Key Issues in Comparative Politics - POL101

What is Politics?

  • Public vs. private

  • Authoritative vs. voluntary

    • Force can be used to have people comply

  • Politics is the competition for public power

    • Power is the ability to extend one's will

 Governments = orgs of individuals who are legally empowered to make binding decisions on behalf of a particular community

 Governance = establishing goals for society, finding the means for reaching those goals, and then learning from successes or failures of these decisions

 

Why do we have governments?

  • To create and maintain a stable and peaceful community

  • To protect us, property, and other rights

  • To promote economic efficiency and growth

  • To promote social justice and protect the weak

 

Critiques of governments:

  • Destruction of natural communities with rules/structures

  • Violations of basic rights

  • Economic inefficiency

  • Government of private gain, abuse of public power and govern for private gain = corruption

 

How do we Study Politics?

  • Collecting empirical facts and data

  • Research Hypotheses --> "Lack of democracy leads to corruption"

    • Dependent variable = what is to be explained? --> corruption

    • Independent variable = explanatory factor --> democracy

((Research Hypothesis --> Research Method --> Answer))

 

The Four Empirical Methods

  1. The Statistical Method

    • Surveys

    • Questionnaires

    • Cause and relation relationship --> more storks = more babies?

  2. The Experimental Approach

    • Manipulation of variables

    • Difficult to conduct experiments in political sciences

  3. The Case Study Method

    • Generalizations

  4. The Comparative Method

    • Two or more case studies

    • Inductive vs. Deductive reasoning

      • Inductive = gathering more knowledge on something

      • Deductive = already have a hypothesis and general knowledge of something

    • Synchronic comparisons across space

    • Diachronic comparisons in one setting across time

      • Sweden and Finland part of EU for testing hypothesis, Norway not part of EU as a control

 

How do we Compare Political Systems?

Two designs:

  • The "Most Similar Systems" Design

    • Two countries with only ONE difference, everything else is (for the most part) very similar

  • The "Most Different Systems" Design

    • Two countries with only ONE similarity, everything else is (for the most part) very different

 

What Do We Compare in Political Systems?

  1. Public policy

    • Safety policies

    • Immigration policies

  2. Political behaviour

    • What do actors actually do in political systems?

    • Voting behaviour

  3. Governmental institutions

    • Parliaments

    • Governments

    • Political parties

    • Courts

 

Why Do We Compare?

  • To widen our understanding of politics in other countries

  • To enable us to learn from other countries

    • The more we understand a problem, the better we can avoid it

  • To develop more sophisticated understandings of politics in general

 

What should we avoid while comparing?

  • Overgeneralizations

    •  Individualistic fallacy = taking info at an individual level and generalizing the entire population

    •  Ecological fallacy = taking info at broad eco level and applying it to individual cases

  • Over-assumptions

    • Political ethnocentrism

      • We think everyone will think like us

 

Challenges/problems in comparative research:

  • Controlling a large number of variables

  • Controlling for the interaction between variables

  • Limited number of cases to research

  • Limited access to information from cases

  • Uneven research across cases and regions

  • Cases selected on the bases of effect and not cause (selection bias)

  • Variables may be both cause and effect in relation to each other (endogeneity)