition, each chapter contains examples which are taken from existing comparative research and are partially based on data that is made accessible by us via the World Wide Web (http:// welcome.to/PaulPennings).

In Part I we present our own arguments concerning the comparative approach: namely, that any empirical research needs to be theory-driven and must be formulated in a well-elaborated Research Design. Part II is essential reading for those who wish to understand the use of (advanced) statistics in order to be able to conduct an explanatory analysis (including its caveats and pitfalls!). Part III can be seen as our attempt to pull together the threads of our way of doing comparative research and will be interesting for any reader, whether a freshman or an advanced student of comparative politics and sociology.

Without claiming that this approach and its elaboration is the one and only way to teach comparative methods and statistics in political science, we feel that it offers a valuable `springboard' to judging the comparative information with which modern students are confronted. It also helps to shape a theory-inspired research design in such a way that it leads to plausible and adequate results. These are valuable skills that are lacking in too many course-books on methodology.

See Content below

Chapter 1: The Comparative Approach and Political Science

Chapter 2: The Comparative Approach: Theory and Method

Chapter 3: The Art of Comparaing: Developing a Research Design

Chapter 4: Concepts, Cases, Data and Measurement

Chapter 5: Explorative and Descriptive Statistics

Chapter 6: Multivariate Analysis and Causal Inference

Chapter 7: How Problems Arise

Chapter 8: How Decisions are Made

Chapter 9: How Problems are Solved