COMPARATIVE METHODS & APPROACHES
Fundamental to all human thought
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Absolute Monarchy (1600s-1700s)
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Constitutional Monarchy (Saudi Arabia)
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Parliamentary Democracy (UK, Japan, Canada)
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Presidential Democracy (US, Mexico, Brazil)
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Dictatorship (Cuba, Vietnam, N. Korea)
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Theocracy (Iran, Vatican)
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Allocate resources
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Enhance security
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Protect the environment
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Provide public service (education, transportation,
cultural amenities)
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Build community and nation
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Promote economic efficiency and growth
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Protect Human rights
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Common identity and sense of community among
citizens important
Without a unifying factor cleavage can dominate
• Japan: example of a population that is ethnically
homogeneous with shared language, little
religious diversity and strong political history; in
addition, enjoys relative geographic isolation
from neighbors
• Nigeria: extremely large and diverse population;
no common pre-colonial history; sharp religious
divisions; 250 ethnic groups; language diversity
Negative Rights/Political & Civil Rights
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Freedom from interference; an entitlement to be
left alone (e.g., freedom of expression, privacy
rights);
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Focus on individual liberty and freedom
Positive Rights/Welfare Rights
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Freedom to do or attain something; an
entitlement or claim that somebody else do
something for you (e.g., the right to an education,
the right to medical care)
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Understand our own political system
 Permits us to see a wider range of political alternatives
 Permits us to illuminate the virtues and shortcomings of our own
political life and to expand our awareness of the possibilities of
politics
Enhance our ability to understand others
 Helps to interpret development of other countries
 Helps to describe and understand political processes and political
change by offering concepts and reference points from a broader
perspective
Stimulate us to form general theories of political relationships
 Improve out classifications of politics (constitutions, electoral
systems, executives)
 Achieve generalizations that have potential prediction
Enable us to test our political theories
 Helps to form our political theories by confronting them with the
experience of many institutions and settings
A World of States
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States as the primary actors on the world stages
International organizations play a crucial role
External factors shape politics and policies of states
Governing the Economy
The Democratic Idea
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Strong appeal of the democratic idea
Diverse sources of support for democracy
Democracies vary widely in states
Potential fragility of democratic transitions
The Politics of Collective Identity
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Importance of ethnicity, religions, race, & locality
Comparing institutions
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Institutional roles matter more than the people who occupy them
The value of institutions as long-term commitments that are more
reliable than any single employee
Institutions define interests
Comparing societies (1960s-1970s)
Reasons for the rise of analysis on societies (decolonization, the
rise of communist countries, new developments in social science
techniques as political behavior and attitude surveys
Society-centered analyses formed part of the behavioral revolution
in politics (contrast with institutional analysis)
Comparing states (after 1980s)
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The state as an active agent, shaping and re-shaping societies
Where society-centered analysis saw the state as embedded in
society, the state-centered approach saw the state as part ofa
configuration defined by the state itself.
The Modernization Theory
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A universal theory of social, political, and economic
development, based on the experience of “modern”
systems.
Claims that as societies develop, they would become
capitalist democracies, sharing a similar set of values
The Behavioralism
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Explains the behavior of actors, not describe institutions
A shift from descriptive study of politics to one that
stresses explanation & prediction.
Places greater emphasis on the political behavior of
individuals as opposed to larger political structures and on
quantitative over qualitative methodology.
The Dependency Theory
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A new approach developed by the critics of the
modernization theory
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Claims that development wasn’t linear, and that third
world was poor because of international capitalism (not
because it was “pre-modern”).
Postbehavioralism
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Rejection of a grand theory of politics
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Criticism of modernization theory as biased and inaccurate
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Diversity of methods and political approaches,
emphasizing such issues as gender, culture, environment,
and globalization.
Correlation
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Relationship between two or more variables
Correlation is different to causation because it doesn’t
necessarily mean that one variable causes changes in
another variable.
Causation
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Changes in one variable (the independent variable)
cause changes in another variable (the dependent
variable).
Dependent variable as a factor or a phenomenon that
is to be explained.
Independent variable as a factor that is thought to
affect the dependent variable.
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Focus on empirical data (statistics) across a large
number of cases
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Variables are numbers
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Enable to access a large number of
cases/countries
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Conclusions are more generalizable
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Limited to variables expressed in quantitative
data and across countries.
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Focus on a more detailed study of one (or few)
case(s).
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Concentrates on the unique aspects of a country
such as history and culture.
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Allows for more detailed conclusions and for the
analysis of more sophisticated research
questions.
Knowledge
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The simplest and the best reason.
Helps to interpret development of other countries &
understand our own system
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Classification
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Formulate & test hypotheses
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Generalizations & predictions
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A theory allows to explain singular cases.
Conceptual stretching
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A common or abstract concept for comparison (the
connotation of “national pride” differs among
countries
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Interdependence
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Too many variables too few cases
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Lack of sufficient cases to test hypothesis
Variables vary over countries
Selection bias
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Unrepresentative results, generalizations cover only
a small number of cases/countries