Comparison, Triangulation, and Embedding Research in History: A Methodological Self-Analysis

Over the course of five decades, a social scientist can register many achievements - but can make many mistakes as well. This paper details some of those achievements but also admits to some of those mistakes and explains what can be learned fromthem over a career spent studying social movements, local politics, political parties, and contentious politics more generally. The underlyingmethodological strand in thework described belowis to try to find ways of bringing qualitative-historical and systematic-quantitative materials together in a search for the tangled relationships between contentious and institutional politics.