In a 1985 American political science roundtable analyzing the state of the field of comparative politics, the participants concluded that Middle East studies lagged behind most other area studies in the generation of theory (PS 1985). They determined that scholars of Latin America, Asia, and Africa had traversed a greater distance along the road to theory than had analysts of the Middle East. Today, almost a decade later, despite some promising developments, the situation remains basically unchanged.

From the Rigor of Metatheory to Theoretical Rigor Mortis

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of comparative politics emphasized issues of philosophy of science and the logic of theory construction. They spent an inordinate amount of time debating metatheory, i.e., they theorized about theory. Although this exercise yielded important intellectual advances, it ultimately degenerated into a sterile exercise in logic for its own sake, and its formulations remained divorced from the empirical world. Partially in reaction to this preoccupation with metatheory, many comparativists in the 1980s abandoned theoretical concerns and focused instead upon empirical investigation and data collection. The result has been the generation of uneven, disconnected, and unrelated stagnant data deposits.