Suchergebnisse

Field research remains common in comparative politics and other branches of political science. While fieldwork is more appropriate for some projects than others, leaving home base and striking out into unfamiliar surroundings is an essential way in which researchers gather new data, acquire fresh perspectives, subject seminar-room musings to cruel but necessary reality checks, and establish credibility. Yet for all our discipline's attention to methods and research design, it does relatively little to train graduate students for the practical and conceptual challenges of managing a field research project.

The methods that generally go under the labels ethnography and participant-observation occupy a somewhat awkward place in political science (Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004). Our discipline lays claim to prominent, if rather isolated, examples of scholarly work based on these methods—with perhaps the two most widely read being Fenno's Home Style (1978) and Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985). A subset of empirical researchers has always been drawn to them, going back at least as far as the immediate post-WWII generation and presumably earlier (Banfield 1958). They are discussed on the occasional conference panel. They are actively employed in much exciting research today, by themselves or in conjunction with other methods (examples include Adams 2003, Allina-Pisano, 2004, Bayard de Volo 2001, Cammett 2005 and 2007, Chen 2006, Galvan 2004, Morris MacLean 2004, Roitman 2004, Schatz 2004, Straus 2006, and Tsai 2007).

During the Cold War, comparisons between the Soviet-led state-socialist bloc and democracies sparked scholarly controversy. Today, with China assuming the mantle of the most significant nondemocratic regime model, and with scholars pursuing innovative comparisons between China and other political systems (Duara and Perry 2018; Tsai 2016; Zhang 2013), it behooves us to revisit some of the questions that such comparisons pose. Specifically, when is it reasonable to pursue comparisons, what is their purpose, and what do they entail? In this short piece, I will address only some of the issues involved.

Theories of civil society set high expectations for grassroots associations, claiming that they school citizens in democracy and constrain powerful institutions. But when do real-life organizations actually live up to this billing? Homeowner organizations in the United States and elsewhere have sparked debate among political scientists, criticized by some as nonparticipatory and harmful to the overall polity and defended by others as benign manifestations of local self-governance. With this as a backdrop, China's emerging homeowner groups are used as a testing ground for exploring variation in three criteria of performance: self-organization, participation, and the exercising of power. Comparisons are drawn cross-nationally, among 23 cases in four Chinese cities and over time within neighborhoods. The article puts forward several factors affecting the properties of grassroots groups, highlighting the role of conflict, the political-legal environment, and collective action problems in shaping the way they engage their members and take political action. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008.]

Theories of civil society set high expectations for grassroots associations, claiming that they school citizens in democracy and constrain powerful institutions. But when do real-life organizations actually live up to this billing? Homeowner organizations in the United States and elsewhere have sparked debate among political scientists, criticized by some as nonparticipatory and harmful to the overall polity and defended by others as benign manifestations of local self-governance. With this as a backdrop, China's emerging homeowner groups are used as a testing ground for exploring variation in three criteria of performance: self-organization, participation, and the exercising of power. Comparisons are drawn cross-nationally, among 23 cases in four Chinese cities and over time within neighborhoods. The article puts forward several factors affecting the properties of grassroots groups, highlighting the role of conflict, the political—legal environment, and collective action problems in shaping the way they engage their members and take political action.