A typology of approaches to comparative analysis of sports policy

This article provides a four-fold typology of comparative sports policy studies: Type 1, Seeking Similarities, is a nomothetic approach seeking law-like generalization; Type 2 is Describing Difference, an ideographic approach seeking to capture the specificity of policy systems; Type 3, Theorizing the Transnational, goes beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis to fuse global and local levels of explanation; and Type 4, Defining Discourse, seeks to analyze ways in which policy discourse defines the reality of the policy problems it seeks to address. The authors underline the ontological and epistemological assumptions of such approaches that are often only implicit, and they employ selected examples to illustrate the contribution to knowledge of the different approaches.