Abstract

MUNCK, Gerardo L.  and  SNYDER, Richard. Comparative Politics at a Crossroad: Problems, Opportunities and Prospects from the North and South.Translated byAna Inés Fernández Ayala. Polít. gob [online]. 2019, vol.26, n.1, pp.139-158.  Epub June 26, 2020. ISSN 1665-2037.

How has the field of comparative politics in the US evolved since the turn of the millennium? What might a scholar based in Latin America, a different working environment than the United States, do to contribute to comparative politics? Researchers in the US currently give disproportionate attention to matters of methods, tend to address narrow substantive questions, and pay inadequate attention to matters of theory. However, the research community in the US is diverse, and no trend dominates for long. In turn, few researchers in Latin America work in the kinds of circumstances conducive to careers focused fully on research that their peers in the US enjoy. Still, there are advantages to working in the periphery, including greater knowledge of the languages and cultures, a stronger ability to produce "thick knowledge" that sets research in context, and closer proximity to empirical phenomena of interest that can make the stakes of research more obvious. Moreover, Latin American scholars can benefit from selectively engaging with ideas and colleagues from the North. We thus see not only problems and obstacles but also opportunities for comparative politics in both the North and South.

Keywords : comparative politics; theory; methods; North-South collaboration; knowledge production; political economy of research.

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