The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice

“Paired comparison assumes that a number of relevant contextual factors between the two cases are fairly similar (Tarrow 2010).”

“We employ a paired comparison approach in terms of research methods, aligning with comparative politics ’ Most Similar Systems Design (Tarrow 2010, Gisselquist 2014).”

“…sharing most of the conditions, totally diverge in both the ‘‘relevant’’ conditions and the outcomes, I will be able to ‘‘direct [my] attention to the ways in which they differ (Gerring, 2007:133-35)’’ (Tarrow 2010:234), examining in particular how such opposite ‘‘causal forces’’ actually work.”

“In order to understand variations across villages, I deployed the strategy of paired comparisons (Tarrow, 2010).”

“Appealing to case-study-based generalizations, the UAE, a least-likely case, allows to control for selection bias and to make claims about SWF choices across Gulf rentier states more robust (Tarrow, 2010).”

“We also encourage theoretically-informed ‘ paired comparisons ’ (Tarrow, 2010), within and across countries.”

“In addition, the cases are paired with a mainstream party-led case operating within the same systemic context, to provide an analytical baseline with which to 636 Fred Paxton assess the distinctiveness of the PRR-led case (Tarrow 2010: 244).”

“The essay explores the implications of this general argument in the Caucasus using a sub-national research design of paired comparisons (Tarrow 2010).”

“Parallels between Indonesia and Pakistan provide a good opportunity to use the method of paired comparison (Tarrow 2010).”

“Embracing methodological pluralism (Tarrow, 2010: 252), we conduct within-case analyses in both probes combining visual thinking, quantitative methods (network analysis and spatial analysis) and process tracing.”

“Comparing American and French knowledge regimes Drawing on comparative political science (Doherty & Hayes, 2014; Tarrow, 2010) showing the merits of focused international comparison for revealing mechanisms of social phenomena, I compare gay family knowledge production fields in the U.S. and France.”

“To answer it, we have developed the concept of frame internationalization, inspired by Tarrow’s conceptualization of internalization (Tarrow, 2010a), and the concept of frame bridging (Snow, Rochford, Worden & Benford, 1986).”

“We focus on three US NCMs following a most similar research design: FfF, XR and SM (Seawright and Gerring 2008, Tarrow 2010).”

“This article is situated inside the framework of a qualitative political analysis and has been structured according to the pattern of a thematic and paired comparison (Tarrow 2010).”

“To this end, I will leverage a series of purposefully selected case comparisons (Gerring 2007; Tarrow 2010).”

“The study first re-examines the substance of EU democracy promotion through a paired comparison (Tarrow 2010) of the Union’s efforts in Ukraine and Belarus.”

“The move from single-case to paired comparison offers a balanced combination of descriptive depth and analytical challenge that progressively declines as more cases are added [44].”

“This approach not only adds confidence in the theory through process tracing, thus reducing the possibility of interpreting potentially spurious relationships as causal, but also increases inferential power by combining correlations, such as the ones discussed above, with an analysis of specific variables, mechanisms,…”

“To explain the emergence of this linkage strategy, we adopted a paired process-tracing methodology (Falleti and Lynch 2009; Tarrow 2010), an approach well suited to following the multicausal sequence of interactions between right-wing parties and activist groups during prolonged contentious cycles.”

“However, Iceland and Romania have tackled these risks in different ways.”

“Japan and Korea because this make it possible to study cross-national variation in effects while simultaneously drawing on country-specific factors to explain the variation (Tarrow, 2008).”

“Following the logic of paired comparisons (Tarrow, 2010), we compare each of the two obvious cases of relations to autocracies in the target region, namely Chinese-Cuban and Chinese-Venezuelan relations, to structurally similar cases (Chinese relations with Costa Rica and Chile, respectively).”

“Dans le premier cas, l’enjeu consiste à faire ressortir la variété des phénomènes sociaux au sein de systèmes a priori ressemblants ; dans le second, les différences entre systèmes sociaux sont au contraire minimisées (Gerring 2007 ; Tarrow 2010).”

“This latter issue can simply be ruled out by narrowing the scope conditions (Tarrow, 2010) Key to table: A: name, if existent (coded as 1), of the cantonal LG association; B: functioning website (coded as 1) or special URL (0.5); C: association statutes publicly available; D: intra-parliamentary…”

“This study compares the policy responses of the EU and Canada to the Ukrainian crisis using a paired comparison strategy (Tarrow, 2010).”

“Like Wood, and like another author who has written about paired comparisons in this journal (Tarrow, 2010), Simmons chose dissimilar cases—the “water wars” in Bolivia and Mexican farmers’ struggle to maintain the price of corn—to show how similar mechanisms operated in both systems.”

“This section draws on my contribution, “Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide” to Henry Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry (Tarrow, 2010a).”

“The research adopts a paired comparative method in order to provide a rich and detailed analysis of qualitative data that goes beyond the exploration of a single case study (Tarrow, 2010).”

“In a recent piece, Sidney Tarrow (2010) extols the benefits of paired comparisons.”

“By studying two cases rather than one or multiple, the added value of comparison is introduced while maintaining indepth discussion (Tarrow 2010).”

“…the mechanisms or events ‘ that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations ’ (Tarrow 2010: 239) to understand how initial gender-parity cabinets establish a concrete floor of gender parity in cabinet reshuf-fles (or fail to…”

“Adopting a paired case comparison (Eisenhardt, 1989; Tarrow, 2010), we aim to formulate a typology of the governance attributes of farmer cooperatives and investigate the roles of various non-economic factors in the dynamics of the governance attributes of cooperatives.”

“For a discussion of the logic of paired case comparisons, see Tarrow (2010) and Slater and Ziblatt (2013).”

“Our strategy is the following: First, our goal is not just to relate antecedents to outcomes (Tarrow 2010) but also to explain variation in the pace of reforms and/or policy compliance by specifying the mechanisms by which these outcomes were brought about (Elster 1983).”

“In spite of important asymmetries between the PB experiences conducted in Delhi and Chengdu (see Table 1), we will show that a comparative analysis of these two case studies can be theory-building (Tarrow, 2010, p. 245).”

“In order to trace the role of Mipim as an input of policymaking – or how policymakers who attend these fairs “arrive at” policies (Robinson, 2015) – we have conducted a paired comparison (Tarrow, 2010) following an a priori most different selection of cases.”

“When juxtaposing the dissolution of Germany's and Russia's democracies, we use “a distinct strategy of comparative analysis that both single cases and multicase comparisons lack” (Tarrow, 2010: 230).”

“This article has been structured according to the pattern of a paired comparison (Tarrow, 2010).”

“The paired comparison provides several advantages: it provides a ‘balanced combination of descriptive depth and analytical challenge’ as an intermediate step in theory-building between single-cases and multi-cases (Tarrow 2010, p. 243).”

“In the following sub-sections we employ what Tarrow (2010) calls dual process tracing to investigate this point.”

“Using two country cases to test our set of general expectations has important drawbacks (Tarrow 2010).”

“In what follows, we address the analysis of the impact of domestic versus global contextual influences through a paired comparison (Tarrow 2010) of two cases characterised by quite similar movement traditions, but in which the configuration of political opportunities is instead very different.”

“The second part involves a paired comparison using the Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD), focusing on cases with similar positional shifts (independent variable) that only di ff er in electoral outcome (dependent variable) (Tarrow 2010).”

“The diverse trajectories of social movements are often better articulated when researchers attend to their ‘historical temporalities’ (Sewell, 2005) and similar dynamics and outcomes (Tarrow, 2010).”

“Embora seja uma metodologia associada à análise qualitativa, ela proporciona uma combinação balanceada entre profundidade descritiva e desafios analíticos que progressivamente declinam quanto mais casos forem adicionados (Tarrow, 2010).”

“…contexts being examined, the paired comparison we perform throughout is a distinct analytical strategy that uses the leverage afforded by the differences and similarities of comparable cases, thereby increasing the inferential power of the design over standard single-case studies (Tarrow, 2010).”

“These cases were chosen because both pairs exhibit variation in democratic institutions and human rights outcomes but share other key variables in common (Tarrow 2010).”

“…hepatitis C (HCV) victims’ activism, and the movements’ analogous tactics and claims enable me to conduct a “paired comparison” that minimizes potential confounding factors and isolates the impact that each country’s media environment had on the publicity these movements received (Tarrow 2010).”

“pressure (EMU requirements) (Tarrow 2010).”

“…Tsay 2000; Abbott 1992; Griffin 1993), Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) or “ fuzzy set social science ” (Ragin 2000, 2014), “ paired comparisons ” (Tarrow 2010), methods for comparing historical time periods through “ sequences of problem solving ” (Haydu 1998), various strategies of “…”

“However, the possibility to conduct a paired comparison of local polities (McAdam et al., 2001; Tarrow, 2010), which differ substantially in terms of consolidation and cleavage salience, has also a direct theoretical relevance.”

“Structured paired comparisons (Tarrow 2010) between those sets, and all in all twelve pairs, have been performed in order to identify the (relative) influence of each condition on the dependent variable, i.e. fans’ degree of Europeanisation.”

“Here I follow an intermediate path and adopt the structured focused comparison approach proposed by George and Bennett (2005) while also drawing on the paired comparison method proposed by Tarrow (2010).”

“…for a paired comparison which grants us a maximum of case intimacy and helps us to avoid looking only at 2In Europe, as of 2021 an aviation tax is in place in eight countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK (EU 2019). national idiosyncrasies (Tarrow 2010).”

“The result is a constructivist twist on the comparative research strategy of “paired comparison” (Tarrow 2010) that avoids treating each occupation as ontologically separate.”

“using a paired comparison (Tarrow 2010): Flanders (a Dutch-speaking community of the Belgian state) and Quebec (a Francophone province of Canada).”

“This is particularly true for most-similar systems design, ‘in which common systemic characteristics are conceived of as ‘‘controlled for,’’ whereas intersystemic differences are viewed as explanatory variables’ (Tarrow, 2010: 234).”

“According to George and Bennett [52], case studies enable deep contextual understanding and they have potential for achieving high conceptual validity; case studies are a useful means to closely examine the hypothesized role of causal mechanisms in the context of individual cases.”

“These guidelines are particularly relevant when investigating the magnitude of causal effects (Beach and Pedersen, 2018; Gerring, 2007; King et al., 1994; Lieberman, 2005; Tarrow, 2010).”

“Hence, even if more cases are contrasted to assess the relevance of certain factors in determining similar or different outcomes, PT implies that their processes are traced singularly and separately to explain their specific case-outcomes (Bennett and Elman, 2006; Tarrow, 2010).”

“I employ 2 × 2 paired comparisons for dual process tracing, a strategy that accounts for ‘ differences and similarities in outcomes ’ and ‘ relates variables to one another over time ’ (Tarrow 2010).”

“To this end, I engage in a paired comparison which offers ‘a balanced combination of descriptive depth and analytical challenge’ (Tarrow 2010, 246) and helps to better understand what is specific to the individual cases.”

“In doing so, we can trace the mechanisms at play while also cross-checking the findings by comparing cases.(49) Process tracing is an inherently deductive method whereby theorised causal mechanisms are traced empirically by looking”