van Kersbergen, Kees. "Comparative Politics: Some Points for Discussion". European Political Science, Vol.9, No.1 (2010): 49-61.

van Kersbergen, Kees. "Comparative Politics: Some Points for Discussion". European Political Science, Vol.9, No.1 (2010): 49-61.

• Since the mid-1980s, with the broader shift within the social and political sciences towards the institutionalist school, political science has begun focusing much less on history, sociology, and the reasons behind events, and much more on measuring the outcomes of political events to enhance the predictive power of theories (50).
• Analyses of comparative politics which allow parties, states, or individuals to behave as independent actors have been largely marginalized within the field. An exclusion of actors and a concentration on institutions is the norm in political science (51).
• Comparative politics has come to focus almost exclusively on the differences between cases, rather than explaining similarities across cases. The methods used have transitioned from most-different systems to most-similar systems (54). This concentration on explaining variation is likely a consequence of the growing emphasis on the scientific method within political science, where experimentation becomes key and sociological explanations are no longer acceptable (55).
• The increase of literature on the 'end of the state' and 'globalization' has created a fear among political scientists that many of their concepts, like 'states' or 'national systems' are now obsolete. In response, they started creating new, confusing, and pointless terms to avoid mention of these 'obsolete' concepts (57).