Any list of the ten most influential scholars of comparative politics will include Theda Skocpol. It is in this field of the discipline that her impact came earliest and has hit hardest. Her notoriety began with the publication of the award winning States and Social Revolutions. Her subsequent writings on the importance of theory and history to comparative inquiry had great impact even before she gained the attention of scholars working in other fields of the discipline. A summary of her main contributions is bound to be dissatisfying, only because so much will be left out. Nonetheless, I will briefly outline four of what most would agree are her lasting contributions. Following this I wish to outline the main current challenge to her view of politics, namely to consider ideas as important causes and consequences of politics.

Professor Skocpol's first notable contribution was the publication of States and Social Revolutions¹ in 1979. That book challenged two competing schools of thought to "think outside the box" and begin to take seriously each other's intellectual claims. These competing schools were behavioralism, which tended to focus on individual actions and overlooked the impact of institutions on political life, and Marxism, which gained ascendency in the 1970s, but was dominated by passionate scholars whose intellectual seriousness was often in doubt. Arguing that behavioralists needed to "bring the state back" into their analyses, Skocpol employed the Marxist idea of "state autonomy" to show how the states in France and China formulated their own interests and acted in pursuit of them. Hard core behavioralists remained skeptical, arguing that people, not institutions are capable of action, but more sophisticated scholars began to recognize the important role states play in structuring political life. The idea of state autonomy was also challenging to the Marxists of the day who tended to adhere to the crude idea that the state is merely the instrument of oppression serving the interests of the ruling class. Marx himself had moved beyond this crude formulation in his later writings, notably the Eighteenth Brumaire,² and it took Skocpol to remind her contemporaries that what the state does must be the subject of empirical inquiry, not theoretical assumption. 

Skocpol's new formulation created a space for what came to be known as "new institutionalism."³ Today, new institutionalists no longer employ the concept of state autonomy, recognizing that inanimate objects do not "act", but they do place institutions at the center of their analyses, exploring how certain types of institutional designs affect the preferences of actors and the processes of political exchange.

Theda Skocpol's second notable contribution was methodological, and stemmed from her efforts to incorporate historical analysis. Here she spearheaded a campaign against the ahistorical nature of behavioral inquiry, whose most venal effects were evident in the field of comparative politics. For example, the leading comparative study of the 1960s, Gabriel Almond's and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture, ⁴ concluded that some countries were more likely to build a successful democracy than others because their citizens had civic values of participation and political engagement that were absent in countries without stable democracies. Based on surveys conducted in the subject countries, the study provided a snapshot of public attitudes at one point on time. Though such cross-sectional analysis of attitudes and activities had become the norm for comparative inquiry, they proved inadequate for making meaningful statements about long historical processes, such as building a democracy. 

Instead, processes that unfold over time must be examined over time. This is what historians always claimed. Yet Skocpol shared the criticism behavioralists often leveled at historians: that they were merely descriptive story tellers. Some of the most well-regarded political historians, Reinhard Bendix and Barrington Moore, for example, had a strong impact on her interest in history, but she proposed that their tendency to become absorbed in richly detailed narrative needed to be balanced with attention to scientific theory.⁵ For Skocpol, the purpose of science is to explain things that happen. Explanations require a statement of causal relationships. In other words, the thing to be explained (the dependent variable) must be clearly identified. Then, the things that caused it (independent variables) must be identified. Finally, the explanation must logically demonstrate how the causes produced the outcome. Most comparativists at the time agreed with this view of science, but they tended to concentrate on current events, with an indifference to history. Skocpol challenged them on their own ground, arguing that good theories of politics should explain the past as well as the present. To explain the past Skocpol developed what can be called the "events-historical method." Focusing on events as the things to be explained (e.g. social revolutions or the development of social programs), Skocpol's theories strive to explain the causes of those events. Her independent variables are numerous, and include powerful individuals, social classes, organized interests, and institutions. This way of explaining history stands apart from the narrative style. Narratives need to build dramatic tension, and this stylistic requirement often forces their authors to portray the outcomes as inevitable, with all developments building to the inevitable climax of the story. Skocpol's framework is free of that tendency. Indeed, many of the events she studies proved to be unintended, and simply resulted from the actions taken at specific moments in time. 

Professor Skocpol's third major contribution came in the 1980s, when she helped to establish the new subfield of comparative public policy. Focusing specifically on the development of welfare states, she, along with a number of graduate students,⁶ wrote many articles that explained why some countries adopted expansive social programs in response to the Great Depression, and others did not. The events-historical approach was well-suited to this type of inquiry. Public policies are basically events. They happen because of a statement by a public official, or the passage of a piece of legislation. Those who follow Professor Skocpol have examined how cross-national differences in the character of policy institutions allow some types of groups to be more influential in some countries than in others in the passage of legislation or the adoption of a public program.

Professor Skocpol's fourth major contribution has been to overcome the awkward boundary that divides political scientists into "Americanists" and "comparativists." The division is relatively recent. It began in the 1960s when graduate programs in the United States abandoned foreign language requirements. The result was a new generation of students interested in studying the politics of their own country, and increasingly unaware of how politics operated in other parts of the world. Those who chose to study foreign languages became specialists in the countries where those languages were spoken, and comparativists came to be viewed as those who study countries besides the United States. The result was a growing divide between two separate bodies of literature within political science, and few people who were familiar with both.

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, ⁷ Theda Skocpol's important history of the origins of the American welfare state, crashed through this artificial divide. As a study of the history of social policy exclusively in the United States, it resembled a typical book in American politics. But, in setting up the investigation, Skocpol treated the American case in comparative context. The introductory chapter to the book begins by reviewing the literature on the development of welfare states in Europe and North America, outlining the relatively curious position of the American case in most explanations. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, the American welfare state is less comprehensive in its coverage, especially in the area of health care. Common wisdom in the United States held that America's classically liberal political culture led people to prefer a more limited role for the state. Skocpol showed that it was actually the historic legacy of state institutions that contributed. Pensions for war veterans, adopted after the Civil War, developed into corrupt schemes for political patronage and bureaucratic graft. Consequently, when broader pension systems became the topic of discussion in many countries around the turn of the century, opponents of social insurance in the United States successfully defeated the idea by drawing an association with veterans benefits. 

Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, which stands as Professor Skocpol's most recent seminal contribution to comparative politics, illustrates all the major contributions she has made to the field. Central to the analysis is the impact of state institutions in ordering political life. Major historical events are the objects of analysis, and the historical narrative highlights the way political entrepreneurs seek to negotiate through institutions. The book also demonstrates an enduring interest in social welfare issues, and the efforts people make to improve their social conditions. Finally, it represents an effort to improve the science of political science by making the study of American politics not a thing apart, but as part of the world of politics.

Yet a recent shift in the field of comparative politics has led many scholars to conceptualize politics in ways that fit uncomfortably within Professor Skocpol's framework. Dubbed by Mark Blyth the "ideational turn"⁸ in comparative politics, scholars are giving increasing attention to ideas as powerful political forces. There are various strands of this argument, but its basic theme is that ideas have a special effect on political life because they are the basis on which people structure their understandings of the world. If politics is the art of persuasion, ⁹ one of the most common ways for political actors to realize their goals is to present them in a way that others find compelling. On theoretical and methodological grounds, Professor Skocpol's work is not designed to address the role of ideas, either as factors that influence politics (independent variables) or as factors that result from politics (dependent variables).

As independent variables, Professor Skocpol sees ideas as exogenous variables, factors that, if they matter, fall outside the bounds of theoretical inquiry. For example, in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Professor Skocpol recognizes the presence of ideas in the policy process. Veterans benefits impeded the adoption of comprehensive social insurance because people held the idea that the programs for veterans were corrupt. Public assistance for mothers was pushed through by middle class women who had little stake in the outcome, but believed it was a good idea to help single mothers. But these ideas were incidental, rather than decisive of the policy outcomes. In Professor Skocpol's formulation, the ideas mattered not because ideas per se matter, but because these happened to be the ideas of those who influenced the decisions. The real thrust of the explanation lies in structural factors, the existence of a policy legacy that placed parameters on future policy decisions, or an open, pluralistic policy process that allowed well organized groups to influence decisions. To take this argument in comparative perspective, Professor Skocpol would explain the adoption of comprehensive social insurance in Europe as a consequence of a policy legacy that favored vigorous state intervention, or maybe as the absence of any legacy that could have created an unfavorable environment for the passage of social insurance. Whether Europeans thought it was a good idea to enact social insurance is not theoretically relevant.

In methodological terms, the "events-historical" method is ill-suited to studying ideas as the consequences of politics, even though some of the most interesting dependent variables in political research are ideas, e.g. legitimacy, citizenship, sovereignty. These ideas have a fluid character, they change and evolve over time. Yet the events-historical method can only study dependent variables that have a static character. Take the welfare state as an example, since much of Professor Skocpol's contribution has been in the field of comparative welfare studies. A simple way to define the welfare state is as an idea about the proper role of the state in securing the welfare of its citizens. It is an idea that has a social construction, and which is a powerful force in politics. It evokes passion in the minds of people who think it a good idea and those who would like to see it disappear from modern life. Following Professor Skocpol, a researcher would have to ask "when was the welfare state built?" in order to identify the factors that led to its creation. As this is a rather nonsensical question, one would have to follow Professor Skocpol's lead and disaggregate the dependent variable, focusing on specific programs and policies and posing questions about how these programs (events) came about. But here we are faced with a classic case where the whole is not the sum of its parts. Explaining the welfare state, therefore, is a problem of explaining the development of an idea, and it requires a different type of explanation.

Thus, to summarize, Professor Skocpol's contribution to comparative politics has been immense. She has forced comparativists to think theoretically, and to avoid the tautological description that comes from the exclusive study of one country's political system. But, the "ideational turn" in comparative politics marks a shift away from the research agenda professor Skocpol pioneered. We might hope that her future work will help us to "bring ideas back in."

Professor Cox can be reached by email at rhcox@ou.edu.

1.  Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

2.  Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978) 594-617.

3.  For good overviews of this literature, see Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, "Introduction," in Steinmo, Thelen and Longstreth, eds. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-32; Peter A. Hall and Mary C. R. Taylor, "Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms," Political Studies 44 (1996): 936-957.

4.  Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

5.  Theda Skocpol, "Sociology's Historical Imagination." in Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1-21.

6.  Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, "State Structures and Social Keynesianism: Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 1983 24(1-2): 4-29; and Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

7.  Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

8.  Mark Blyth, "Any More Bright Ideas? The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy." Comparative Politics, 1997, 29(2): 229.

9.  Giandomenico Majone, Evidence Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).