Comparative politics part 1
Core Objectives of Political Scholarship
The Goal of Inquiry: The primary objective in scholarship is to generate more questions than answers. This approach allows researchers to:
Dig deeper into complex subjects.
Consider phenomena from various and opposing perspectives.
Engage with both agreeing and disagreeing viewpoints to strengthen analysis.
The Human Connection and Empathy: Scholarship should never be detached from the human experience.
Researchers must always think about people: how they are active participants in systems and how they are impacted by them.
Navigating complex ideas, events, and phenomena requires an empathetic lens to understand what individuals and groups are going through.
Students are encouraged to be active participants in their education, bringing up questions and considering how they personally would approach political phenomena.
Foundational Tensions and Philosophical Themes
Freedom versus Security: A recurring theme is the investigation of the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective security. This includes exploring how these tensions impact the way humans organize their lives politically.
Liberty versus Equality: Another enduring tension in political phenomena is the balance between liberty and equality and how they coexist or conflict within diverse systems.
The Goal of Living Together: Political science is not merely about mutual recrimination or conflict. Its ultimate purpose is to figure out how humans can live together better, in dignity, and with empathy for one another.
Defining Politics: Multiple Perspectives
Definitions of politics are not static; they are subject to change and reconsideration. Scholars should consider which definitions resonate most with their research.
Politics as a Process: One robust definition views politics as a continuous sequence of events and interactions.
Structure: It involves rules, procedures, and institutions.
Centricity: People (individuals and groups) are central to the process.
Collective Action: Individuals work together to realize collective values, ideals, and goals ().
Commonality: It requires an understanding of shared fate or common membership within a group.
Actors: Includes state actors, non-state actors, individuals, and corporations.
Primary Motivation: At the most basic level, groups organize to achieve security in terms of mental, physical, and material well-being.
Politics as Conflict and Management: Conflict is an inherent part of the human experience and, by extension, politics.
Enduring Tensions: Because humans are diverse and have differing views, conflict is never fully resolved but must be managed.
The Role of Government: Tensions become political when the government is involved directly, indirectly, expressly, or minimally. Government serves as the body that makes decisions on collective goals and organizes how people interact.
The Laswell Definition: A shorter, more direct definition popularized by Laswell is that politics is "who gets what, when, and how."
Historical Ideals: The Periclean Vision of Democracy
Pericles' funeral oration serves as a foundational text regarding the ideals of democracy, though these ideals often fell short in actual Athenian practice.
Politics as Noble Service: The oration frames politics as a noble and lofty endeavor. Public administration is viewed as a form of service to, for, and by the people.
Key Democratic Ideals articulated by Pericles:
Justice: The ideal of providing justice for all people alike.
Trust: Building a society where neighbors are not suspicious or angry with one another.
Welcoming Others: Maintaining an open society that does not expel foreigners.
Education: Prioritizing education to ensure a citizenry that is actively engaged in the state's affairs.
Comparative Politics: Methodology and Scope
Scope of Study: Comparative politics focuses on the comparative examination of polities, politics, and governments. It extends beyond the state to include civil society across different countries and time periods.
The Comparative Method: This is both an area of study and a specific method of inquiry. It involves:
Examing how different eras and systems address central questions of living together.
Learning which approaches work for specific phenomena by comparing domestic experiences.
Generating hypotheses and generalizations that can be applied across different cases.
Comparison with International Relations:
International Relations: Primarily looks at the relations between countries, diplomacy, and international law.
Comparative Politics: Focuses on how specific phenomena are addressed within different countries, institutions, or timeframes to challenge assumptions and reconsider established ideas.
Scientific Inquiry and Research Design in Political Science
Scientific Inference: Research should go beyond listing facts. Facts are merely a collection of data; the goal of scientific inquiry is to understand why those facts matter and how they contribute to the field of research.
The KKV Framework: The work by King Cohan and Verba (also referred to as King Cochin and Faribah in transcript references) provides a starting point for balancing philosophical debate with practical logic to produce valid inferences.
Types of Inference: Research should strive for both descriptive and explanatory inference based on empirical information.
Public Procedures: Methods must be explicit, codified, and publicly available. This ensures that data reliability can be assessed, results can be reviewed, and other researchers can build upon the work.
Uncertainty in Conclusions: Uncertainty is a natural part of all knowledge projects. Researchers should acknowledge other perspectives and explicitly argue why their specific approach is fruitful.
Method as Content: The methods and rules of research are the content themselves, applicable to any subject of study.
The Process of Research and Question Generation
Selecting a Research Question: This is a creative and often non-linear process.
Popper’s View: Karl Popper noted that there is no strictly logical method for having new ideas; it is a creative and artistic process of discovery.
The Work Behind the Question: Often, to of a researcher's reading, notes, and initial thoughts do not make it into the final project but are essential to arriving at a compelling question.
Empirical Evaluation: Every hypothesis must be evaluated against empirical data before it can contribute to the existing social scientific literature.
Academic Rigor: A researcher must explicitly locate their research design within the framework of existing literature to demonstrate its specific contribution to the field.