MAKING COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS COUNT

Abstract

Often, when social scientists hear the phrase general knowledge they immediately start thinking in terms of relationships between abstract concepts represented in terms of variables. They have been trained to equate general knowledgewith discourse about relationships between variables. For example, a social scientistmight observe that the most economically advanced countries are also stabledemocracies and from this observation posit that there is a general relationship betweendevelopment and democracy. Thus, he or she might state, in general knowledge terms,that "economic development furthers democratic stability, as seen in the correlationbetween the variables democracy and development." In this paper, I argue that generalknowledge can come in other forms and that it is not dependent on a discourse groundedin correlations between variables.