Comparative Debate: Area Studies vs. Generalists?

[natofone]

On another topic (China/IR), someone mentioned that his/her school is moving away from area studies. I've also heard that it is a dangerous practice to focus your application around one specific geographic location because of the debate over area studies vs. generalists. What are the general contours of this debate? Are there any articles in major journals discussing this debate? Which schools generally eschew area studies specialists and which school still embrace them? It looks like I'll be applying again next year after an unsuccessful admissions cycle and any help that you can offer would be great.

[plisar]

I would say that it is important to list a larger area of focus (Europe-not France, east-Asia-not Japan), but it is still important to be focusing on a political science question whose answer applies more universally.

If your question deals with the comparative political economy of insurgency, for example, you're likely not going to be studying this in France, but in Latin America, the Middle East, or Africa. I think the question about focus area deals more with making sure you know where you should be studying your interests rather than saying you want to study those countries.

[mormegil]

I agree with plisar. I was very particular about this in my SOP. I mentioned my area specific research interests but I did not focus into a single specific country. For instance, I mentioned terrorism in Asia at some school's SOP, I not only mentioned India but also Bangladesh and Pakistan and rising extremism and terrorist activities in Indonesia.

I guess for most schools it's better to focus one's regional interests into a larger geographic area and not a single country, unless there's a single faculty member you want as your advisor whose research focus is exclusively on a single country. But even then it's risky to do that.

[Duli]

So I hope this isn't too irrelevant to the question, but since I have no real experience in Political Science as a discipline I'm curious: I am going to be getting an MA in East Asian Studies with a focus on Chinese politics (specific interests include cross-strait relations and dissent in China) and I would like to eventually get a PhD with the same focus. So what sort of degree am I looking for? The Sino-American IR question confused me because I also would have thought that fell under the International Relations category. But my undergrad degree is in foreign languages so I don't know a lot about this stuff. Thanks.

[dysmetria]

China is the only country where you can do comparative with a focus on one country because is is just so big. Source: A R1 tenured professor who does research in this area.

[FuzzyDunlop]

Not true at all what the previous poster said about China. Lots of people do research primarily on one country - scholars who have had great success really only studying Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, or China are all pretty common in comparative.

The area studies versus generalist distinction is a false one. What is area studies? Is the study of American politics nothing more than area studies? What does generalism entail? Does it mean that you have to compare across world regions, even if the comparison is stupid or entails using really weak statistical techniques? Why can't you develop theories primarily out of one context and still be a "generalist?"

[plisar]

^ Yes, but this is a fading trend in our field. Don't expect that becoming a prolific researcher of post-World War II France will guarantee you a job in contemporary political science.

[spark25]

^ Yes, but this is a fading trend in our field. Don't expect that becoming a prolific researcher of post-World War II France will guarantee you a job in contemporary political science.

You are guaranteed a job in contemporary political science not only for the region you focus on but also the quality of the research that you actually do as well. If a prolific research of post-World War II France gets a tenured job it is not because he was studying modern France but rather the quality of the acutal research itself. Furthermore, even one studies France he/she will be aware of developments in Europe as well. Thus, what one researches on is important, but how they do it and what they find are also significant factors as well. Failure to acknowledge this factor leads to misleading and somewhat narrow conclusions about that specific persons research or tis whole 'area studies versus generalization' arguments.

Personally, I think this area studies versus generalization view is not only blurry but also false. We can identify top scholars within the field today who study one country and/or general trends. How you approach a subject should not be pre-determined by methodology or focus but rather the research question that one is trying address and finds interesting. Arbitrarily drawing a line or dismissing what is or should be political science really isn't something I think should be practiced. I have to agree with FuzzyDunlap on this one.

[plisar]

Sure, the question should drive the method and the regional focus, I've already stated that earlier in this thread. I'm simply saying that the questions asked by people who concentrate on one or two questions are not very effective in answering broader puzzles of comparative politics. If n<3, the usefulness of a study seriously comes into question...

[IRdreams]

If it is a question about field trend, its probably best to look at recent R1 hires to see what is going on. I'm sure there a number of established scholars who made their careers doing country specific research on all sorts of places, but would they have been able to do so again today? I don't know the answers to these questions because Comparative is not my field. But this is how I went researching field changes in my own discipline since my undergrad profs. are a little dated in their apprehension of field developments sometimes.

[FuzzyDunlop]

Lots of people recently have gotten good comparative jobs working on only one country. And just because you are looking at just one country, this does not mean that you can't have a large-n research design.

There is a trend in the field toward more focus on statistical methods, but one should not assume that this means a trend of increasing rewards to big cross-national studies. That seemed to happen for a while. But as more emphasis has been put on doing statistics well (not just doing statistics at all) - using more cutting edge techniques with better data sources - a bit of a backlash has begun against those big cross-national research designs. The hottest people on the comparative job market tend to be those who combine case knowledge with sophisticated quantitative methods and good data, and a lot of times they are only working on one country.

[Penelope Higgins]

Here are a few comparative hires at top schools in the recent past (chosen purely off the top of my head, not based on any commentary about these folks or anyone left off the list):

Prerna Singh (Princeton PhD, hired at Harvard) qual and quant work on India, comparisons across Indian states

Ana de la O (MIT PhD, hired at Yale) quant work on Mexico - natural experiments

Rafaela Dancygier (Yale PhD, hired at Princeton) quant (mostly) work on ethnic violence in Western Europe

Stanislav Markus (Harvard PhD, hired at Chicago) qualitative work on former Soviet Union

Daniela Campello (UCLA PhD, hired at Princeton) quant work, mostly on Latin America

My view is that knowledge of a region is necessary but not sufficient to get a job at a top school, but fancy methods aren't everything either - the people who get these jobs combine both: look at the job market wiki to see the people getting offers at Yale, Chicago, etc. and take a look at their work - you'll see the same pattern.