Neighborhood Ethnic Composition and Outcomes for Low-Income Latino and African American Children

George Galster (Wayne State University) and Anna Santiago (Michigan State University)

Abstract found at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015598067.full 

Investigating the adverse consequences of residential segregation for ethnic minority people has a long and distinguished social scientific history in the U.S.  Rigorous studies have identified substantial socioeconomic and health costs that segregation imposes on Latinos and African Americans, though often with contingencies based on ethnicity and gender.

What these quantitative studies do not reveal, however, are the complex underlying pathways through which segregation exacts its toll.  Do the primary mechanism(s) operate through confining minorities in inferior neighborhoods that constrain opportunities because they offer inadequate public services, more intense pollution, poorer access to employment, higher rates of violence and/or concentrated poverty and joblessness?  Or, does segregation operate independently of these ethnically correlated aspects of geographic context and instead work through ethnic composition of the neighborhood per se?  Might concentrations of ethnic minorities impose costs (or benefits) regardless of the particulars of the places where they are concentrated, due to socialization processes within minority communities and/or stereotyping and stigmatizing processes by majority populations external to them?  Stated differently, the issue needing empirical investigation is the degree to which ethnic residential segregation affects the life chances of minorities irrespective of the particular features of the places where they are concentrated beyond disproportionate ethnic clustering.

In this paper we focus on a variety of outcomes for individual children, youth and young adults (“children” hereafter) from the groups commonly thought to suffer the greatest harms from residential segregation in the U.S.: low-income Latino and African American families.  Our original approach bridges two traditionally distinct literatures: “consequences of segregation” and “neighborhood effects.”  The forces of segregation operating at the regional scale inevitably generate one direct outcome at the neighborhood scale: increasing exposures of minority children to neighbors from other minority groups.  They generate another outcome indirectly following from the concentration of minorities: shaping the geographic flows of resources (financial, institutional, human, environmental) and thereby the opportunities and quality of life available to minority children in those neighborhoods.  Potentially both direct and indirect effects of segregation affect child developmental outcomes by altering their neighborhood contexts.  Distinguishing these two effects constitutes the core empirical test of our paper. 

Specifically, our research questions for low-income Latino and African American children are:

            To what extent are the odds of ever experiencing a variety of childhood outcomes in the domains of health, exposure to and use of violence, education and fertility related to the percentages of Latino and African American residents in their census tracts? [i.e., the direct effects of segregation]

            If so, to what degree do these relationships persist when controlling for neighborhood indicators of socioeconomic status, safety, housing stock, institutional resources and environmental conditions ?[ i.e., the indirect effects of segregation]

We answer these questions through a stratified, logistic regression analysis of data on minority children that we collected through a retrospective survey of Latino and African American families whose children resided in Denver (CO) Housing Authority (DHA) dwellings during at least part of their childhood.  This program represents an unusual natural experiment holding great potential for overcoming geographic selection bias because assignment of households on the DHA waiting list to public housing mimics a random process, thereby permitting causal inferences about neighborhood indicators and child outcomes.  Because DHA dwellings are located in a wide variety of neighborhoods throughout Denver County, it also offers an unusual opportunity of observing how low-income minority children fare in places that differ on a host of other neighborhood characteristics beside ethnic composition that we measure comprehensively. 

Regarding our first research question, results show that low-income, Latino and (especially) African American children growing up amid greater concentrations of African American neighbors in Denver pay penalties across several outcome domains, controlling for their own, households’ and caregivers’ characteristics.  By contrast, growing up among greater concentrations of Latino neighbors is associated with both positive and negative outcomes for African American and (especially) Latino children. 

Specifically, low-income African American children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have greater odds of: (1) an asthma diagnosis by 52 percent; (2) witnessing violence in the neighborhood by 62 percent; (3) being victimized in the neighborhood by 78 percent; (4) using violence themselves by 39 percent; and (5) having a child outside of marriage by 51 percent.  These associations with harmful outcomes are more limited for low-income Latino children.  Latino children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have greater odds of: (1) being victims of neighborhood crime by 82 percent; and (2) repeating a grade in school by three percent. 

By contrast, concentrations of Latino neighbors are associated with positive and negative outcomes for children of both ethnicities.  Latino children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents are predicted to have 56 percent greater odds of witnessing violence, but lower odds of: (1) using violence by 35 percent; (2) dropping out before a diploma by two percent; and (3) having children outside of marriage by 29 percent.  Of interest, the positive dropping out result also applied to African American children in our sample.  However, if they were to live amid a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents they are predicted to have 51 percent greater odds of being victimized in the neighborhood. 

Our second research question asks the extent to which the aforementioned associations persist when a host of non-ethnic neighborhood indicators are added to the models.  Results reveal that all the aforementioned associations between African American neighborhood composition and adverse outcomes for African American children disappear when other aspects of residential context are controlled.  The same is true for Latino children, with one exception (odds of repeating a grade).  Similarly, the few aforementioned associations between African American neighborhood composition and adverse outcomes for African American children disappear when other aspects of residential context are controlled.  Indeed, with the one exception of repeating a grade, all five statistically significant parameters for neighborhood ethnic composition indicate more favorable minority child outcomes.  Controlling for non-ethnic aspects of residential context, low-income African American children living in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of African American residents are predicted to have 84 percent lower odds of an asthma diagnosis.[1]  Were they to live in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents, they are predicted to have lower odds of: (1) witnessing violence by 78 percent; (2) using violence by 71 percent; and (3) having a nonmarital birth by 89 percent.  Ethnic effects on low-income Latino children appear more limited.  When they live in a neighborhood with a standard deviation-higher percentage of Latino residents they are predicted to have eight percent lower odds of dropping out of school.

So if ethnic composition per se is not responsible for the negative associations between segregation and negative outcomes, what is?  Two aspects of the residential environment stand out as consistent predictors of negative outcomes:  higher property crime rates and lower occupational prestige among resident workers.  For both Latino and African American children, higher property crime rates are associated with substantially greater odds of: asthma diagnosis, witnessing and being victimized by violence, and repeating a grade; for Latinos the same associations apply to engaging in violence, dropping out, and having children outside of marriage.  For African American children, lower occupational prestige is associated with substantially greater odds of: asthma diagnosis, witnessing violence, dropping out and having children outside of marriage.  For Latino children it is associated with substantially greater odds of: being victimized by and engaging in violence, dropping out and having children outside of marriage.

Several other aspects of neighborhood context prove predictive for certain outcomes and ethnicities.  Places with negative peer influences as assessed by caregivers are associated with greater odds that African American children will witness, be victimized by, and engage in violence.  Places with more social problems (an index focusing in violent and criminal behaviors) as assessed by caregivers are associated with greater odds that Latino children will have these same exposure to violence outcomes, plus have children outside of marriage.

In conclusion, growing up amid concentrations of African American residents was associated with a variety of adverse outcomes for low-income Latino and (especially) African American children, though outcomes associated with concentrations of Latino residents were more mixed.  Virtually all of the negative associations disappeared, however, when other aspects of the residential context were controlled, and several positive ones persisted.  The adverse developmental consequences of ethnic segregation appeared to be generated primarily by concentrating minority children in neighborhoods with higher rates of property crime and lower occupational prestige.

We see our study as bridging two substantial scholarly literatures: consequences of ethnic segregation and neighborhood effects.  We have linked them by positing that the forces of segregation operating at the metropolitan scale directly shape children’s intra-neighborhood exposure to various ethnic groups.  Moreover, because ethnic composition of neighborhoods affects the flows of various resources into them, segregation indirectly affects children’s exposure to non-ethnic aspects of their local context.  Our empirical findings indicate that it is the indirect effects of segregation that create by far the more pernicious neighborhood effects for low-income Latino and African American children.

Our results clearly suggest that policymakers should be cognizant of neighborhood ethnic segregation as an important metropolitan force that continues to shape the developmental context of low-income minority children.  It is not neighborhood ethnic composition per se, but rather the correlated aspects of safety and social status that appear crucial.  Our finding is thus fully consistent with the position that desegregation efforts should not be motivated by an implicit valorization of “whiteness” or stigmatization of “non-whiteness.”

The daunting policy challenge is providing neighborhood environments that are developmentally friendly to low-income, minority children.  This can be approached in principle by either by improving the neighborhoods where they live through community development strategies and/or by improving their access to developmentally superior neighborhoods through well-designed assisted housing programs backed by vigorous fair housing enforcement.  We acknowledge the political difficulties involved in doing so in practice, but urge continued efforts in these regards nevertheless.

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[1] We acknowledge that this is an ambiguous finding insofar as it may indicate a lower probability of caregivers seeking medical diagnosis given a set of symptoms, instead of a lower probability of symptoms.

Waiting for the R Train: Public Transportation and Employment

By Justin Tyndall

 

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy served to highlight the fragility of coastal cities in an era of increasingly unpredictable weather. The impact of the storm on many New York City residents was devastating. The storm’s effects were far reaching, but the stone and steel that forms the skeleton of New York City was largely left intact. Many of the more than 20 bridges and tunnels that connect Manhattan Island to the rest of New York City suffered minor damage, but nearly all were able to reopen in the days or weeks following the storm. A stark exception to this robust recovery of transportation was the severe damage to the Montague Street Tunnel –which carries the R train subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan– the tunnel would take nearly two years to be fully repaired.

The fact that some New York City neighborhoods have historically been extended strong public transit while others have not is far from random. The most economically developed areas of New York are provided with dense public transportation options, while less prominent neighborhoods are not. The same relationship exists in essentially every city where public transportation operates. The simple observation that neighborhoods with transit are doing better economically is insufficient to say anything about the economic impact of transit: transit is certainly a symptom of an economically developed neighborhood, whether it is also a cause of local economic success is normally impossible to say.

The differential fate of the Montague Street Tunnel and the R train offer an unprecedentedly clear natural experiment by which particular neighborhoods were, randomly and without warning, deprived of vital public transportation amenities. This situation allowed for the investigation of the true effect public transportation imparts on the neighborhoods it serves.

In 2013, when the R train disruption was most severe, the unemployment rate within Brooklyn neighborhoods that were dependent on the R train increased by 0.4 percentage points, marking a departure from steady reductions in unemployment over the previous few years. Furthermore, neighborhoods in the remainder of New York City saw unemployment fall 1.4 percentage points in the same period. By controlling for city wide trends in employment, and the characteristics that make the treatment and control neighborhoods different, this paper was able to get a relatively clean estimate of the impact the train closure had on unemployment for those neighborhoods affected: unemployment was a full 1.4 percentage points higher along to Brooklyn R train in 2013 than it would have been if not for the subway disruption.

Job creation in cities has been the goal of numerous and diverse policies including job training programs, and incentives for businesses to locate in disadvantaged areas. These programs have been shown to be tremendously expensive, and are often ineffective. Advocacy for public transit often focuses on the regional economic benefits, and land value effects; however, public transit’s apparent ability to substantially reduce local unemployment should be given more attention. Meeting the employment needs of isolated urban communities through policy should include consideration of the powerful role played by public transportation.

Urban eco-modernisation and the policy context of new eco-city projects: where Masdar City fails and why

Federico Cugurullo – University of Manchester, Geography

http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/28/0042098015588727.abstract?rss=1

The main reason for writing this article is because I fear that, across the world, we are building new cities following dangerous models of city-making.

Today, the genesis of cities built from scratch in previously underdeveloped areas is shaping the present and future of the planet and, with hundreds of new settlements under development, we cannot risk the implementation of unsustainable strategies of urbanisation. The environmental, social and economic impact of new urban developments is significant. Environmentally, for example, the construction of a new city requires vast amounts of energy, generates tons of carbon emissions and upsets the balance of local and regional ecosystems. This is not a process that we can overlook. We need to be aware of what exactly makes our cities unsustainable and develop alternative strategies of city- making.

This article uses Masdar City in Abu Dhabi as a case study, to challenge what today is one of the most popular models of sustainable urban development: the eco-city.

The focus of the article is on the policy context of Masdar City, and on how it shapes the mechanics and conceptual underpinnings of the Emirati eco-city project. I argue that eco-city projects are not standalone urban experiments, but rather tiles of broader context-dependent policy mosaics whose understanding can reveal how, in eco-city initiatives, ideas of urban sustainability are cultivated and implemented.

Masdar City (May 2015).

Source: Gianfranco Serra Photography.

Masdar City is the product of a regional development agenda, Vision 2030, which seeks to regenerate the economy of Abu Dhabi through the regeneration of the built environment. The Emirati economic system is largely based on oil: a finite resource which, in the near future, will not be sufficient to sustain Abu Dhabi’s society. The plan of the government is to develop non-oil sectors of the economy and Masdar City, designed as a living laboratory, serves this purpose by providing an urban space where Emirati and international companies can research, develop, test and commercialize new clean technologies: products, such as smart grids and photovoltaics, that will eventually be sold worldwide, thereby generating substantial returns for Abu Dhabi.

In this policy context, the concept of sustainability is understood primarily in economic terms. In Masdar City, sustainability is interpreted as profitability and the attention of the developers is put exclusively on what can be capitalized. As a result, aspects of the city such as its impact on ecosystems and the social distribution of environmental and economic benefits are not taken into account because they are seen as unprofitable by stakeholders.

In addition, in the Masdar City project, environmentalism is understood as consumerism. The developers of Masdar City encourage their customers to buy and consume the Masdarian technologies as a way of protecting the environment, but forget to mention the fact that the consumption of technology (based on energy-intensive processes of extraction, production and distribution) is one of the main reasons why environmental issues exist in the first place.

I fear that what in this paper I call urban eco-modernisation, the vision and application of urban technology as the solution to environmental problems, is becoming an established, international formula of city-making: an urban paradigm that has to be challenged before its socio-environmental consequences will become irreversible.

Uncivil cities

In 2005, I was a witness as a Barcelona resident of a worrying emphasis on ‘incivility’ as a problem. All of a sudden, things that were part of daily life in urban public space, especially in a Mediterranean capital, such as street drinking, skating, prostitution or game-playing, took centre stage and became the object of a deafening policy and media debate. Those things, that we may have seen as annoying but normal, or even been the ‘perpetrators’ of, very quickly became a public problem and portrayed as a clear sign of the decay of Western civilisation. Almost overnight, graffiti and homelessness became punishable offenses, among many other, varied things. Something had changed in the Barcelona of ‘amigos para siempre will you always be my friend’.[1]

Soon after this happened, a copy of Urban Studies’ double issue on ‘(In)civility and the city’ fell in my hands, giving context to the events I had just lived. Incivility was becoming a global issue and different bodies in different countries were looking for tools to pursue a law and order approach to city life. These efforts received different names in different places, but were essentially all part of a global process to turn deviant behaviours into offences and thus turn them into a police matter.

The Barcelona case, however, seemed to have its own dynamic –the role played by the annual neighbourhood festivities, seen by some media as bacchanalia of incivility, or the government crisis the Socialist government at the time was going through, as well as an evident conservative turn experienced by the generation that had lived and been protagonists of the transition to democracy, who now demanded that their ‘right’ to enjoy a clean and non-degraded public space, to rest and to be tranquil and to not be ‘disturbed in the exercise of the freedom of circulation.

I became curious in the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the reason of this ‘defining up’ of deviancy. The international literature gave me clues that resonated with the Barcelona experience, but only in broad terms. The ins-and-outs of the Barcelona case did not match those described in the international literature. Trying to make sense of ‘asynchronic synchrony’ was the main driver behind the paper, written with the hope to get international authors to question some of their assumptions or generalisations, as well as to encourage other to explore similar local processes and contribute them to our scientific field.

Using a combination of urban studies literature, public policy process and transfer theory and media discourse analysis, the paper retraces the policy process of what was called the Civility Ordinance of Barcelona, finally passed on 1 January 2006, in an attempt to contribute a detailed account of the local determinant factors. These are put in light not only of similar processes elsewhere, specially the UK, but also in broader debates on the local security agendas in the 90s and 00s. By presenting a mainly empirical picture, the paper aspires to inform other comparative studies on the role of security and deviancy in urban environments, and on the political role of cities under globalisation.

Now that several years have passed since these schemes were implemented in different countries and cities, and so we can begin to evaluate their impact –and probably validate Bannister and Kearns’ hypothesis, quoted in the paper, that the emphasis on tolerance and respect through civility results in an erosion of tolerance and respect-, and in a time when urban anxieties are centered on the crisis and radicalisation processes, understanding the problems of the civility approach can act as a timely warning sign.

Gemma Galdon-Clavell.

Barcelona, May 2015

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[1] One of the landmark songs of the Olympic Games of 1992, symbolising tolerance, friendship and openness.

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

by Julia Affolderbach and Christian Schulz

 

When starting our research on green building initiatives and urban low-carbon strategies in Canada, Europe and Australia, we came across the promising complementarities of the Transition Studies approach on the one hand, and the more recent debate around Policy Mobilities. Given our primary interest in political, institutional, regulatory and organisational innovations and their impact on the greening of the building sector, the Social Studies of Technology (or “Transition Studies”) provided us with a useful heuristic to explore the interplay between niches for innovation, evolutions of the established regimes and changes of the general context conditions (“landscape”). But we also had to acknowledge the insufficient conceptualization of space in this approach, in particular when it comes to supra-national relationships, knowledge flows and long-distance influences. Here, the Policy Mobility approach allowed us to operationalize the extent to which local policies and actors’ behaviour are embedded into wider networks of constant policy exchange and learning processes, but also selective adoption and reinterpretation (mutation) of trend setting approaches. A combination of the two approaches gave us the opportunity to study both the localised settings and their impact on green building innovations and the relational articulation of urban sustainability programmes at the international level. The paper thus tries to contribute to the advancing conceptualization of space in the Transitions Studies literature, and – given its sectorial focus – to feed case study results from economic geography into the scholarly debates around the notion of Policy Mobility. We are convinced that a further engagement of the two approaches might not only reciprocally inspire the enrolled communities of researchers, but that it could also open new perspectives for both academics and practitioners/decision makers.

Provision of knowledge and evidence on the actual pathways and biographies of successful urban policies provides a basis to reconsider existing strategies without overrating the importance of local framework conditions in order (1) to facilitate the exchange and critical conversation with practitioners and decision makers in other city regions and (2) to develop a systemic understanding of influential levels and scales, without reifying the latter.

A wide range of topics regarding sustainable transitions might serve as test beds for this recombined approach including the multi-facetted energy policy aspiring for low carbon transitions (encompassing the decentralized use of renewables, low/zero/plus energy buildings, district heating, smart grids), transport and mobility issues, food security and urban farming, and more organizational issues such as community planning, co-housing, or solidary economies, and local sharing schemes. All of these are identified as highly innovative fields showing dynamics of rapid and international dissemination as well as re-adaptation of promising concepts.

 

Photo: Sebastian Fastenrath (used with permission)

SPECIAL ISSUE - MAY 2015 - VOLUME 52/7

Governing for Urban Resilience

Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne)

Cathy Wilkinson (Stockholm Resilience Centre)

Sue Parnell (University of Cape Town)

This Special Issue (published May 2015, Volume 52/7) focuses on social-ecological resilience (SER) and urban governance. The papers are case-based and analyse different practices (‘the doing’) of urban SER which transcend scale and location, governments and governance. Locating the action and understanding how it is constituted is a first step to constructing data-bases, creating stories or reconstructing ways of knowing places. 

 

The papers question policies and programs that are intended to shape the urban and highlight how SER can provide impetus for shifting boundaries (connecting ecosystems, waterways, pathways, buildings, species) to reinvigorate the spaces and occupation of the urban (from an allotment garden to the peri-urban revegetation corridor).  They also make visible the ecological, social, engineering and economic systems that run through and contribute to the dynamic forces of urban resilience.  Cross scale analysis becomes a way of interrogating this dynamism with citizens and with institutions. 

 

In the research presented here, SER is part of issues of social justice, economic sustainability, local knowledge and the way that these, coupled with memory, can shift our understanding of the urban. SER is not confined to the city as the urban has long transcended the visible infrastructure of its origins.   Collectively, the research in this Issue seeks to examine and support the radical social change needed to inspire citizen discourse and contribute to the ‘doing’ that informs our urban futures.

 

 

Pacifying Babel's Tower: Lessons for comparative urbanism

 

Michiel van Meeteren  (Ghent University)

 

Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Ben Derudder (Ghent University)

Frank Witlox (Ghent University)

In our paper 'Pacifying Babel's Tower: A scientometric analysis of polycentricity in urban research', we analyze the origins of the fuzziness of the concept of polycentricity in urban studies. While seemingly little more than an adjective to describe the multi-cored character of settlements, the term 'polycentricity' disguises the much thornier and fundamental question of defining the notion of ‘city’ itself. This masking of a different debate suggests that, as a community of urban scholars, we have been talking past each other for a long time – hence our reference to Babel's Tower. We assume that we are discussing the same object, but are in fact often not. The paper extensively draws on the work of political scientist Giovanni Sartori (and his interlocutors) from which the notions of 'conceptual stretching', and 'Babel's Tower' are derived[1]. While conducting this research, we increasingly became convinced that Sartori's oeuvre might be able to provide important resolutions to some of the methodological issues plaguing (comparative) urban studies and human geography more widely (an insight that has proven productive elsewhere). In this post, as an extension of our paper, we explore the broader implications of Babylonian confusions caused by conceptual stretching for comparative research in urban studies.

 

 

The Tower of Babel (1563) by Pieter Breugel the Elder, Illustration used for the cover of Collier and Gerring's (2009) appreciation of the oeuvre of Giovanni Sartori. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Accessed 23/03/2015)

 

Polycentricity is a concept that fits comfortably in the methodological toolbox of comparative urbanism. It provides a seemingly coherent yardstick to compare urban regions. Of course, in a strict ontological sense, every city in the world is unique. However, finding similarities and differences between places allows us to abstract from these unique and concrete realities. Based on these abstractions, we then define wider 'urban processes' that serve to structure the debates in our field of research. The crucial point in these abstractions is to avoid what Sartori calls 'miscomparing': drawing undue conclusions regarding similarity or difference.

 

Miscomparing can either take the form of a wrong 'case definition' (the answer to the question 'what is this a case of?', which leads to the proverbial comparing of apples and oranges, or a wrong 'case scoring' (assessing how this case compares to others, a kind of measurement error). When a specific miscomparison is routinely made (as has happened in the debate on urban polycentricity), it is solidified in the literature and may consequently become 'paradigmatic'. In this way, reminiscent of Kuhn's description of scientific revolutions, communities of researchers may collectively and unknowingly hold on to a theoretical proposition that ought to be revised given the available empirical evidence.

 

By way of example, let us consider an 'institutionalized miscomparison' identified in our paper that can potentially influence comparative urban studies in a detrimental way. In the polycentricity debate, differences between American and European contexts have commonly been overstated, despite the fact that the processes behind polycentricity are very similar across contexts. Because the processes behind polycentricity overlay distinct historical trajectories, incorrect assessments of difference between Europe and the United States have been made when studying the concrete situation 'on the ground'. At the correct level of abstraction (in this instance this involves comparing changing agglomeration-economy regimes across contexts), these cases should have been labeled as the 'same', whereas an empiricist assessment has led to a conclusion of 'difference'.

 

In general terms, this example highlights once again how the adopted theoretical and methodological perspective determines the results of comparative research. Miscomparing can result in accepting 'wrong' theory as 'valid', similar to type II errors in statistics, a concern that is at the heart of postcolonial critiques in urban studies, for example in the interventions of Jennifer Robinson or Ananya Roy. But it can similarly lead to type I errors: rejecting 'right' theory as 'invalid'. The polycentricity debate is one such example; another possibly arises if one takes too literally Roy’s sweeping suggestion that 'EuroAmerican theories' of the city cannot be used to say something useful about cities in Asia.

 

Therefore the most important conclusion of our study, which transcends the more narrow confines of the polycentricity debate, is that (as Sartori would phrase it) the proper application of the ‘ladder of abstraction’ is of paramount importance. We should always ask: are we comparing the same thing across contexts? If not, then we end up comparing apples to oranges, leading to erroneous conclusions about similarity and difference. This is remedied by abstraction, which results in the equally fascinating activity of comparing fruits.

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[1] A wonderful introduction to Sartori's work on comparitivism is Collier & Gerring's 2009 edited volume Concepts and Method in Social Science.