Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Aligning Ontology with Methodology

    I’m doing a Zoom talk on Friday afternoon at FLACSO Mexico City this coming Friday. The title of the talk is “Single Country Research in Comparative Politics: The Promises and Pitfalls of Aligning Methodology with Ontology.” There’s no paper yet, but I’m taking this as an opportunity to try out an argument about what has happened to comparative politics in the last 20 years. Here is the argument.

    In “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics“, Peter Hall argued that there was a growing disconnect between the regression-based model of large-n comparison in comparative politics, and the growing body of research on history, sequence, and path-dependence in many of the sophisticated comparative politics works of the late-1990s and early-2000s. He argued that they should be aligned:

    I will argue for the usefulness of a method, based on small-N comparison, that has long been available to the field but underappreciated because small-N comparison has too often been seen as a terrain for the application of “weak” versions of the statistical method rather than as one on which a robust but different kind of method can be practiced.

    But there is an unspoken assumption that underlies Hall’s argument. Like most everyone reading this piece, Hall assumed that a proper resolution of this tension would necessarily mean aligning method with theory.

    I will propose on Friday that in point of fact, the opposite has happened. Twenty years on, comparative politics has aligned theory with method, and so the dominant ontology of comparative politics is one that is amenable to quantitative analysis in the causal inference template. This is an important thing to notice. And it is worth thinking about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

    There will be plenty of graphs to make the descriptive point, but the bigger point is a conceptual one, so I’ll be walking through how I think about the argument and its stakes in more of a lecture format. The argument draws the arguments I’ve made here (PDF) and here (PDF) and on the thinking I’ve done with various collaborators about the past and future of comparative politics and area studies.

  • Learning about Nguyen the Accomplished

    One of the privileges of teaching Southeast Asian Politics is how it helps me to discover new facts, new anecdotes, and new perspectives on old subjects. Sometimes I learn these things from my students, sometimes I learn these things as a result of trying to answer a question from students.

    Several years ago, for example, I learned about the Joyoboyo prophesy while trying to answering the question from a student about what do Indonesians learn about the Japanese occupation during WWII? My recent lectures on modern Vietnamese politics have provided me with another good one.

    Here is a picture taken from a Vietnamese school. Thanks to one solid year of Vietnamese language in graduate school Google Translate, I can get a sense of the conversation.

    It relates the story of an enterprising young man in colonial-era Annam (French Indochina) named Nguyễn Tất Thành (that name is what is obscured by the head on the left… written Ng Tất Th___). He is speaking with his friend Pear (bạn = a familiar term of address, lê = pear) about his desire to go overseas to see the world and use his experiences to help the Vietnamese people:

    Tôi muốn đi ra nước ngoài, xem nước Pháp và các nước khác. Sau khi xem xét họ làm như thế nào, Tôi sẽ trở về giúp đồng bào chúng ta.

    I want to go abroad, to see France as well as other countries. After seeing how they do it, I will return to help our compatriots.

    But look at Mr. Nguyễn’s hands. Part of the story I have been told is that Mr. Nguyễn responded to the question “how will you earn money to do this?” by responding “with my hands—my hands are my money.” It is remarkable to see that those hands are stamped with dollar signs rather than the đồng symbol (₫) to signify this point.

    The story also becomes more evocative when you realize that Nguyễn Tất Thành is a sobriquet that means “Nguyen the Accomplished.” And even more so once you realize that this same Nguyen was later known to the world as Ho Chi Minh.