IQMR 2026

Comparative Historical Analysis (Modules 10, 14)

Wednesday, June 17; Thursday, June 18

Eggers Hall, Room 010

Marcus Kreuzer (Villanova University)

We live in a constantly emerging world in which the contexts in which we explain social phenomena change across time and place. Comparative historical analysis (CHA) has long been attentive to the temporal and spatial dynamics shaping social phenomena. It complements traditional methods that often background such dynamics behind historical and geographic scope conditions. CHA includes 19th century social science classics, American Political Development, historical institutionalism, global and diplomatic history, post-colonial studies, political geography, place-based analysis, or any intellectual agenda interested in macro-historical questions. These approaches share an ontological self-awareness necessary in problem-driven research that emphasizes the proper alignment of methods with questions.

The module discusses four key elements of CHA:

Overall, the module encourages students to explore the complex interplay between causal elements, time and space to make social inquiry more multi-dimensional and become more self-aware about the theory-laden nature of evidence. What contexts we construct determines what we see and what questions we answer. It also makes us aware what evidence we overlook, what questions we ignore, and how the resulting ignorance biases the answers we get.

Book to Purchase: Marcus Kreuzer. The Grammar of Time: A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Participants may enter the module sequence after it has begun, but their doing so is discouraged.

Comparative Historical Analysis I (M10, June 17)

8:45am - 10:15am – Thinking Historically: Problematizing History and Geography

CHA is problem driven and presumes that research questions—particularly in an ever-changing and globally entangled world—rarely pose themselves. Identifying questions requires initial exploration, journalistic-like description, and ultimately establishing a baseline for our understanding of what is going on in a macro-historical phenomenon. Historical thinking provides the analytical, temporal and spatial framework to structure this exploratory research stage.

Historians prefer to travel light when they head for the archives, but they nevertheless employ various, substantive, temporal and spatial frames to identify patterns that become research questions. Historical thinking provides a broader ontological map for these units of analysis that guide exploration. Moreover, historical thinking problematizes existing accounts by looking at the same phenomena from different substantive, temporal and spatial lenses. It foregrounds new evidence, answers new questions and thereby generates new inductive insights. This module illustrates the pay-offs of historical thinking by contrasting it with statistical thinking that operates under more abstract, less readily explorable contextual assumptions.

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1:30pm - 3:00pm – Thinking Temporally: Varieties of Time

Thinking historically involves thinking temporally. Historical thinking appears at first sight to involve a serendipitous and largely unsystematic sleuthing. On closer analysis, it is structured by deploying two notions of time—historical and physical time—as well as a specific temporal vocabulary. Temporal thinking does not come naturally and requires mastering this temporal vocabulary, just as statistics requires mastering probability theory. This session differentiates between four notions of historical time: cyclical, bounded, serial and eventful. Each notion freezes history to a different degree, foregrounds varying levels of contextual complexity, and serves distinct methodological purposes.

The session then pivots to discussing five elements of physical time: tempo, duration, timing, sequencing, and stages. These mechanical, clock-like elements of physical time play a dual role in CHA. First, they serve to capture the more context independent elements of historical change and thereby better understand its differing rhythms. Second, they also serve to unfreeze linear notions of causality (i.e. potential outcomes, average treatment effect) and elucidate more historical notions of causality.

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3:30pm - 5:00pm – Eventful Analysis: Identifying Patterns of (Dis-)continuity

Eventful analysis is the most interpretivist, descriptive, and exploratory strand of CHA. It tries to establish what is going on, elucidate existing concepts, and identify historical continuities and discontinuities. It employs the most unfrozen notion of historical time—eventful history—and draws on physical time to analyze the rhythms at which history unfolds. Eventful analysis is deeply embedded in global history, diplomatic history, global historical sociology, constructivist international relations theory, American Political Development, historical institutionalism, the history of the welfare state, postcolonialism, and race and gender studies.

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Comparative Historical Analysis II (M14, June 18)

8:45am - 10:15am – Longue Durée Analysis: Temporal Broadening and Exploring

James Scott observed that “once you elongate the time horizon, things start to move.” Such temporal broadening is the hallmark of longue durée analysis that explores longer-term, slower moving patterns of historical change. It is the least developed strand of CHA. It is used by economic historians, demographers, evolutionary psychologists, and historians influenced by the French Annals school. It often employs time series data and leverages various data visualization tools to identify long-term trends. Longue durée analysis plays a particularly important role in shifting the analysis from, what Paul Pierson called, short/short explanations to explanations with more long-term temporal perspectives. It also partially overlaps with historical political economy, a more recent entrant to historical social science.

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1:30pm - 3:00pm – Grounding Explanations Theoretically

Despite its emphasis on exploration, CHA remains committed to advancing theoretically grounded explanations that are empirically validated in a transparent and replicable fashion. However, given its commitment to placing questions before methods, CHA is unwilling to define itself in terms of a single causal inference strategy. It draws heavily on process tracing and causal graphing to make causally complex inferences. It complements process tracing in three distinct ways. It highlights temporal and spatial causal mechanisms (e.g. path dependency, sequencing, intercurrences, diffusion, tipping points), emphasizes theory’s role in updating findings across research cycles, and stresses the value of causal graphs to visualize explanations. The module highlights CHA style process tracing with experimental and quasi-experimental research designs. These designs are capable of estimating causal effects by backgrounding many of the contextual complexities that CHA foregrounds.

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3:30pm - 5:00pm – Conclusion: CHA and “Angry Science”

CHA imposes fewer parameters or scope conditions so that it can explore context in its full complexity. It treats the discoveries of this exploration as inductive insights that help to update theories. This exploration and updating are highly theoretical activities. CHA, following historians, uses theory to problematize existing explanations. Problematizing involves shifting theoretical frames or changing your temporal or spatial units of analysis to foreground different sets of causal factors. CHA also depends on theory to integrate new inductive insights into existing theories, when appropriate, or construct entirely new theories. The paper on Sweden’s PR adoption illustrates this abductive updating process.

Towards the end of his career, Daniel Kahneman became increasingly troubled by the unwillingness of scholars to update their beliefs and the professional incentive structure that reinforced this theoretical obstinacy. He contended that this intransigence contributed to “angry science.” CHA’s heterodoxy offers a template for what Kahneman called adversarial collaboration. This concluding module shows how CHA offers a more integrative approach to social inquiry. It evaluates its potential to reduce angry science by offering a more even balance between exploration and confirmation and emphasizing the interactive and theory-guided nature of knowledge production.

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