Comparative Politics

9 Key excerpts on "Comparative Politics"

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  Introduction to Comparative Politics

  Political Challenges and Changing Agendas

  • Mark Kesselman, Joel Krieger, William Joseph, , Mark Kesselman, Joel Krieger, William Joseph(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Comparative study can make it easier to recognize what is distinctive about the United States and what features it shares with some other countries. This is why we have included a chapter on the United States in this book. Special mention should be made of the distinction between comparative poli-tics and international relations. Comparative Politics involves comparing domestic political institutions, processes, policies, conflicts, and attitudes in different coun-tries; international relations involves studying the foreign policies of and interactions among countries, the role of international organizations such as the United Nations, and the growing influence of global actors, from multinational corporations to inter-national human rights advocates to terrorist networks. In a globalized world, how-ever, domestic and international politics routinely spill over into one another, so the distinction between the two fields is somewhat blurry. Courses in international rela-tions nowadays often integrate a concern with how internal political processes affect states’ behavior toward other states, while courses in Comparative Politics highlight the importance of transnational forces for understanding what goes on within a coun-try’s borders. One of the four themes that we use to analyze Comparative Politics, the “globalizing world of states,” emphasizes the interaction of domestic and interna-tional forces in the politics of all nations. It still makes sense to maintain the distinction between Comparative Politics and international relations.

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  Comparative Politics

  Interests, Identities, and Institutions in a Changing Global Order

  • Jeffrey Kopstein, Mark Lichbach, Stephen E. Hanson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  What is the relationship between Comparative Politics and international relations? Like comparativists, most students of international relations consider themselves to be social scientists. In addition, like Comparative Politics the subfield of international rela-tions can also trace its roots to ancient Greek political theory. In this case, the person of interest is Thucydides, who attempted to understand the origins and consequences of the Peloponnesian Wars (431 BCE to 404 BCE) between the Greek city-states. War, as we know, is unfortunately an important part of the human condition. Modern scholars of interna-tional relations understandably devote a great deal of time and energy to explaining why states go to war with each other. Of course, peoples of different states do not only fight with each other. They also trade goods and services with each other and interact in many What Is Comparative Politics? 3 different ways. It is not surprising then that scholars of international relations also study trade between countries. Comparativists, although acknowledging the importance of war and international trade, concentrate on politics within countries rather than the politics that occurs between them. The intellectual division of labor between comparativists, who study “domestic politics,” and international relations specialists, who study the “foreign politics” of states, has long-characterized political science. With so much to learn, it seemed a sensible way of dividing up the discipline. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this division began to change. For one thing, most scholars of international relations now recognize that what happens within a country may determine whether it wages war or makes peace.

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  Biology and Political Science

  • Robert Blank, Samuel M. Hines Jnr.(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  3 Comparative Politics, world politics and international relations in biopolitical perspective

  Introduction

  The fields of Comparative Politics and international politics afford a number of examples of how the application of the theoretical frameworks discussed in chapter 2 , particularly those of Masters and Corning, can contribute to the field. Comparative Politics has always been concerned with the comparability of structures, processes and behaviour in the context of contemporary nation states. Comparativists have also been concerned with the historical development of the above and the unique contexts in which countries have ‘developed’ (see Apter, 1996). Both comparative and international politics also invite further consideration of the issues surrounding the levels of analysis problem in research, which is discussed at some length in chapter 4 . And both fields include the study of elite political behaviour.

  There is also a real sense in which the international discipline of political science treats the study of politics in specific countries (for example, American politics or British politics) within the broader context of Comparative Politics. Indeed, although both authors were trained in American institutions, we readily acknowledge the appropriateness of this view. Research that would be described as ‘American/British politics’ or ‘American/British political behaviour’ in a discussion of political science research with an American or British audience will have been included, by implication, either in chapters 2 or 5 or to some degree in this chapter and is therefore not treated in a separate chapter.

  As the following discussion will make clear, we see the evolution of politics, political institutions and political behaviour as so interconnected that, from the vantage point of biopolitics, it seems inappropriate to disconnect them by using a particular set of field or sub-field categories for the discipline in order to organise our discussion. Moreover, from the perspective of biopolitics, many of the distinctions drawn between comparative and international politics are not relevant (see Mair, 1996). The evolution of political institutions through a process of adaptation to changing environments over time involves both domestic and foreign policy and hence blurs the distinction between comparative and international politics. The two fields merge intellectually as we consider the evolution of politics in all its manifestations. This is even more apparent as we examine the study of political development and modernisation or as we consider the approaches of scholars like Wallerstein (1991), whose world systems approach is quite consistent with an evolutionary approach.

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  Mixed Methods in Comparative Politics

  Principles and Applications

  • D. Berg-Schlosser(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction Since the time of Aristotle, Comparative Politics and the comparative method have been considered by many authors to be the “royal way” of political science (for an assessment of the venerable history of this field, see, e.g., Eckstein and Apter 1963). These were to provide the disci- pline with a method and a perspective which would lead to scientifically valid, testable propositions with a high explanatory power both in space and time. Yet, as one other major practitioner noted, much of what was written under this rubric remained “essentially non-comparative, essen- tially descriptive, essentially parochial, essentially static, and essentially monographic” (Macridis 1955: 7). In the meantime, our substantive body of knowledge has been further expanded, now comprising many important aspects of practically all countries and regions of the world (the various editions of the “World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators” – see Taylor and Jodice 1982 – constituted, for example, a major effort in this regard). Major socio-economic and political data collections, which have significantly improved over time, are now also regularly compiled by such institutions as the World Bank (World Devel- opment Report since 1978; “good governance” indicators since 1996), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP; Human Development Report since 1990) and Freedom House (Freedom in the World since 1972; see also Munck and Verkuilen 2002, Berg-Schlosser 2007). Still, the “revolution in Comparative Politics” since the 1950s, in terms of world-wide data collection and new concepts and approaches, has in its actual performance not lived up to much of its original promise (for an assessment and critique, see, e.g., Mayer 1989). On the one hand, configurative studies, dealing with the complex interaction of a vari- ety of variables in a single system, have remained mostly descriptive. Their potential broadness and historical depth have often been paid for 1

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  The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics

  • Todd Landman, Neil Robinson, Todd Landman, Neil Robinson(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Comparative Politics and International Relations John M. Hobson INTRODUCTION The relationship between the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and Compara-tive Politics (CP) – as well as Comparative Political Economy (CPE) and Comparative Sociology (CS) – despite a prima facie or intuitive appearance of natural or inherent overlap, turns out to be highly complex, fraught and problematic. For given that CP scholars often assume that they work broadly within IR, it is naturally perplexing to be told by many IR scholars that their disciplines share very little in common: that ‘CP is not IR’. It is indeed perplexing, of course, because so many CP scholars frame their analyses within an international context. One need only think of scholars such as Theda Skocpol (1979) or Michael Mann (1993) who not only factor in the role of the interna-tional into their theories but go yet further by seeking to break down what Ian Clark (1999) usefully calls the ‘great divide’ between the-ories of the international and national realms. How could such comparative scholarship be characterized as ‘not IR’? I know just how perplexing, if not bewil-dering, this can be for I was once on the receiving end of such a dismissal, even though I had begun teaching and working in IR. I began in my PhD by developing a com-parative historical-sociological perspective on the shift from free trade to tariff protec-tionism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. The dissertation was essentially a critique of Marxist and liberal conceptions of trade policy and sought not just to theorize the role of the international as it impacted upon different states, but simultaneously reveal how the domestic realm impacted on the international (thereby fundamentally breaking down the ‘great divide’ between the two realms).

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  Understanding Comparative Politics

  A Framework for Analysis

  • Mehran Kamrava(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The comparative study of politics

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203936221-4 Passage contains an image

  A synthesis

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203936221-5

  As chapter 2 demonstrated, there has been considerable debate among comparativists concerning the adoption of an appropriate approach to the discipline. In many ways this debate has come to resemble the “dialogue of the deaf” of a decade earlier between modernizers and dependency theorists.1

  Each of these approaches has in its own way shed much light on previously unexplored angles, and each has deepened and enriched the level of analysis by its critique of the one before. But, as previously demonstrated, arguments over which line of inquiry best provides a method of comparison continue to rage in books, in university lecture halls, and in scholarly journals. As some of the quotations presented in chapter 2 indicate, at times the debate has lost sight of the issues at hand and has degenerated into one-upmanship and name-calling. Successive generations of scholars appear to have learned little from those who preceded them. Earlier state-centered analyses drew attention to the importance of political institutions and their forms, but their insights and contributions were largely neglected by the behavioralists. The behavioralists pointed to the significance of social forms, only to be overlooked by neo-statists.

  What, then, is the comparativist to do? Which, if any, of the approaches to Comparative Politics is sounder as a framework for analysis? This and the following chapter seek to answer these questions, not by reiterating the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches but by proposing an alternative framework for the study of Comparative Politics. As the following pages will argue, each of the existing approaches contributes something significant to further the study of the subject. Nevertheless, in their separate ways, they all ignore or overlook one or another crucial facet of comparative analysis. Here I do not attempt to devise an analytical framework that puts a definitive end to the debate. Instead, I draw on the insights provided by the various approaches to formulate, as far as possible, a comprehensive analytical framework for comparative examination. The goal here is to present more of a synthesis in order to address the analytical paucity left by other works rather than to outline a new approach from scratch.

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  Socializing Democratic Norms

  The Role of International Organizations for the Construction of Europe

  • T. Flockhart(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Empirically-minded social scientists have vied with normative political theorists and constitu- tionalists, with practitioners of comparative historical analysis, with area studies specialists and with single country experts to cover all this new terrain. (Whitehead, 2002: 2) The first attempt at theorizing these exciting events took place within Comparative Politics. Area studies scholarship, however rich or sensitive, was simply not broad enough to frame the emerging scholarship that embraced deep comparisons between events taking place in different cul- tures, with different class structures and with varying levels of develop- ment. The difficulties and the pitfalls of comparison of this type are many and well known (Collier and Mahoney, 1996; Whitehead, 2002: 198–202). As a result of the methodological difficulties associated with cross-regional comparisons or large N studies and as the number of cases that were included increased and the findings became more generalizable, the com- parativist approach to democratization adopted excessively narrow under- standings of what democracy and democratization meant. In particular, institutionalist and electoralist definitions of democracy were employed, as much due to the need to facilitate comparison as the real difficulties of 24 Socializing Democratic Norms defining operationally what democracy means. Attention also focused on the role of (mainly elite) actors in the process of regime change. 2 Comparative studies of democratization thus offered a significant, but partial, window on the process of democratization. Democratization was understood to comprise the transformation of the political system from non-democracy towards accountable, representative and elected government, accompanied by a gradual increase in liberal freedoms.

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  Strategies for Comparative Research in Political Science

  • B. Guy Peters(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The above having been said, however, there may be a shortage of theory that provides the comparative thrust needed for advancing this particular segment of the discipline of political science. A good deal of the explicitly comparative theory now existing functions at a level of extreme generality. That gener-ality prevents the development of sufficiently specific hypotheses for effective comparison. Further, many available theories of politi-cal behavior assume that political behavior is the same in almost any setting, and that comparison, therefore, is not particularly valu-able. What may be needed most is some means of assembling these various approaches and using them together. For example, approaches such as rational choice tend to assume that behavior is the same in all places. This universalistic assumption should then be assessed in light of the more directly comparative hypotheses of other types of theory. The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics 145

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  Rethinking Comparison

  Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry

  • Erica S. Simmons, Nicholas Rush Smith(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  12 See Wedeen (2002). 12 Rethinking Comparison to Rethink Political Science embrace ambiguity and develop approaches to studying a world that is often contradictory and incoherent. By expanding modes of qualitative comparative inquiry, political scientists can both uncover new questions and drive innovations in how we ask questions that have dominated the discipline for decades. Thus, Rethinking Comparison encourages us to revisit the kinds of big research questions that animated scholars such as Anderson (1983), Huntington (1968), and Tilly (1990) – scholars whose work is canonical despite their eschewing controlled comparisons. It is often difficult (though certainly not impossible) to tackle ambitious questions about power and governance while looking for cases that meet the standards of controlled comparison. More profoundly, though, as scholars in the humanities who are critical of comparative methods have shown (see Felski and Friedman 2013a), comparisons are not merely reflective of the world and its subjects; they constitute both. It also follows that if we expand how we think about comparison, we can challenge how we see the world and upend the politics of knowledge that shape our understanding of it as a result. We may even be able to upend how politics themselves are practiced, if we are able to imagine them differently (see Schaffer, Chapter 3, this volume). That is what the chapters that follow aim to help us achieve. rethinking what is compared While we agree that “the dazzling array of divergences and convergences across nation-states in the modern world . . . has long drawn scholars to the craft of Comparative Politics” (Slater and Ziblatt 2013, 1302), we should challenge ourselves to be open to how we think of the kinds of divergences and convergences that could be brought together in our analyses.

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