The geography of comparative politics

Evidence from our most cited scholars

The true size of Africa

A friend of mine from grad school once told me about his visit to Harvard as a prospective grad student. He asked about the Government Department’s plans for covering the South Asian region and was told that “Harvard has no commitment to real estate”. That is one view of comparative politics. It is simply the rigorous and systematic study of domestic politics with no commitment to particular places.

Another view, closer to that of my friend, is that comparative politics studies the politics of specific regions and countries. (Ironically, he ended up as an Americanist.) Indeed, many faculties, not to mention journals, are structured in this way. We see job searches for an Africanist or Western Europeanist along with searches for a comparativist. And even for the general searches, there is typically an expectation that the scholar knows at least one particular place well – its history and culture in addition to its politics.[1]

That said, there are different ways of studying global real estate. A century ago, comparative politics mainly studied the Western world. Since then, it has begun to cover the globe. But how balanced is our study of the world? Which places are more influential in our understanding of comparative politics? Or are we embracing the more generalist view of the discipline?

Scholars have begun to ask these questions and I will contribute to the pile. While previous authors have mostly looked at published works, I instead consider our profession’s most cited scholars. The takeaway is that Western Europeanists remain the largest set of most cited scholars and focusing on citations extends their lead. On the other hand, Latin Americanists and to an extent more generalist comparativists are catching up, albeit slowly. For better or worse, our field reacts to the Western European experience.

A skippable section on the existing literature and what I did

The most notable attempt to map the geography of political science comes from Wilson and Knutsen (2022) who considered the appearance of countries and regions in the titles and keywords of articles in major political science journals over time. Not surprisingly, they found that North America and Western Europe lead the pack. Confining the searches to comparative politics journals diminishes Europe’s lead and gives a boost to Latin America, while further limiting the searches to 2019 puts Latin America into the lead.[2]

My main addition to their work is to focus on scholars and in particular the most cited scholars in comparative politics. To do this, I borrowed two datasets from Grofman and co-authors. (Masuoka et al. 2007 and Kim and Grofman 2019). They isolated the 400 most cited scholars in US political science departments based on the Social Science Citation Index and more recently Google Scholar.[3]

My main addition to their work was to identify which scholars could be considered comparativists (the 2009 list includes the authors’ own somewhat problematic coding of this) and which, if any, regions they specialized in.

In coding comparativists, my thinking was guided by whether the scholar identifies as a comparativist (for example, on a department website) or produces books and articles that foreground a country or region outside the US. In total, I found 131 scholars who seemed to me to be comparativists in 2019 and 100 in 2007 (in both cases out of the 400 most cited).

Coding regions led to a few ambiguities. In addition to the cases where a scholar clearly studied a particular region over the course of their career, others gave up that original regional specialization in favor of work on other regions (e.g., David Laitin) or in favor of broader work across regions or across the globe (e.g., Herbert Kitschelt, Larry Diamond). Yet others meanwhile started out and remained broad generalists (e.g., Samuel Huntington) or started out as Americanists and then began studying a region as a sidelight (e.g., Stephen S. Smith, James Gibson). Conversely, there were only a small handful of scholars who could plausibly be considered an expert on multiple regions. Among those were Juan Linz, Philippe Schmitter, and John Stephens, though I coded each for only one region (curiously all three span Western Europe and Latin America).

Ultimately, I chose to code scholars by their initial region of specialization (i.e., thus leaving out those who were originally or mainly Americanists). My justification is that their initial region likely influenced their worldview. I also coded some comparativists as lacking a regional specialization. These are admittedly subjective decisions and my codings are posted here. Feel free to write me with corrections.

Results

Enough throat clearing. The figures below show the percentage of the most-cited comparativists specializing in particular regions in each of the two surveys. I follow Wilson and Knutsen (2022) in dividing the world into seven regions (I leave out North America and the Pacific Islands), but I add a generalist category.[4]

As might be expected, Western Europeanists dominate the list. They made up 44% of comparativists in 2007 dropping to 37% in 2019. These numbers are comparable but slightly higher than those in Wilson and Knutsen (2022) who look at a century’s-worth of articles.

Much of the drop in Western Europeanists was made up by Latin Americanists. They moved from third place in 2007 comprising 11% of the most cited to second in 2019 with 18%. Wilson and Knutsen found an even larger jump among Latin Americanists when they focused on references in 2019; indeed, Latin America led all regions by a good amount for that slice.

I asked some of my Latin Americanist colleagues how they would account for the region’s strong position and rise over time. Their theories included (i) the high degree of political change in the region; (ii) the focus of Latin Americanists on topics like democratic backsliding, corruption, inequality, and populism that have become more common in other regions; and (iii) pipelines of students and scholars between North and South America.

The generalist category did quite well and showed the second most improvement between the two surveys from 8% to 11%.

Perhaps surprisingly, Africa scored relatively well with 12% of the most cited comparativists in 2007 and 11% today. Some Africanists, however, seem to have become detached from the region as they age (e.g., Larry Diamond, David Laitin, Robert Bates). This may partially explain why the percentage of most cited scholars is higher than the percentage of article references in Wilson and Knutsen.

In a previous piece, I noted the concerns of a colleague that research on Chinese politics tended to be outside the mainstream of comparative politics. Contrary to these concerns, East/Southeast Asia constitutes a respectable 11% of scholars on both lists.

I had expected my own region, Eastern Europe, to punch above its weight, but in fact it comprised only 8% of the most cited comparativists in 2007 and dropped to a mere 5% in the 2019 survey. I had thought that the end of communism would have integrated the region more tightly into the mainstream. It is the case, however, that the region has witnessed an almost complete turnover of its most cited scholars (only Valerie Bunce remains from the earlier list).

The Middle East/North Africa and South Asia bring up the pack. Their low numbers were a bit surprising to me given the prominence of the Middle East in political debates and the fact that South Asian scholars often study and publish in English. Perhaps the categorization of regions was at fault here.

As a robustness test, I recreated the figures using the percentage of total citations by region. I would note that these citations are those of scholars that I have linked to a region. Many of their actual books and articles, however, focus on other regions (including the US) or methods. So take them with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, the citations exaggerate the dominance of Western Europe and diminish most other regions except for the generalist category. It is not just more scholars working on Europe, but also more citations to those scholars (again with the necessary caveats).

For those interested in the identities of the most cited comparativists, I included below the top fives for each region along with the date they received their PhD and the citation score reported in the works cited earlier. (As mentioned, the cites were calculated differently in 2007 and 2019 and so are not directly comparable.) I have posted the full lists online along with my codings. I am sure that I made mistakes, so feel free to contact me with corrections!

Conclusion

Overall, one could thus say that the field used to be divided into Western Europe and the rest of the world, though this applies somewhat less today than it did fifteen years ago. If we look into the future a bit and consider scholars in the most recent list who earned their PhDs after 1986 (thus splitting the recent sample at its median) and compare them to older PhDs the results are mostly similar. The main differences are Eastern Europe which shows a substantial increase and East/SE Asia a substantial decrease. Maybe my region has a bright future.

I began the piece by noting the argument that comparative politics does not need to be attached to regions. Some support for this can be seen in the substantial number of generalist comparativists and a slight increase over this period, though not enough to predict that a focus on regions will disappear. The generalists do even better in citations, so that may help them in the future.

I should probably conclude with another caveat. One worry about looking at citations is that it is hard to determine whether the people who study these places are the most talented (and thus most cited) or whether studying certain places guarantees more attention (for a multitude of reasons). Adding to the problem, citations may be easier to gather in relatively understudied places because one can set the agenda for that region or they may be harder to gather in relatively understudied places because fewer people are interested in them. In short, citations may be the coin of the realm, but they can also be counterfeit.

Table 1: Most cited scholars by region

References

Bates, Robert H. 1997. "Area studies and the discipline: a useful controversy?" PS: Political Science & Politics 30(2): 166-169.

Hendrix, Cullen S. and Jon Vreede. 2019. “US Dominance in International Relations and Security Scholarship in Leading Journals.” Journal of Global Security Studies 4(3): 310–20.

Johnson, Chalmers. 1997. "Preconception vs. observation, or the contributions of rational choice theory and area studies to contemporary political science." PS: Political Science & Politics 30(2): 170-174.

Kim, Hannah June and Bernard Grofman. 2019. "The political science 400: with citation counts by cohort, gender, and subfield." PS: Political Science & Politics 52(2): 296-311.

Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, Bernard Grofman, and Janet Campagna. 1989. "The Political Science 400: Citations by Ph. D. Cohort and by Ph. D.-Granting Institution." PS: Political Science & Politics 22(2): 258-270.

Masuoka, Natalie, Bernard Grofman, and Scott L. Feld. 2007. "The political science 400: A 20-year update." PS: Political Science & Politics 40(1): 133-145.

Pelke, Lars and Paul Friesen. 2019. “Democratization Articles Dataset: An introduction.” Democratization 26(1): 140–60.

Pepinsky, Thomas B. 2019. "The return of the single-country study." Annual Review of Political Science 22: 187-203.

Teorell, Jan, Marcus Samanni, Søren Holmberg, and Bo Rothstein. 2011. “The Quality of Government Dataset, version 6 Apr 2011.” (http://www.qog.pol.gu.se/data/qogstandarddataset/)

Wilson, Matthew Charles and Carl Henrik Knutsen. 2022. "Geographical coverage in political science research." Perspectives on Politics 20(3): 1024-1039.

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[1] See Bates (1997) and Johnson (1997) for a famous debate on the subject.

[2] See also Pepinsky (2019) who finds the dominance of the West in single country studies, but also the rise of Latin America. Hendrix and Vreede (2019) find that GDP/capita and population are the key determinants of the study of places in IR journals, while Pelke and Friesen (2019) find more diversity in the study of democratization.

[3] They limited themselves to research active scholars, leaving out deceased and emeritus scholars, in order to capture the current state of the field. They also compiled an equivalent list in 1989, but the complete data is not readily available (see Klingemann et al. 1989). There have been some criticisms of these lists. The authors focus only on political scientists working in the US and appear to have left off of their lists some political scientists working outside of political science departments. Readers should attach the appropriate caveats.

[4] They in turn follow Teorell et al (2011). A few scholars who purport to study the advanced industrial societies were coded as Western Europeanists.