Compare or Perish: A Handbook for Strengthening the Field of Policy Analysis

‘Compare or Perish’, said the political scientist De Beus at a social science conference in 1992 reflecting on the poor state of comparison in political science at that time. The importance of comparison in areas such as political science and public administration has been advocated by many authors as the “very essence of the scientific method” (, p. 878; ; ; ; ; ). Almost three decades after De Beus’ statement, we can say that the field of comparison in [...]

This does not mean that public policies were not compared in the literature, but rather the methods and theories of both political science and public administration fields were used for this. However, with the strengthening of the policy analysis area and its expansion as an interdisciplinary but independent field, the need to build its own theories and methods began to emerge. The new book organized by Guy Peters and Guillaume Fontaine, 'Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Comparative Policy Analysis' is an important milestone in this effort.
In its 22 chapters, written by authors from different countries, the book intends to "advance the understanding of methodology in the study of comparative public policies, as much as to broaden the array of methods and techniques considered by CPA (comparative policy analysis) scholars in their research design" (PETERS and FONTAINE, 2020, p. 01).
Throughout the book, all the authors try to demonstrate, from different perspectives, the importance of adopting specific methods or unique approaches to analyze public policies. As proposed by the organizers in the introduction to justify this effort, "given the multi-disciplinary nature of policy studies, the methodological challenges in CPA are arguably more complex than for other research areas in social science. Therefore, there is a greater need to provide an overview of the available methods, as well as their strengths and weaknesses for addressing theoretical issues (…)" (PETERS and FONTAINE, 2020, p. 01).
One of the main justifications for developing a specific field for comparative policy analysis is its multi-disciplinary nature and the idea that this agenda requires multiple-methods. Influences from political science, public administration, sociology, anthropology, economy, and law studies are only some examples of how the policy analysis area dialogues with different theories, methods, and approaches. The organizers also rely on an idea proposed by Pollitt (2013) in one of his last books to justify the sp ecificity of the CPA field: the argument that the context matters when analyzing public policies.
Introducing the importance of the context into a comparison is one of the distinctions of the field, as the book advocates. Another distinctive feature Gabriela Lotta (2020) 14 (2) e0008 -3/9 of this field proposed by the book is that policy analysis is usually concerned with processes, elements that should also be introduced into CPA.
The book makes also an important contribution in convincing readers why it is important to use comparison in policy analysis. It answers this question by arguing with theoretical and empirical reasons.
Comparison enables governments to develop more effective and efficient policies, However, all the authors are very careful to suggest that there is neither a best method nor best way to conduct comparisons in policy analysis.
Actually, the book provides readers with many possibilities and a critical evaluation of their advantages and disadvantages. The book also considers that methods should never be chosen as a technique. "A methodology is best understood as the product of a philosophical ontology (the relationship between the mind and the world) and a scientific ontology" (the relationship between the status of empirical data and our knowledge about the world) (PETER andFONTAINE, 2020, p. 09 apud JACKSON, 2016). Ultimately, the book is a useful road map for scholars from CPA to make good decisions about their research design and the methods to be used, based on their philosophical and scientific ontologies.
Many reasons make this book a very important contribution to the policy analysis field. The first one is by presenting us with the road map described above which provides a "conscious choice of the methods to be used, given the strength that triangulation of methods and theory can bring to research" (PETER and FONTAINE, 2020, p. 14).

Gabriela Lotta
(2020) 14 (2) e0008 -5/9 Second, it reinforces the idea that policy analysis is a multi-disciplinary and multi-methods field that needs different approaches and methods. Issues like change, process, and context are central to this field and can be addressed by different perspectives and analytical tools.
The third is that it proposes the construction of coherent models and methods that consider the specificities of policy analysis but also enables scholars to recognize themselves as a field.
Actually, it is important also to recognize Guy Peters' efforts in this effort to Issues as corruption, clientelism, and patronage are not 'mistakes' in many of these countries, they are actually constitutive of those societies.
If we just use CPA to compare countries lik e these with countries from the global north, we tend to always reinforce the idea that in these countries we have less democracy, less accountability, and worse policy outcomes -which may be true, but this may also not enable us to understand the real processes that occur in these contexts.
I must say that it is quite relevant that one of the book's organizers, Guillaume Fontaine, works in Ecuador. And that the book has a chapter from a Brazilian scholar, Osmany Porto, and from a Mexican scholar, Raul Pacheco-Vega. This shows how scholars from developing countries are gaining space in the policy analysis field. We hope that they, together with other scholars, may be able in the future to address these questions and propose new approaches and methods that incorporate in its grounds these differences of contexts.

For this reason as well, the Handbook of Research Methods and
Applications in Comparative Policy Analysis is a must-read book for those interested in advancing in the field of public policy.