How Cases Speak to One Another: Using Translation to Rethink Generalization in Political Science Research (Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY)

Regardless of method, political scientists often seek to develop arguments that can be generalized to a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how cases speak to one another? We advocate for a new way to think about how qualitative research produces broadly applicable insights: translation. Much like linguistic translation, the goal of translation in political science is to develop ideas that are intelligible in a different context, even as the context will change how an idea or political practice is interpreted or enacted. Translation offers at least three benefits. It could allow us to (1) rethink how we form and deploy concepts; (2) rethink what a generalizable argument is by carrying parts of an argument, instead of entire causal chains to other cases; and (3) rethink how we conceptualize knowledge accumulation to include an abductive process where generating theory is the primary goal.

‌Nicholas Rush Smith is is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and the Graduate Center and in 2025 a Visiting Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, with Erica Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Research (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This talk is based on a presented paper co-authored with Erica S. Simmons, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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