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Stein Rokkan and Barrington Moore revived comparative historical analysis (CHA) in Europe and the United States, respectively, during the 1960s without, however, elaborating its methodological underpinnings. Theda Skocpol's State and Social Revolutions as well as her Visions and Methods Historical Sociology filled this gap. In her important essay with Margaret Somers, she identified three distinct strands of CHA that tackled macro-historical question in distinct but ultimately also complimentary ways. In doing so, she established the foundation for subsequent work on CHA methodology. The article elaborates the subsequent elaborations of Skopol and Somer's CHA typology and the factors contributing to this evolution. It also underscores how many of those innovations were already implicit in Skocpol's State and Social Revolutions even though she herself did not highlight it in her own methodological writings. Skocpol the empirical scholar thus turns out to have been methodologically more advanced than Skocpol the methodologist.

Explanation presumes description. Description explores the who, when, where, and how, and its answers furnish the raw material for theorizing and explaining. This connection between description and allegedly serendipitous exploration contributed to the notion that description is inherently subjective and thus incapable of being evaluated. I challenge this notion of "mere" description. I show that description has a distinct structure that consists of discreet analytical stages facing distinct inferential challenges. The quality of description thus becomes a function of how well it addresses those challenges. I explicate distinct criteria for evaluating how well a describer handles those challenges. I illustrate their utility by applying them to the controversy in the late 1990s between Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning over what explained the willingness of ordinary Germans to kill Jews.

Virginia Woolf once noted that "there is an extra-ordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind" (Cited in Gaddis 2002: 19). She meant to underscore the complexity of understanding time as it combines objective, mechanical elements with contextual and subjective ones. Political science has come a long way from the days when scholars mistook studying something that occurred in the past for studying actual temporal dynamics (Sewell 1996; Bartolini 1993); political science now employs myriad temporal concepts that permit analyzing time in all its complexity. This symposium takes an inventory of some of these concepts in order to push beyond the current consensus that time matters and draw greater attention to different ways in which time matters in our analysis of social phenomena.

Political scientists commonly draw on history but often do not read actual historians carefully. This limited engagement with historians, and with contextual information more generally, contributes to a loss of historical knowledge that can undermine the validity of quantitative analysis. This article makes this argument by means of an examination of the qualitative evidence underlying the important quantitative arguments about the origins of electoral systems advanced by Carles Boix and by Thomas Cusack, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice. The article explores how their respective attention to historical knowledge affects the quality of their data, the plausibility of their hypotheses, and, ultimately, the robustness of their statistical findings. It also analyzes how such knowledge sheds new light on the causal direction between institutions and their economic effects.

The formation of new party systems involves processes that significantly distinguish them from the transformation of established ones. In new party systems historical legacies matter, timing and sequencing of events have important consequences, and politicians do not just limit themselves to winning votes but employ a wide range of co-ordination strategies (i.e. electoral coalitions, party switching, manipulation of electoral vote-counting procedures) to make votes count more effectively. The literature has identified many of these causal factors individually without, however, thinking systematically about their interactions. This article borrows from recent work on path dependency to analyse such interactions in greater depth and pays closer attention to the distinct temporal dynamics shaping the formation of new party systems.

Over the last decade, historians have made steady inroads into the frequently static social sciences as they are trying to understand the changing post-Cold War order and the even more rapidly changing global and domestic political economies. Such softening of disciplinary boundaries is also observable in the other direction. Jonathan Sperber's work on nineteenth-century electoral politics and Kenneth Ledford's study on German lawyers offer two examples among many of historians borrowing concepts and methods from the social sciences. Yet, these encouraging signs of disciplinary trespassing cannot mask the fact that these two disciplines continue only infrequently to publish in each others' journals, intelligently review each others' works, or jointly reflect on the payoffs of interdisciplinary scholarship. Given this limited dialogue, it is a particular pleasure to reply to two such thoughtful and constructive respondents. In subtly tackling the problems inherent in comparing, Kenneth Ledford ventures into the disciplinary borderlands of history and the social sciences while Jonathan Sperber stays more closely in the historical corner and — to use Ledford's apt characterization of his colleagues — "picks cautionary holes in the applicability" of comparisons.

Ina contribution to this journal, Volker Berghahn regretted the fragmentation and lack of focus in the recent research on the German Empire. While he may have overstated his case, his criticism certainly applies to the historiography of Germany's parliamentarization. The dearth of research, especially of recent vintage, has left the debate about the exceptionalism of Germany's governing institutions indeed "fragmented and decentered." Since Manfred Rauh's two volumes in the 1970s, little has been published. His thesis about Germany's silent parliamentarization has been attacked, it seems, more for the haughtiness of its footnotes than the substance of its argument. As a result, Rauh's provocative interpretation coexists far too quietly with other accounts, and thereby preempts the sort of dialogue and scholarly integration Berghahn so misses. In her response to Berghahn, Margaret Anderson points out that such a dialogue can be found in, without being confined to, the new work of Germany's electoral politics, that looked anew and more skeptically at the exceptional political development of Imperial Germany. Its findings indirectly raise questions about why the development of Germany's governing institutions — the Reichstag, the Bundersat, and the chancellor — continue to be interpreted in much more exceptionalist terms than the evolution of electoral politics.