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Institutions
Power (A getting B to do what they would not otherwise do)
Outcomes
Political Science & the study of institutions
Or what is the point of it all?
Lecture will step back a bit from institutions and focus on the wider discipline.
What is the study of politics?
Question can be approached historically.
Earliest texts - Platos (429?-347 BCE) Republic, Aristotle’s (384-322 BCE) Politics - concerned, among other things with classification of how we are ruled.
Distinctions between Plato and Aristotle
Plato’s distinction between rule by the one, the few, the many.
Aristotle’s distinction between oligarchy (ruled by the few rich people) vs democracy (rule by the poor many).
In practice, Athenian democracy was highly exclusivist as all democracies were well until into the 20th century
Plato was a metaphysician (positing on ideal world of which this one can only be an imitation): Aristotle was an empiricist.
Both saw politics as the pursuit of human virtue
Intellectural forebearer of this course was arguabl neither but rather…
Plato’s distinction
Plato’s distinction between rule by the one, the few, the many.
Aristotle’s distinction
Aristotle’s distinction between oligarchy (ruled by the few rich people) vs democracy (rule by the poor many).
Theory of Anacyclosis, or the Political Cycle
Polybius (299-118BC):
Attributed the growth of Rome to its political institutions.
Through trial and error, the Romans had achieved stability, prosperity and the expansion through their mixed constitution with three elements
The Consulate: Two consuls, elected from judiciary or provdincal governers, presided in alternative months and over now
The Senate: Regulated Millitary service, decided which legislation should be on in..
The Assemblies: Were multiple, assed all legislation although power drifted to the Senate
During the renaissance, Polybius influenced..
Niccolo Machiavelli
Wrote in an Enlightment context od seculaiemsm, rationalism and empirical knowledge
Associated in lay language with the pejorative, Famous aphorism on love and fear
Rejected the ancient claim that political institutions should contribute to virtue; rather, virtues are only such if they contribute to order; that which is otherwise vicious and cruel can be rendered just if it brings order out of chaos.
Also the author of the Discourses, which argued that whereas feudal regimes (landed aristocrats with armies) are rapacious and violent, the ideal form of government is a republic governed by the productive bourgeoisie.
Capitalism, Democracy and the City
Associated with Florence and above all the Republic of Siena (1125 to 1555).
1512: future Pope captures Florence, establishes a hereditary monarchy in 1532.
1555: Siena surrendered to Spain and sold to Florence.
Found also in the Hanseatic League of northern Europe: Lübeck, Hamburg, Danzig (Gdansk), Riga, Stettin (Szczecin).
Origin of liberalism, capitalism, the middle class, and democracy.
Discipline as we know it emerged in the 19th and 20th century
Karl Marx : efforts to uncover the laws of economics and history.
Max Weber (next week) formalized the study of bureaucracy and the broader state.
Herbert Baxter Adams took a degree in the subject from Heidelberg in 1876 and founded Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science; later became the Chair of History and Political Science.
Columbia opened the first Department of Political Science in 1880.
Woodrow Wilson, a Baxter student, took a PhD in 1886; 1890, he became Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy.
Postwar Political Science
Discipline took off on the back of American funding.
Reaction to the past: failure of scholarship to anticipate and prevent fascism, the two world wars, and the enslavement of Eastern Europe.
….and the future: the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Politics vs….comparative politics
Single-case studies immerse you in the history, institutions, culture, and economics of one country.
Advantage: extensive in-depth knowledge, a sense of how the parts relate to the whole.
Disadvantage: tendency to treat as exceptional the common or at least general.
Comparative studies allow you to generalize; the more cases in which X (a stagnant economy) explains y (electoral failure), the closer you are to a generalizable truth about politics.
Disadvantage: tendency to ignore specificity, to pick the facts to fit the theory.
Comparative method
Qualitative vs. Quantitative. Qualitative studies tend to look at 2-3 cases (small ‘n’), quantitative many cases (large ‘n’).
Deductive vs. Inductive.
Inductive:
Working with the ‘data’ – that is, learning about the details of the cases – and drawing conclusions and even building theories from them.
Deductive:
Coming up with arguments, theories, ‘hypotheses’ which are then applied to (or ‘tested against’) the evidence.
Both are legitimate, and deductive work has the great advantage of guiding your research.
Just be prepared to adjust or abandon your argument/theory/hypothesis if the evidence doesn’t support it/them.
Inductive:
Working with the ‘data’ – that is, learning about the details of the cases – and drawing conclusions and even building theories from them.
Deductive:
Coming up with arguments, theories, ‘hypotheses’ which are then applied to (or ‘tested against’) the evidence.
Both are legitimate, and deductive work has the great advantage of guiding your research.
Just be prepared to adjust or abandon your argument/theory/hypothesis if the evidence doesn’t support it/them.
The problems of comparative work (and essay writing!)
1. The ease of confusing cause and effect (or independent and dependent variables):
Low-skilled immigration leads to low wages, when in fact low-skilled immigration is the product of low wages.
2. Selection bias
Cherry-picking the evidence.
3. Regional bias and excessive focus on Western Europe (and even Britain, France, and Germany).
Should we compare, say, South Africa and Germany? Or Thailand and the US?
4. Limited information + few cases
Two hundred countries at most
More Problems: 5. Multicausality
[revolution might be a function of too much repression, too little repression, poverty, a burst of economic growth, drought/climate change, incompetence, too little education, too much education, demagoguery, and leader’s illness etc]. Revolutions occurred in both poor, unequal, Russia and wealthy, increasingly educated Iran.
More Problems 6: Endogeneity
6. Endogeneity
factors are both the cause and effect of each other.
Low levels of education lead to anti-science sentiment and anti-science sentiment leads to low levels of education.
Thus problems of cause and effect, selection bias, regional bias, limited information, multicausality, and endogeneity. m, given language limits, often not more than a few).
Do we give up?
No.
Rather, we give up on the physics envy.
Bear in mind the difficulties in coming up with (causal) explanations and convincing arguments, but do not become a slave to them.
Rather, accept that are efforts are relative: more or less successful and more or less convincing and…
That there is a value in argument or perspective that makes you understand something about the world in a new light, that makes you think, even if it does not get it 100% right.
Because not much does.
Goal of the course is to develop institutional theories and explanations while recognizing that they will never be complete.
Essential, but not complete.
Democratic Regimes
The main, but not only, regime that we will examine.
Democracy comes from Demos or rule by the people.
Different institutional arrangements – different regimes – are ways of defining, limiting and enabling power.
They are different ways of translating the public will into concrete policies.
Why not keep it simple?
Referenda
Elitism? The expert always knows best?
No. Rather:
Voters rarely vote on the question; rather, they express broader frustrations.
Absence of accountability means that referenda are highly susceptible to misinformation.
And even more susceptible to money: California story.
2020: supporters of proposition 22 spent 204 million; opponents 20 million. Vote: 59% to 41%
If we admit that we need representative institutions, debate is on which are better
Edmund Burke (1729-1797).
Delegate: elected officials are errand boys who do what they are told by their electors.
Trustee: person who over the course of her mandate exercises their judgement and is, in turn, is judged for it at the next election:
Parliament is “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.”
Delegate cleaves closest to the referenda model, the trustee the furthest.
Contrasting forms of representative democracy are closer to one or the other.
Institutions are, in part, the mechanism through which polities achieve representation, translating preferences into votes into policies
Legislature: Branch charged with making and debating laws; in the idealized Burkean version, it is where great issues of the day are debated.
Extent to which is a forum for debate and transformation is a function of the party system.
Political Parties: what is the point?
They organize a mass of opinions, ideas, and policy options into coherent choices.
The stronger the political parties are, the more coherent and effective government is, but the weaker the individual representative; this is an essential trade-off.
Legislature:
Branch charged with making and debating laws; in the idealized Burkean version, it is where great issues of the day are debated.
Extent to which is a forum for debate and transformation is a function of the party system.
Political Parties: what is the point?
They organize a mass of opinions, ideas, and policy options into coherent choices.
The stronger the political parties are, the more coherent and effective government is, but the weaker the individual representative; this is an essential trade-off.
The Executive
Executive: carries out the laws of the state (‘executes’ them).
Is confusing and tension-ridden. What does this mean exactly?
A President is hardly closing nightclubs, delivering the post, or guarding the borders.
Rather: the civil service is responsible for the daily implementation of laws.
Generally organized functionally: interior, foreign affairs, health etc. And overseen by Cabinet ministers either a purely appointed (United States) or appointed among the elected (most liberal democracies).
Three systems
Presidential: separate election of the President and the Parliament (US, Turkey, Brazil and most Latin American countries, Afghanistan (2004- 2021, Zimbabwe, Nigeria).
Semi-Presidential systems: Direct election of the President, but Cabinet governed by the PM (France, Poland, Taiwan, Sri Lanka Mali).
President is also the Head of State, a figure that is somehow meant to be both of and above politics.
Parliamentary systems
Parliamentary systems (UK, Germany and most European countries, Australia, New Zealand, India).
Most common and most confusing because…
The executive emerges from the legislature.
Divide between constitutional monarchies (Canada, Sweden, Australia) and parliamentary republics (Germany, India).
Can tend toward what one observer called an ‘elected dictatorship,’ but that depends on the party system.
Different electoral systems produce different party systems with contrasting degrees of centralization.
The State:
These institutions differentiate democratic regimes.
They are nested in a broader set of institutions that are the subject of next week’s lecture, and understanding of which is essential to understanding (failed and successful) military coups, racial segregation, gender and sexuality, eugenic sterilization and broader patient abuse, political violence, and forced migration: The State
Note 
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