Draft paper presented to Workshop on Theories and Methods in Sheffield 2016. A version of this paper was later published as Ryan, M. (2018). The Comparative Method. In V. Lowndes, D. Marsh, & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theory and Methods in Political Science (4th ed.). (Political Analysis). Palgrave Macmillan. The Comparative Method Matt Ryan Introduction Plenty of political scientists will say that one of the ways – or perhaps the way they study politics is by using the comparative method. You may hear some distinguish their work by saying that that they are ‘comparativists’, or that they work in the subfield of ‘comparative politics’. What do they mean? There is no such thing as a research method that is not comparative. As Swanson nicely puts it “thinking without comparison is unthinkable” (Swanson as quoted in Ragin 1987: 1). Every thought or action we come across is understood with reference to previously acquired information, thoughts and experiences. Why then do political scientists talk about a distinctive comparative method? This paper answers that question by first explaining the historical development of comparison in the study of politics. I then present ‘Mill’s methods’ and update them by drawing a lineage to current developments in case-based/set-theoretic methods, providing examples along the way. The paper focuses on important debates about how cases are chosen for comparison and discusses critiques of comparativists’ research strategies. I discuss how recent evolutions in methods and approaches in the discipline pose difficulties for proponents of a distinctly valuable comparative method. I argue, nevertheless, that the strategic expertise of a good comparativist is witnessed in their sensitivity to the implications of trade-offs among different sampling strategies for explaining and predicting politics. Good comparativists know how to identify and exploit opportunities for reasoning from the comparison of attributes in particular cases. Understanding the logic and purpose of comparison is paramount for those who engage in political science because comparison is not just a method, but it is the fundamental process by which any branch of academic scholarship develops and consolidates itself. Comparative politics and comparative method - Politics beyond the armchair? The comparative method is as much about what political scientists study as it is about how they study it. Impulsive parents have been known to give their children unfortunate names and this might well be true of the founders of ‘comparative politics’. The moniker of comparative politics emerged in the discipline of political science to designate that category of research that was not primarily concerned with either normative political theory or international relations. The legacy of this move is one source of confusion. Both conceptual and normative analysis imply comparison and often employ comparison explicitly, for example in the form of considering counterfactuals in thought experiments. Nevertheless, early proponents of a distinctive comparative method saw themselves to be moving the