rientially based research on Central America, what some call polemic, has raised
new and fundamentally more important questions than those stressed by objective
social science. This trend should continue, for the culmination of these dynamics
is the welcome shift from system stability-oriented models toward policy studies.
If politics is the study of "who gets what, when, and how," then the scope of
research should be whatever are the most important dimensions of social life.
In comparative politics, this means focusing on the outcomes of these policies.
Once a policy approach is adopted, there is no limit on the boundaries of political
research. The scope of research should no longer be solely the study of the state,
the government, the system, or the political process per se, but needs to shift
to social outcomes.

In Central America, this means studying the patterns of control over agricul-
tural resources, access to markets, and state assistance to elites in these areas.
Public policy research means new topics: human rights, repression and state
terrorism, questions of land tenure and nutrition, anthropological issues involving
cultural survival and adaptation, and questions of foreign intervention and of
dependence, to name a few. Research should focus on policy choices that affect
conditions traditionally beyond political science, such as decisions that lead to
deforestation or to other ecological conditions that affect and reduce the quality
of life. Issues of migration and refugees, pervasive social violence, breakdowns
in traditional cultural structures, continuing economic pressures, and many other
serious social conditions merit continuing analysis. ³

Comparative political research has come a long way in Central America since
the 1960s when political science paid little attention to the region. Since 1980,
however, the region has been at the center of the discipline's spotlight, producing
a dramatic increase in the amount of work published, an increase in the number
of high-quality works, a remarkable increase in the level of criticism of that
work--some of it justified--and several lessons for comparative political research
for the decade of the 1990s.

This last development--lessons for political research--is exciting; it heralds
a potential new direction for the field of comparative political research. Review-
ing the literature on Central America, we see that rigid theoretical approaches
imported to the study of the region, whether these be derived from the Marxist
tradition or from the Liberal-Developmentalist tradition of the behavioral rev-
olution, have contributed neither to improvements in theory nor to improved
conditions for Central Americans. Conversely, research inspired by quality of
life questions and the role of public policy decisions on quality of life has
contributed as much, if not more, than the rigid conventional approaches to the
quality of social life. Because these recent approaches are based on real social
conditions, better empirical theory will result in the long run, provided that
researchers maintain contact with normative thought and with conceptual re-

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