Abstract

This paper is about the development of comparative European politics... It focuses on the role which the comparative study of European countries has played and should play in our profession. It offers a general survey on the manner in which this field of study has developed in the past half century. And it discusses the relationship of country studies to cross-national studies, which are to some extent their corollary, and from another point of view their contrast. The paper deals with four different ways in which countries figure in the study of comparative politics:
1. as pattern states;
2. as stimuli for the extrapolation of the political experience of specific countries into new models
3. as laboratories for cross-national research;and,
4. as variables in their own right.

The paper ends with an attempt to distill some "lessons" which we might draw from this survey.

Table of content:

1. The paramountcy of pattern states
Britannia rules
Cross Atlantic comparisons
The quaint smaller European democracies

2. New country models
The decline of the English model
The American reversal
The umbilical cord
Extrapolated models

3. Countries as laboratories
Cross-national studies Macro-theories

4. Counties as variables
Stein Rokkan's Werdegang

5. Some lessons