Workshop
Workshop: Rethinking Qualitative Comparison
- Date
- Thursday 13 November 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 2.17
Qualitative comparative methods—and specifically controlled qualitative comparisons–have been central to some of the most influential works of social science. Yet, even as controlled comparisons have produced lasting insights and continue to dominate research designs, they are not the only form of comparison that scholars utilize. There is little methodological guidance in political science, however, for how to design comparisons that do not rely on control as a central element, and little epistemological insight on why such comparisons might be compelling.
In this session, we will explore logics of comparison that are not motivated by control. The session will be driven by four questions: What kinds of questions lend themselves to non-controlled comparisons? How should we design non-controlled comparative research? In particular, how should we think through case selection? What kinds of insights about the world are non-controlled comparisons positioned to produce?
This workshop will be relevant to anyone who is interested in reflecting on new trends in qualitative comparative methods in general, or in their own projects (PhD candidates, junior and senior academic staff). It will include a short participatory element to work through attendees’ own projects.
About the speaker:
Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader (Associate Professor) in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is also co-Editor-in-Chief (with Eva Bellin) of the journal, Comparative Politics. Smith’s research utilizes qualitative methods to examine how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to challenge that order.
With Erica S. Simmons, Smith has written about the intersection of comparative and ethnographic methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. For their work, Simmons and Smith were jointly awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association. He is currently working on another book with Erica S. Simmons (under contract with Cambridge University Press) that reconsiders the goal of generalization in political research.