Comparison, Triangulation, and Embedding Research in History: A Methodological Self-Analysis

Abstract

Over the course of five decades, a social scientist can register many achievements – but can make many mistakes as well. This paper details some of those achievements but also admits to some of those mistakes and explains what can be learned from them over a career spent studying social movements, local politics, political parties, and contentious politics more generally. The underlying methodological strand in the work described below is to try to find ways of bringing qualitative-historical and systematic-quantitative materials together in a search for the tangled relationships between contentious and institutional politics.