Introduction: The Comparative Observation of Government Activity

Abstract

When they discuss their research findings or practices, policy analysts, like their colleagues in the other social sciences, disagree most of the time. These disagreements may spring from divergent conceptions of knowledge but also from divergent conceptions of what the actual object of observation is. In other words, apparent disagreements on how to go about doing research or on what is important in a set of findings often are not really disagreements but merely parallel monologues — contenders simply do not talk about the same thing. Hence the importance of the definition of the object of analysis and of its status in a research design. In this introduction, I want to do two things. First, I want to propose a definition of government activity that will allow for the development of a typology of the forms government activity may take — a typology that will transcend the fields of government intervention and particularly the foreign/domestic divide. Second, I want to argue that, according to the methodological status government activity has in a given research, the issues of validity and of conceptualisation will have different bearings. I will then introduce each of the contributions to this volume and show how they relate to these two issues.