Globalizing Comparative Public Administration With Integrative Contextualization: State Autonomy in the Developmental Path of Hong Kong and Singapore

ABSTRACT The lack of a common variable for comparison has been a major obstacle to the development of Comparative Public Administration (CPA). State autonomy enables an integrative contextualization approach, allowing both the analysis of contextual individual country experiences and the generation of generalized comparable knowledge. To empirically validate this approach and illustrate the utility of a common independent variable, this article adopts state autonomy as the focus in examining the research question of governance and development in a comparative study of the twin city‐states of Hong Kong and Singapore. The relative decline in state autonomy, particularly in Hong Kong's administrative state, has been a key factor contributing to the divergence in economic performance. Since state autonomy underpins governance outcomes beyond the economic sphere, this proposed lens and approach can help dismantle epistemic colonialism and hegemonic intellectualism for addressing the obstacle of CPA to contribute to global public administration.