Crossing Borders, Expanding Evidence, & Strengthening Theory: Synergies Between Subnational and Mixed-Method Research

Over five decades ago, Stein Rokkan warned against the “whole-nation bias” constraining comparative political analysis (Rokkan 1970). Roughly two decades later, Gabriel Almond (1988) expressed concerns that political scientists and comparativists sat at “separate tables,” divided by seemingly insurmountable methodological and epistemological commitments. In the years since, two major developments have responded to these critiques and reshaped empirical research in the social sciences: (i) the recent rise of subnational research designs (SNR) and (ii) the growing adoption of mixed-method approaches (MMR). While each has generated its own body of scholarship—offering sound guidance to practitioners (e.g., Berg-Schlosser 2012; Giraudy, Moncada, and Snyder 2019)—they have rarely been examined in tandem. This omission reflects the distinct intellectual lineages from which they emerged: SNR from attention to variation inside countries, and MMR from efforts to bridge qualitative and quantitative traditions. Yet given their growing prevalence and their increasing intersection in research practice, in this paper I explore the shared strengths and challenges of SNR and MMR, arguing that when deployed together they can (and in fact do) operate as mutually reinforcing logics of social inquiry.