Research Methodology in Comparative Public Administration: Significance, Applications, Trends, and Challenges

Comparative Public Administration (CPA) is a stimulating and significant subfield of public administration, because it helps people to understand similarities and differences between countries via comparative perspective about administrative concepts, systems, history, culture, governance, public policy, and bureaucracy. Therefore, this chapter evaluates the following topics for CPA research: the significance of comparative research, trends, and possible approaches (e.g., systems theory, process tracing), contextuality (e.g., social & political contexts, and integral operating system), use of methodology (e.g., quantitative/qualitative/mixed methods, levels and units of analysis, data collection and analysis), and methodological problems and challenges (e.g., case selection, construct equivalence, causality, value bias, and the availability of data). Scientific study of CPA, like all sciences, requires finding answers for big questions of the field by using the most appropriate approach and methodology to be able to overcome possible challenges that might negatively influence objectivity or confirmability, reliability or consistency, validity or truthfulness, and generalizability or transferability of the research.