Modern Comparative Politics Facing Challenges of Development
The article examines the current situation in comparative politics as part of general political science. The author concludes that the fundamental problems in this discipline are due to a simplified understanding of theory and methodology. In its theoretical dimension, political science lags behind the post-non-classical picture of the world, which combines randomness and necessity, reversibility and irreversibility, linearity and nonlinearity, dynamism and stability, and so on. At methodological level, the shortened understanding of methodology as a science of methods is prevailing, not as a way of exploring a subject by placing it in a broad meta-context. Regarding the tools, the irrelevance of opposing qualitative and quantitative methods and of reducing the whole range of quantitative methods to their specific categories is emphasized. Nevertheless, the forecast for the further development of comparative studies is positive, as diligent “laboratory” work is being done in many fields.