Description
KEY CONCEPTS
Comparative politics relies on a comparative method in order to construct and test hypotheses.
There are long-running debates over whether we can make comparative pol-itics more scientific—better at explaining or predicting politics.
One concept to guide our study is political institutions: self-perpetuating pat-terns of activity valued for their own sake.
One ideal to guide our study is the relationship between freedom and equal-ity, and how politics reconciles the two across countries.
During the past two decades, the world has seen an astonishing number of changes: the rise of new economic powers in Asia, the retreat of communism and the advance of capitalism and democracy, the return of religion to politics, the spread of the Internet and wireless technologies, the deepening of globalization. As a result, many of the traditional assumptions and beliefs held by scholars, policy makers, and citizens are open to question. New centers of wealth may reduce poverty, increase inequality, or both. Democracy may be an inexorable force, or it may founder on the obstacles of nationalism, economic instability, or culture. New forms of electronic communication may bind people across societies, creating shared identities, or fragment communi-ties, generating a backlash.
Debates over ethnic conflict illustrate these issues. Why does this form of political violence occur? Is it a response to economic or political inequality or bad government? A function of cultural differences, a “clash of civiliza-tions?” Is it abetted by globalization? Perhaps the explanation lies somewhere else entirely, beyond our purview or comprehension. How can we know what is correct? How do we scrutinize a range of explanations and evaluate their merits? Competing assumptions and explanations are at the heart of political debates and policy decisions, yet we are often asked to choose in the absence of reliable evidence or a good understanding of cause and effect. To be better citizens, we should be better students of political science and comparative politics the study and comparison of domestic politics across countries.
This chapter will lay out some of the most basic vocabulary and structures of political science and comparative politics. These will fall under three basic categories: analytical concepts (assumptions and theories that guide our research), methods (ways to study and test those theories), and ideals (values and beliefs about preferred outcomes). Analytical concepts help ask questions about cause and effect; methods provide tools to seek out explanations; 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.
Our survey will consider some of the most basic questions: What is politics? How does one compare different political systems around the world? We will spend some time on the methods of comparative politics and how schol-ars have approached its study. As we shall see, over the past century, political scientists have struggled not just with the challenges of analyzing politics but also with whether this can actually be considered a science. Exploring these issues will give us a better sense of the limitations and possibilities in the study of comparative politics. From here we will consider comparative politics through the concept of institutions—organizations or activities that are self-perpetuating and valued for their own sake. Institutions play an important role in defining and shaping what is possible and probable in political life by laying out the rules, norms, and structures through which we operate. Finally, in addition to looking at institutions, we will take up the ideals of freedom and equality. If institutions shape how the game of politics is played, then the objective of the game itself is the optimal mix of freedom and equality. Must one come at the expense of the other? If so, which is more impor-tant? Can both freedom and equality be achieved? Or is perhaps neither desirable in place of some other ideal? With the knowledge gained by exploring these questions, we will be ready to take on the complexity of politics around the world.
What Is Comparative Politics?
Before we go any further, we must identify what comparative politics is. Politics is often defined as 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; for example, we may speak of “office politics” when we are talking about relations and power within a business. Political scientists in particular 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. It is therefore hard to separate the idea of politics from the idea of power, which is often defined as the ability to influence or impose one’s will on others. Politics is thus about the competition for public power, and power is about the ability to extend one’s will.
Within political science, comparative politics is a subfield that compares this struggle for power across countries. The method of comparing countries, it is believed, can better test our assumptions and theories than simply look-ing at our own country or by making arguments about cause and effect with-out any comprehensive evidence drawn over space and time. For example, one important puzzle we will return to frequently 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? Or to be more specific, how come South Korea is democratic while North Korea is not? Looking at North Korea alone won’t necessarily help us understand why South Korea went down a different path or vice versa. A comparison of the two, perhaps alongside similar cases in Asia, may better yield explanations. As should be clear, these are not simply academic questions. Democratic countries actively support the spread of like-minded regimes around the world, whether through diplomacy, aid, or war, but 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. It is important to separate ideals from our concepts and methods and not let the former obscure the latter. Yet even as comparative politics can help inform and even challenge our ideals, it can provide new ways of thinking by highlighting alternatives to what we see and know, questioning our common assumption that there is one (right) way to organize political life.