Books on the topic 'Constant comparative analysis/method'

The monograph presents a methodology for assessing the vulnerability of landscapes to external influences. A comparative analysis of the concepts of "stability", "sensitivity", "vulnerability" in relation to natural complexes. An overview of existing methods for assessing the vulnerability of natural complexes is presented. The author's method of assessing the vulnerability of landscapes to anthropogenic impacts is described. The methodology is based on: selection and justification of criteria for assessing the vulnerability of landscapes; preparation of a parametric matrix and gradation of assessment criteria in accordance with the developed vulnerability classes; calculation of weighting factors of vulnerability assessment parameters; selection of optimal territorial operational unit for landscape vulnerability assessment. The method is implemented in the GIS environment "Assessment of vulnerability of landscapes of the Kaliningrad region to anthropogenic impacts", created by the authors using modern geoinformation products. The specificity of spatial differentiation of different landscapes in terms of vulnerability to anthropogenic impacts at the regional and local levels is revealed. It is stated that the use of the methodology for assessing the vulnerability of landscapes to anthropogenic impacts and its integration into the system of nature management will ensure a balanced account of geoecological features and environmental priorities in territorial planning. It is of interest to specialists in the field of rational nature management, environmental protection, spatial planning.

Comparative Politics provides an introduction to the field. Comparative politics is an empirical science that deals primarily with domestic politics. It is one of the three main subfields of political science, alongside international relations and political theory. The text provides a comprehensive introduction to comparative politics. It includes three chapters dedicated to familiarizing readers with the comparative approach, discussing substance as well as method. It then guides readers through a thematically organized, comprehensive analysis of the core methods, theories, and concepts in comparative politics. Empirical data is drawn on to demonstrate key similarities and differences of political systems in practice. Increased focus is given to the Global South and its path towards democratization. At the end of each chapter, there are questions designed to encourage critical thinking. The six sections of the work deal with: theories and methods; the historical context; structures and institutions; actors and processes; public policies; and beyond the nation-state.

This chapter explores the principles of comparative research design as well as the issues and problems associated with different aspects of the approach. In particular, it considers the issue of case selection, the common sources of error that are associated with comparative research, and what can be done to try and avoid or minimize them. The comparative method is one of the most commonly used methods in political research and is often employed to investigate various political phenomena, including democratization, civil war, and public policy. The chapter discusses the three main forms of comparison, namely case study, small-N comparison, and large-N comparison. It also describes two main approaches used to select cases for small-N studies: Most Similar Systems Design and Most Different Systems Design. It also evaluates qualitative comparative analysis and concludes with an analysis of issues arising from case selection and data collection in large-N comparative research.

Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences.

This chapter explains the method of policy network (PN) analysis and its benefits (and limits) for cross-national comparative analysis. The purpose of the PN approach is to understand how the structure of relationships among organizations engaged in a policy domain affects the content of policy and outcomes. The chapter illustrates the use of the PN method with reference to the ongoing cross-national project Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (Compon). Global climate change constitutes an (un)naturally occurring quasi-experiment; in the face of a common threat, the various societies have exhibited divergent responses to reducing the cause, carbon emissions. This research project and network method can provide knowledge helpful to global negotiations as well as open up new vistas on thorny theoretical questions about the behavior and outputs of political systems.

After the 1994 Oslo Accords, Palestinians were hopeful that an end to the Israeli occupation was within reach, and that a state would be theirs by 1999. With this promise, international powers became increasingly involved in Palestinian politics, and many shadows of statehood arose in the territories. Today, however, no state has emerged, and the occupation has become more entrenched. Concurrently, the Palestinian Authority has become increasingly authoritarian, and Palestinians ever more polarised and demobilised. Palestine is not unique in this: international involvement, and its disruptive effects, have been a constant across the contemporary Arab world. This book argues that internationally backed authoritarianism has an effect on society itself, not just on regime-level dynamics. It explains how the Oslo paradigm has demobilised Palestinians in a way that direct Israeli occupation, for many years, failed to do. Using a multi-method approach including interviews, historical analysis, and cutting-edge experimental data, Dana El Kurd reveals how international involvement has insulated Palestinian elites from the public, and strengthened their ability to engage in authoritarian practices. In turn, those practices have had profound effects on society, including crippling levels of polarisation and a weakened capacity for collective action.

The book brings together articles by 24 authors, distributed into three problematic and thematic sections: a diachronic view of the Russian estate, estates of the Russian emigration, estates of European countries. A number of constant features of the Russian literary estate and cottages (storehouse of culture, moral space, the core of national identity, the concept of “non-city” in mass society, etc.) are highlighted in a comparative and diachronic analysis. The structure-forming potential and references of the “estate-dacha topos” in the foreign culture of Russian emigrants of the ХХth century disclosed in the works by I.A. Bunin, V.V. Nabokov, B.K. Zaitsev, L.F. Zurov, I.S. Shmelev, V.A. Nikiforov-Volgin of the 1920–1960s and in the Russian-language periodicals of France, Germany, Latvia, Estonia of the 1920–1930s. The most important topic of the book is the search for the origins of the Russian estate phenomenon in world culture, along with its involvement in the spectrum of similar phenomena in other national literatures (Greek, Polish, English, Belgian). The isomorphism of the estate space in Russia and other European countries allows us to speak of the “estate topos” as a universality. The publication is addressed to humanities professionals, primarily philo- logists, and at the same time to a wide circle of students and interested readers.

This volume critically reassesses the history of international law studies in the Italian context. It aims to address such basic questions as: How have such studies been driven by the convergence of global dynamics and context-dependent solutions based on local features, through a constant process of attrition and cross-fertilization? To what extent have historical and political turning points had an influence on such studies, scholars being part of broader academic or public debates or even active participants as legal advisers or politicians? Was international law used—or misused—by relevant actors in such contexts? Mixing scholars specialized in both international law and legal history this volume first provides a historical examination of the theoretical legal analysis present in the Italian context, in order to explore its main features, mainstream ideas, and dissident voices. The second part assesses the impact on international law studies of key international and domestic historical and political events involving Italy and, conversely, how the latter have been influenced by international law evaluations. Finally, a concluding part puts such analysis into broader and contemporary perspectives. This volume thus intervenes in a growing debate on the need to explore international law from comparative and situated viewpoints, a debate that has increased awareness of how regional, national, and local contexts have contributed to the shaping of international legal rules, institutions, and doctrines and, conversely, how the international dimension has influenced solutions at local levels, in light of the continuum pendulum between center and periphery of the international legal system.

This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible theoretical approach and a methodological framework. Analyzing the ways in which comparison is used in the study of religion, the book identifies the primary goals of this method and argues that it is constitutive for religious studies as an academic discipline. Revisiting various critiques of comparison—decontextualization and essentialization charges, postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques, and the perspectives of recent naturalistic approaches—the book incorporates insights gained from such debates into an approach that is based upon thorough epistemological analysis of comparison and that takes the scholar’s situatedness and agency seriously. Few scholars have reflected deeply upon how comparison works in practice. The book argues, and tries to demonstrate, that such reflections are useful both for producing and for evaluating comparative studies. It proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of comparison that is meant to prove relevant both for theoretical reflections and for the pragmatics of comparative work. In addition, it suggests a comparative approach—discourse comparison—that helps to confront the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. Arguing that the comparative method is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion, this book makes a case for comparison. It seeks to enrich the considerations of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about methodology, and encourage scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.

This chapter introduces the broad changes in the global politics of intellectual property that marked the late 1900s and early 2000s, and a coalitional argument for understanding cross-national and longitudinal diversity in response to the new external environment. The chapter situates the book’s analysis in the context of broader scholarship in comparative and international political economy, highlighting the importance of coalitions for understanding national forms of compliance to global changes. The chapter reviews scholarship on the politics of intellectual property, with an eye toward integrating international and domestic drivers of national policies. The chapter concludes with discussion of the logic of case selection, the method of data collection and comparative analysis, and the organization of the remainder of the book.

This chapter presents a new multi-level investigation of discourse that combines network analysis with qualitative content analysis. This book is the first to employ this method for multi-linguistic comparative research. The chapter first develops an understanding of discourse, which seeks to address some of the challenges discourse analysis has faced. It then describes the sources, the sampling procedure, the process of qualitative content analysis, and the logic of the applied coding scheme. A final section introduces details of the discourse network analysis, which combines the unique insight of qualitative interpretation, and the structural insights derived through the rigour of network analysis. This combination can pre-empt some of the concerns that critics have voiced about new quantitative approaches to analysing text. Its added value lies in the identification of clusters in the network, which point to discursive formations that structure meaning.

As a companion to the five regional reports in this volume, this chapter’s aim is a double one: first, to bring the comparison up to the regional level, and second, to analyse the international and domestic institutions, procedures, and mechanisms that affect how international human rights instruments influence domestic law. The chapter is therefore both a study in comparative international human rights law and a contribution to its methodology. Its structure is four-pronged. The first section clarifies the aim, object, and method of the comparison. The second section presents a comparative assessment of the Covenants’ domestic influence across regions and develops a grid of comparative analysis. The third section addresses the authority of the Committees’ interpretations of the Covenants, relying on a bottom-up comparative law argument. The fourth section discusses the role of human rights comparison and of regional human rights law in enhancing the legitimacy of the Committees’ future interpretations.

This chapter discusses the significance of literary milieu for the analysis and interpretation of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, in particular, the pre-exilic narratives found in Genesis-Kings (less Ruth). Appealing to literary milieu entails a type of literary-comparative method. There are, however, not one but two forms of literary comparison: historicist comparison, based on chronological and geographical contiguity, and formalist comparison, based on formal similarity. Whereas the concrete literary connections established by the former (so-called ancient Near Eastern parallels) are indispensable to the interpretation of specific passages, the abstract properties established by the latter (poetry, prose, oral tradition, and literature) bring into focus, rather, the different representational possibilities intrinsic to these different forms of narrative art.

How do political regimes respond to the challenges emanating from youth mobilization? This book seeks to understand regime resilience and breakdown by analysing the public meaning of youth, as well as the physical mobilization of young people. Mobilization by young people is a key component in understanding the stabilization of the authoritarian regime structures in contemporary Russia, but the Russian experience makes sense only if placed in its broader historical context. Three comparative cases—the breakdown of the authoritarian Soviet Union, the breakdown of the democratic Weimar Republic, and the crisis of the democratic regime in France around 1968—highlight how regimes which lacked popular support have compensated for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilize youth symbolically and politically. This book illustrates the symbolic significance of youth and its role in regime crisis by analysing a new dataset of newspaper articles with a new method of discourse analysis. The combination of qualitative interpretation and quantitative network analysis enables a deeper and more systematic understanding of discursive structures about youth. Through this methodological innovation the book contributes to the way we define the categories of youth, generation, and crisis. It makes the case that our conceptualization should reflect the way terms are being used—usages that can be captured in a systematic way with new methods of discourse analysis.

This chapter is not an example of comparative politics but of area studies, a field that is descriptive, cultural, historical, and contextual, seeking to analyse a country or region. The chosen area is the dominion countries of the British Commonwealth. The chosen method is the textual analysis of primary sources: speeches, writings, evidence to inquiries, and interviews by heads of the public services. This chapter analyses how the heads of the public services articulate the traditions of ‘constitutional bureaucracy’ found in Westminster systems of parliamentary government and selectively draw on past understandings to understand present-day changes. It describes traditions under challenge that reshape reforms as reforms reshape them. In each case, it is not a question of ‘in with the new, out with the old’, but of ‘in with the new alongside key components of the old’. The myths and legends of yore remain germane to the modern public service.

This chapter responds to a point which Chris Wickham raised in his recent review of my book on Dark Age Liguria: did chestnut cultivation show any economic specialization in this region in the early medieval period? Chestnuts figured a great deal in that book, which drew briefly on the surviving charter documentation for the region. In this chapter a more detailed analysis of charters from the tenth and eleventh centuries develops an answer to the question of specialized production with a comparative study in which the Genoese evidence is set alongside similar charter evidence from Milan and its region, where chestnuts were also cultivated for food. The Genoa–Milan comparison puts into practice Wickham’s advocacy of comparative method at the micro as well as at the macro scale, for regions where comparison has not historically been the norm. The comparison suggests that chestnuts were more important to the Genoese than the Milanese economy, in part for local climatic reasons but also, perhaps, because of fundamental political and social differences between these two cities. It will be shown that some charters show that the production of chestnuts was to some degree specialized, how it was specialized and what the consequences of that specialization were for each economic system.

The primary objective of this introduction is to establish the key theoretical concerns that are examined through the Han Kitab body of literature. The text defines the analytical boundaries of this discussion and identifies key issues about the study of Muslims in China—translation, interpretation, and sources. It defines the Han Kitab tradition as a genre of Chinese-language Islamic texts, which deploy “literati” discourses, themes, and references. Following this, the main subjects of the book, Wang Daiyu (1590–1658), Liu Zhi (1670–1724), and Ma Dexin (1794–1874), are briefly introduced. Next, the text critiques notions of centers and peripheries in establishing authenticity, orthodoxy, and authority. We argue that these literary artifacts are best understood as being produced within a dialogical process of past, present, and future readers and sources. Overall, the discussion describes a clear methodological method for a comparative assessment of key categories in the study of religion through an analysis of the Sino-Islamic tradition.

This chapter reports on the first large-scale community-based study of borrowing as it transpires in the course of regular bilingual interactions. It represents an initial attempt to furnish an empirical basis for going beyond attested loanwords to characterize the borrowing process. Departing from distinctions among lone other-language items of varying frequencies, detailed structural analyses ascertain whether English-origin nonce words incorporated into French display different structural properties from established loanwords. Among the diagnostics examined are gender assignment, plural inflection, verb morphology, word order, and phonetic realization. All lone items, whether nonce or established, display virtually identical linguistic behavior to attested loanwords. Integration is achieved almost immediately at the morphosyntactic level, while phonological integration is variable. This work inaugurated the comparative sociolinguistic method, illustrated throughout this volume, which will be seen to be crucial in the analysis of bilingual behavior, and led to the first corpus-based definition of nonce borrowing.

This chapter revisits trade-offs that qualitative researchers face when balancing the different expectations of area studies and disciplinary audiences. One putative solution to such trade-offs, mixed-method research, emphasizes the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods. CAS, as defined above, essentially encourages a different form of triangulation—the pooling of observations and interpretations across a wider array of cases spanning multiple areas. This kind of triangulation can be facilitated by cross-regional contextualized comparison, a middle-range approach that stands between area-bound qualitative research and (Millean) macro-comparative analysis that brackets out context in search of causal laws. Importantly, this approach relies upon an area specialist’s sensibilities and experience to generate awareness of local complexities and context conditions for less familiar cases. The examples of cross-regional contextualized comparison considered in this chapter collectively demonstrate that engagement with area studies scholarship and the pursuit of disciplinary knowledge can be a positive-sum game.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!