Comparative Politics - Introduction

Introduction Key Concepts

Comparative politics uses the comparative method to construct and test hypotheses.
There are ongoing debates about making comparative politics more scientific to improve its explanatory and predictive power.
Political institutions are self-perpetuating patterns of activity valued for their own sake.
The relationship between freedom and equality is a key ideal, and politics aims to reconcile the two across countries.
Recent global changes include the rise of Asian economic powers, the retreat of communism, the advance of capitalism and democracy, the return of religion to politics, the spread of the Internet and wireless technologies, and the deepening of globalization.
These changes challenge traditional assumptions and beliefs.
New wealth may reduce poverty and/or increase inequality.
Democracy's progress is uncertain due to nationalism, economic instability, or culture.
Electronic communication may unite or fragment societies.
Ethnic conflict raises questions about its causes, such as economic or political inequality, bad government, cultural differences, or globalization.
Competing assumptions and explanations are central to political debates and policy decisions, but often lack reliable evidence or a good understanding of cause and effect.
To be better citizens, one must study comparative politics - the study and comparison of domestic politics across countries.
This chapter outlines basic vocabulary and structures: analytical concepts, methods, and ideals.
Analytical concepts help ask questions about cause and effect, methods provide tools to seek out explanations, and ideals provide a way to compare what we find in political life to what we would prefer.
Concepts and methods can help us reach our ideals by revealing what we don’t know and when our assumptions are wrong.
The survey considers basic questions such as, "What is politics?" and "How does one compare different political systems around the world?"
The chapter will look at the methods of comparative politics and how scholars have approached its study.
Political scientists have struggled with analyzing politics and whether it can be considered a science.
Comparative politics will be considered through the concept of institutions—organizations or activities that are self-perpetuating and valued for their own sake.
Institutions shape political life by providing rules, norms, and structures.
The ideals of freedom and equality will be examined. Institutions shape how politics is played, and the objective is the optimal mix of freedom and equality.
The chapter will investigate if freedom and equality must come at the expense of each other or if both can be achieved, and whether either is desirable in place of some other ideal.

What Is Comparative Politics?

Politics is the struggle in any group for power that will give one or more persons the ability to make decisions for the larger group.
This group may range from a small organization up to an entire country or even the entire global population.
Politics can be found everywhere there is organization and power.
Political scientists concentrate on the struggle for leadership and power for the larger community.
Politics is the struggle for the authority to make decisions that will affect the public as a whole.
Politics is linked to the idea of power, which is the ability to influence or impose one’s will on others.
Politics is the competition for public power and power is about the ability to extend one’s will.
Comparative politics is a subfield that compares the struggle for power across countries.
Comparing countries can better test assumptions and theories compared to only looking at one's own country or making arguments about cause and effect without comprehensive evidence.
An important puzzle is why some countries are democratic while others are not.
Why have politics in some countries resulted in power being more dispersed among the people while in other societies power is concentrated in the hands of a few?
Looking at one country alone won’t help understand why another went down a different path.
A comparison of the two, perhaps alongside similar cases in Asia, may better yield explanations.
Democratic countries actively support the spread of like-minded regimes around the world, through diplomacy, aid, or war.
If it is unclear how or why it comes about, democracy becomes difficult or even dangerous to promote and perhaps foolhardy to take as inevitable.
Ideals need to be separated from concepts and methods to avoid obscuring them.
Comparative politics can inform and challenge ideals and provide new ways of thinking by highlighting alternatives to how political life is organized.

The Comparative Method

Comparison is an important way to test assumptions and shape ideals.
Researchers seek out puzzles—questions about politics with no clear answer—to guide their research.
They rely on the comparative method—a way to compare across cases and draw conclusions.
By comparing countries or subsets within them, scholars hope to draw conclusions and make generalizations valid in other cases.
To investigate why democracy has failed to develop in some countries, one might look at North Korea.
A convincing explanation could guide tense relations with this country in the future.
However, studying one country alone has limitations.
The study of one country alone can generate interesting hypotheses, but it alone is not enough to test those hypotheses.
The single-case approach is called inductive reasoning—the means by which we go from studying a case to generating a hypothesis.
Inductive reasoning can be a “building block” to greater theories in comparative politics.
Comparative politics can also rely on deductive reasoning—starting with a puzzle and generating some hypotheses about cause and effect which will then be tested against a number of cases.
Inductive reasoning starts with evidence to uncover a hypothesis; deductive reasoning starts with the hypothesis and then seeks out the evidence.
In inductive reasoning, we started with a case study of North Korea and ended with some generalization about nationalism to test across other cases, in deductive reasoning, we would start with our hypothesis about nationalism and then test that hypothesis by looking at a number of countries.
By carrying out such studies, researchers may find a correlation, or apparent association, between certain factors or variables.
Political scientists are unable to control the variables in the cases they study.
In other words, in our search for cause-and-effect relationships, we are unable to make true comparisons because each of our cases is quite different.
Countries are amazingly diverse in terms of economics, culture, geography, resources, and political structures, and it is difficult to control for these differences.
Even in a single-case study, variables change over time.
Political scientists are often hampered by a limited number of cases.
This breadth allows researchers to select their cases in such a way as to control their variables, and the large number of cases also prevents any single unusual case from distorting the findings.
If one attempts to control for differences by finding similar cases (e.g., industrialized democracies), the total body of cases will be relatively small.
Accessing cases is a problem.
The information that political scientists seek is often not easy to acquire, necessitating “work in the field,” conducting interviews or studying government archives in other countries.
International travel requires time and money, and researchers may spend months or even years in the field.
Interviewees may be unwilling to speak on sensitive issues or may distort information intentionally or unintentionally.
Libraries and archives may be incomplete, or access to them restricted.
Comparativists often master knowledge of a single country or language and rely on deductive reasoning, which limits the kinds of comparisons they can make.
The specialization of comparativists also tends to congregate around those regions that can be easily studied at home and abroad.
This also means that comparative politics is slow to shift its focus when new challenges and questions arise.
The problems of variables and case selection are further muddied by issues of bias—not only political bias, but how cases are selected biased.
Case selection isn’t randomized in political science.
Single-case studies are already influenced by the fact that comparativists study a country because they know its language or would prefer to travel there.
Relying on deductive reasoning can easily fall into the trap of selection bias.
For example, in order to understand revolutions we hypothesize that the main cause is a rapid growth in inequality.
Finding as many cases of revolution as possible and then looking for whether they were preceded by such a change in inequality would cause us to miss all those cases where inequality may have grown but revolution did not take place.
Concentrating on what we think is our cause (growth in inequality) rather than what we think is our effect is better.
The study of comparative politics is limited by the direction in which research is conducted (inductive versus deductive) and the range, quality, and selection of cases.
Though variables can’t be perfectly controlled, certainly similar countries can be studied; secondary sources or other data can be used where language skills are lacking; and careful construction of our research can make certain we don’t fall into the trap of selection bias.
For example, careful research might find that countries with a low rate of female literacy are less likely to be democracies than countries where female literacy is high, even though the causality is still not clear.
This problem of cause and effect, known as endogeneity, is a major obstacle in any comparative research.
Even if we are confident that we have found cause and effect, we can’t easily ascertain which one is cause and which one is effect.
One political scientist has called endogeneity “the motor of history,” as causes and effects tend to evolve together, each transforming the other over time.
The meanings of freedom and equality may also change over time.

Can We Make a Science of Comparative Politics?

Everything elaborated so far shows the difficulty of studying comparative politics and much of political science in general.
It is precisely these kinds of concerns that have driven political science, and comparative politics within it, toward a more scientific approach.
Political science and comparative politics have a long history.
In almost every major society there are masterworks of politics, prescribing rules or, less often, analyzing political behavior.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) departed from the traditional emphasis on political ideals to conduct comparative research on existing political systems, eventually gathering and analyzing the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states.
Aristotle’s objective was less to determine the ideal political system than to understand the different forms of politics that actually existed and their relative strengths and weaknesses.
With this approach, Aristotle conceived of an empirical (that is, observable and verifiable) science of politics with a practical purpose: statecraft, or how to govern.
Aristotle was perhaps the first Westerner to separate the study of politics from that of philosophy.
For the next 1,800 years, discussions of politics remained embedded in the realm of philosophy, with the emphasis placed on how politics should be rather than on how politics was actually conducted.
Ideals, rather than conclusions drawn from evidence, were the norm.
Only with Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) did a comparative approach to politics truly emerge.
Like Aristotle, he sought to analyze different political systems—those that existed around him as well as those that had preceded him in history, such as the Roman Empire—and even tried to make generalizations about success and failure.
These findings, he believed, could then be applied by statesmen to avoid their predecessors’ mistakes.
Machiavelli’s work reflects this pragmatism, dealing with the mechanics of government, diplomacy, military strategy, and power.
Because of his emphasis on statecraft and empirical knowledge, Machiavelli is often cited as the first modern political scientist, paving the way for other scholars.
His writings came at a time when the medieval order was giving way to the Renaissance, with its emphasis on science, rationalism, secularism, and real-world knowledge over abstract ideals.
The resulting work over the next four centuries reinforced the idea that politics, like any other area of knowledge, could be developed as a logical, rigorous, and predictable science.
During those centuries, a number of major thinkers took up the comparative approach to the study of politics, which slowly retreated from moral, philosophical, or religious foundations.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, authors such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke followed in Machiavelli’s footsteps, advocating particular political systems but on the basis of empirical observation and analysis.
They were followed in the eighteenth century by scholars such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Baron de Montesquieu, whose studies of the separation of power and civil liberties would directly influence the writing of the American Constitution and others to follow.
The work of Karl Marx and Max Weber in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would further add to political science with analyses of the nature of political and economic organization and power.
All these developments reflected widespread changes in scholarly inquiry and were often a blend of political ideals with analytical concepts and some attempt at a systematic method of study.
Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, political science formally existed as a field of study, but it still looked much different from the way it does now.
The study of comparative politics, while less focused on ideals or philosophy, resembled a kind of political journalism: largely descriptive, atheoretical, and concentrated on Europe, which still dominated world politics through its empires.
There was little in this work that resembled a comparative method.
The two world wars and the rise of the Cold War would mark a turning point in political science and comparative politics.
First, among universities there was a growing move toward applying more rigorous methods to studying human behavior, whether in sociology, economics, or politics.
Second, the world wars raised serious questions about the ability of scholars to meaningfully contribute to an understanding of world affairs.
Third, the Cold War with a rival Soviet Union, armed with nuclear weapons and revolutionary ideology, made understanding comparative politics a matter of survival.
Finally, the postwar period saw a wave of technological innovation, such as early computers, that generated a widespread belief that through technological innovation many social problems could be recast as technical concerns, finally to be resolved through science.
The fear of another war was thus married with a belief that science was an unmitigated good that had the answers to almost all problems.
Although these changes dramatically transformed the study of politics, the field itself remained a largely conservative discipline, taking capitalism and democracy as the ideal.
In comparative politics these views were codified in what was known as modernization theory, which held that as societies developed, they would become capitalist democracies, converging around a shared set of values and characteristics.
The United States and other Western countries were furthest ahead on this path, and the theory assumed that all countries would eventually catch up unless “diverted” by alternative systems such as communism (as fascism had done in the past).
During the 1950s and 1960s, comparativists influenced by modernization theory expanded their research to include a wider number of cases.
Field research, supported by government and private grants, became the normal means by which political scientists gathered data.
New computer technologies combined with statistical methods were also applied to this expanding wealth of data.
Finally, the subject of investigation shifted away from political institutions (such as legislatures and constitutions) and toward individual political behavior.
This trend came to be known as the behavioral revolution.
Behavioralism hoped to generate theories and generalizations that could help explain and even predict political activity.
Ideally, this work would eventually lead to a “grand theory” of political behavior and modernization that would be valid across countries.
Behavioralism and modernization theory were two different things—modernization theory a set of hypotheses about how countries develop, and behavioralism a set of methods with which to approach politics.
However, the two were clearly linked by a sense of approaching politics in a more scientific manner to achieve certain policy outcomes.
Behavioralism also promoted deductive, large-scale research over the single-case study common in inductive reasoning.
By the late 1970s, however, this enthusiasm began to meet resistance and significant obstacles.
New theories and sophisticated methods of analysis increased scholars’ knowledge about politics around the world, but this knowledge in itself did not lead to the expected breakthroughs.
Those theories that had been developed, such as modernization theory, increasingly failed to match politics on the ground; rather than becoming more capitalist and more democratic, many newly independent countries collapsed in the face of violent conflict and revolution, to be replaced by authoritarianism that in no way reflected Western expectations or ideals.
Some critics charged that the behavioral revolution’s obsession with appearing scientific had led the discipline astray by emphasizing methodology over knowledge and technical jargon over clarity.
Others criticized the field for its ideological bias, arguing that comparativists were interested not in understanding the world but in prescribing the Western model of modernization.
At worst, their work could be viewed as simply serving the foreign policy of the developed world.
Since then, comparative politics, like all of political science, has grown increasingly fragmented.
While few still embrace the old descriptive approach that dominated the earlier part of the century, there is no consensus about where scholarship is going and what research methods or analytical concepts are most fruitful.
This lack of consensus has led to several main lines of conflict.
Methodological debates turn on how best to gather and analyze data.
Traditional “area studies” scholars continue to emphasize the importance of deep, long-term investigations of particular countries or regions, relying on what is known as qualitative evidence and methodology.
In their view, the behavioral revolution in many ways led the discipline astray by attempting to oversimplify a complex and culturally diverse world.
In contrast, others reject the qualitative approach as failing to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge and being little better than the description that dominated the field a century ago.
These advocates of a quantitative approach favor a greater use of statistical analysis as well as mathematical models often drawn from economics.
For this group, the failing of the behavioral revolution is that this revolution is not yet complete.
A second related debate concerns rationality.
Are human beings rational, in the sense that their behavior conforms to some generally understandable behavior?
Some say yes, relying on rational choice or game theory to study the rules and games by which politics is played and how we seek to realize our preferences.
Such formal models can, ideally, lead not only to explanation, but even to prediction—a basic element of science.
Qualitative political scientists are skeptical of this view, arguing that human beings are essentially unpredictable and that the emphasis on individual rationality discounts the importance of historical complexity or idiosyncratic behavior.
As these debates have continued, the world around us has changed.
The Cold War came to an end, something neither qualitative nor quantitative scholars anticipated (or really even took under consideration).
It seemed that political scientists, whatever their persuasion, had little to contribute to many of these issues and were unable to prepare us for their implications.
Quantitative scholars recognize that careful scholarship is possible with qualitative approaches, recognizing that simply expressing information in the form of numbers does not make it “scientific,” nor does purely qualitative information necessarily lack rigor.
Similarly, traditional area scholars are making more use of statistics and more careful methodology to ensure that their research is more than simply description that cannot be built upon by others.
New models, like those from game theory, can be employed with both quantative and qualitative material.
Some scholars speak optimistically of an integration of statistics, “narrative” (case studies), and formal models, each contributing to the other.
All sides have recognized that the discipline has sometimes lost touch with real-world concerns, become inaccessible to laypersons, and failed to speak to those who make decisions about policy—whether voters or elected leaders.
In the past few years there has been an increasing emphasis on reconnecting political science to central policy questions and also reengaging political ideals, something largely discarded in the behavioral revolution as “unscientific.”
This new emphasis is not a call for comparativists’ research to be biased in favor of some ideal (though some raise this concern); rather, comparative politics should not be simply about what we can study or what we want to study but also how our research can reach people and help them be better citizens and leaders.
After decades of asserting that political science should have an objective and scientifically neutral approach, this call for greater relevance and contribution to the ideals of civic life represents a dramatic change for many scholars, but relevance and rigor are not at odds. They are in fact central to a meaningful political science and comparative politics.

A Guiding Concept: Political Institutions

A goal of this textbook is to provide a way to compare and analyze politics around the world in the aftermath of recent changes and uncertainties.
Given the long-standing debates within comparative politics, how can we organize our ideas and information?
One way is through a guiding concept, a way of looking at the world that highlights some important features while deemphasizing others.
Our guiding concept is institutions, which were defined at the beginning of this chapter as organizations or patterns of activity that are self-perpetuating and valued for their own sake.
In other words, an institution is something so embedded in people’s lives as a norm or value that it is not easily dislodged or changed.
People see an institution as central to their lives, and as a result, the institution commands and generates legitimacy.
Institutions serve as the rules, norms, and values that give meaning to human activity.
Institutions command authority and can influence human behavior; we accept and conform to institutions and support, rather than challenge, them.
In many countries, democracy is an institution: it is not merely a means to compete over political power but a vital element in people’s lives, bound up in the very way in which they define themselves.
Even if cynical about democracy in practice, its citizens will defend the institution when it is under threat and even die for it.
In many other countries, this is not the case: democracy is absent and unknown or weakly institutionalized and unstable.
People in such countries do not define themselves by democracy’s presence or absence, and so democracy’s future there is insecure.
However, these same people might owe a similar allegiance to a different set of institutions, such as their ethnic group or religion.
There is no single, uniform set of institutions that holds power over people all around the world, and understanding the differences is central to the study of comparative politics.
Institutions are not physical structures; they are embedded in each of us, in how we see the world and what we think is valuable and important, so it is difficult to change or eliminate institutions.
When institutions are threatened, people will rush to their defense and even re-create them when they are shattered.
However, institutions can pose the problem of resistance to necessary change because people have difficulty accepting that certain institutions have outlived their value.
The basic political structures of any country are composed of institutions: the army, the police, the legislature, and the courts, to name a few.
We obey them not only because we think it is in our self-interest to do so but because we see them as legitimate ways to conduct politics.
Institutions are a useful way to approach the study of politics because they set the stage for political behavior.
Because institutions generate norms and values, they favor and allow certain kinds of political activity and not others.
As a result, political institutions are critical because they influence politics, and how political institutions are constructed will have a profound effect on how politics is conducted.
The institutional approach combines two traditions: documenting the institutions of politics, without asking how those institutions actually shaped politics, and cause and effect but turned its attention toward political actors and their calculations, resources, or strategies.
From behavioralism, institutional approaches take their emphasis on cause-and-effect relationships.
However, institutions are not simply the product of individual political behavior; they can and do have a powerful effect on how politics functions.
Institutions are not merely the result of politics; they can also be an important cause.
There is still a tremendous amount of institutional variation around the world that needs to be recognized and understood.
This textbook will map some of the basic institutional differences between countries, acknowledging their diversity while pointing to some basic features that allow us to compare and evaluate them.
By studying political institutions, we can hope to gain a better sense of the political landscape across countries.

A Guiding Ideal: Reconciling Freedom and Equality

The book will now touch on analytical concepts (such as institutions), methods (such as inductive or deductive, quantitative or qualitative), and ideals about politics.
Politics was defined as the struggle for power in order to make decisions for society.
The concept of institutions gives us a way to organize our study by investigating the different ways that struggle can be shaped.
What are people fighting for? What is it they seek to achieve once they have gained power? This is where ideals come in.
The core debate that lies at the heart of all politics is the struggle between freedom and equality.
This struggle has existed as long as human beings have lived in organized communities.
Politics is bound up in the struggle between individual freedom and collective equality and how these ideals are to be reconciled.
When we speak of freedom, we are talking about the ability of an individual to act independently, without fear of restriction or punishment by the state or other individuals or groups in society.
It encompasses such concepts as free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, and other civil liberties.
Equality refers to a shared material standard of individuals within a community, society, or country.
The relationship between equality and freedom is typically viewed in terms of justice or injustice—a measurement of whether our ideals have been met.
Freedom and equality are tightly interconnected, and the relationship between the two shapes politics, power, and debates over justice.
What is unclear, however, is whether one must come at the expense of the other.
Greater personal freedom, for example, may imply a smaller role for the state and limits on its powers to do such things as redistribute income through welfare and taxes.
As a result, inequality may increase as individual freedom trumps the desire for greater collective equality.
This growing inequality can in turn undermine freedom if too many people feel as though the political system no longer cares about their material needs.
The United States has one of the highest degrees of both personal freedom and economic inequality in the world.
A primary focus on equality may erode freedom. Demands for greater material equality may lead a government to take greater control of private property and personal wealth, all in the name of redistribution for the “greater good.”
Yet when economic and political powers are concentrated in one place, individual freedom may be threatened since people control fewer private resources of their own.
There are assertion that freedom and equality can also serve to reinforce each other, with material security helping to secure certain political rights, and vice versa.
The meaning of freedom and equality may change over time, as the definition of each shifts through changes in the material world and in the fabric of our values.
In short, politics is driven by the ideal of reconciling individual freedom and collective equality.
Inevitably leading to questions of power—influencing others or imposing one’s will—and the role of the people in political life.
Each political system must address questions regarding freedom and equality, power and its preventions.
Each political system creates a unique set of institutions to structure political power, shaping the role that the people play in politics, and their debates about justice.

In Sum: Looking Ahead and Thinking Carefully

Politics is the struggle for power in any organization, and comparative politics is the study of this struggle around the world.
Over the past centuries, the study of politics has evolved from philosophy to a field that emphasizes empirical research and the quest to explain and even predict politics.
This approach has limitations, such as an inability to generate any “grand theory” of political behavior.
Dramatic changes over the past twenty years have called on comparativists to shed light on these developments and concerns.
Political institutions can help us organize this task. Institutions generate norms and values, and different configurations of institutions lead to different forms of political activity.
Institutions can help map the landscape of politics, serving as a map to political activity, then the goal of that activity is to reconcile the competing values of individual freedom and collective equality.
All political groups, including countries, must reconcile these two forces, determining where power should reside and in whose hands.
The final thought on how to use all this information that The most fruitful approach to comparative politics is to be skeptical not simply of others—that’s the easy part—but of what we believe and take for granted as well.
The most fruitful approach to comparative politics is to be skeptical not simply of others—that’s the easy part—but of what we believe and take for granted as well.
We should be ready to reconsider our beliefs in the face of new evidence and arguments and to remember that every explanation in this book is a conjecture and subject to revision if we can find better evidence.