Editing Arend Lijphart (section)

===Methodology===
Lijphart has also made influential contributions to methodological debates within comparative politics, most notably through his 1971 article "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method," published in the ''[[American Political Science Review]]''.<ref name="Lijphart 1971 682–693">{{cite journal|last=Lijphart|first=Arend|s2cid=55713809|year=1971|title=Comparative politics and the comparative method|journal=American Political Science Review|volume=65|issue=3|pages=682–693|jstor=1955513|doi=10.2307/1955513}}</ref>

In this article Lijphart argues that the comparative method can be understood in contrast to the experimental and statistical methods and claims that the main difficulty facing the comparative method is that "it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases."<ref name="Lijphart 1971 682–693"/> To solve this problem, Lijphart suggests four solutions:<ref name="Lijphart 1971 682–693"/>
* (1) "increasing the number of cases as much as possible by means of longitudinal extension and a global range of analysis" 
* (2) "Reducing the property space of the analysis"
* (3) "Focusing the comparative analysis on 'comparable' cases"
* (4) "Focusing on the key variables"

Lijphart also discusses the [[case study]] method and identifies six types of case studies:<ref name="Lijphart 1971 682–693"/>
* (1) Atheoretical
* (2) Interpretative
* (3) Hypothesis-generating
* (4) Theory-confirming
* (5) Theory-infirming
* (6) Deviant case analyses

Lijphart work on methodology drew on ideas developed by [[Neil Smelser]].<ref>Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, "Arend Lijphart: Political Institutions, Divided Societies, and Consociational Democracy," pp. 234–72, in Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, ''Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics''. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, p. 263; Neil J. Smelser, "Notes on the Methodology of Comparative Analysis of Economic Activity." ''Social Science Information'' 6(2–3) 1967: 7–21; Neil J. Smelser, ''Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976.</ref> It was also the point of departure for the work by [[David Collier (political scientist)|David Collier]] on the comparative method.<ref>David Collier, "The Comparative Method," pp. 105–19, in Ada W. Finifter (ed.), ''Political Science: The State of the Discipline II''. Washington, D.C.: The American Political Science Association, 1993.</ref>