May 12th 2015
• Class Introductions
• Syllabus and Expectations
• Discussing the who, what, when where
• And “why?” of Comparative Politics
• Discussion of Assignments in More Depth
• How do we compare?
• Get into groups of two or three
• Introduce yourself to your group members
• You will share with the class:
• Your group members name
• Their favourite discipline in high school?
• What country they have never been to before, that they’d like to visit and
why?
• Course: Comparative Politics
• Time: Tuesday and Thursday 12-2pm
• Place: Rm 334
• Office Hours
• Time: Mon and Wed 12-1:15
Tue and Thur 10-11:30
• Place: Social Sciences Office Rm 530
• Weekly Readings:
• 13 Weeks to cover 14 and a half chapters
• Assignments
• Attendance/Group Assignments: 10% (done in class, each week)
• Group Presentation – State Profiles: 15% (Due: Wednesday of Assigned
Week)
• Midterm: 20%: Tuesday June 23rd
• Term Paper: 25%: Tuesday July 28th
• Final Exam: 30% TBA
• Cheating and Plagiarism
• Don’t do it
• Plagiarism, in particular, is a significant issue that will be reported
• A Respectful Classroom
• If you are late, take your seat quietly – do not cause further disruption or
you will be asked to leave
• Be respectful of your peers – their time, their learning and their person
• One last note on this term re: accommodation due to conflicts
with other courses
• What is comparative politics?
• Easiest answer is to understand comparison
• What sorts of things can we compare?
• Similarities and differences in:
• Institutions
• Policies
• Outcomes of revolutions or democratization
• Development or failure to develop
• Comparative politics was initially derived as the study of one
state compared to the USA, though this is no longer the case
• Has progressed beyond US-centric focus
• Small-n and Large-n studies
• Single case over time
• Single case
• At its core, Comparative Politics is about exploring relationships
• What kind?
• Good research comes from good research questions – in
comparative politics, these questions typically start with asking
“Why?”
• Why questions, when framed reasonably (ie without an obvious
agenda), tend to require thoughtful responses
• Where, what, when, who and to a lesser extent how questions can often
be answered with straightforward facts (that is to say, you can google
them or otherwise find them quite easily)
• Key to a good comparative question is that it is open ended
• That is to say, there are potentially several potential answers (or
hypotheses)
• Sometimes there is more than one answer
• In Groups or 3-4 consider and record the following concepts:
• Democracy
• Justice
• Freedom
• Concepts are important, help us understand the world
• To be meaningful, though, they need to be broadly understood
• Consistent, coherent, clear, useful
• IMPORTANT HINT FOR YOUR ASSIGNMENTS:
• One way to ensure that there’s a common understanding of a concept,
define it!
• In any discipline, but comparative politics in particular, identifying and
using concepts that have been clearly stated in literature is the most
effective approach
• What are facts?
• Evidence?
• “facts used in support of a position, or facts used in support of
a hypothesis”
• Not a point of view or opinion.
• Your job on assignments in this course is to construct arguments
using evidence
• Empiricism
• The use of evidence to build arguments
• Good evidence must be:
• Related to the issue at hand
• Based on a single level of analysis
• Case Studies
• Case Studies can be:
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A state (country)
An event
A sub-national unit
An international unit
A city
A group
Time Periods
• Identifying variables
• An element or factor that is liable to change or vary from case to case
• Identifying outcomes (or effects)
• Something produced or changed in any social or political process
• Typically looking for an explanation of cause and effect
• Independent variable (cause)
• Dependent variable (effect)
• Most similar systems:
• Based on idea that two countries with lots of things in common
(like climate, religion, wealth or other factors) should have
broadly similar outcomes
• Despite this, that’s often not the case – this is where comparison
comes into play: What’s the cause of different outcomes?
• Togo and Ghana have broadly similar experiences, yet one
has an authoritarian regime, while the other is a democracy
• Oddly, to use MSS, one needs to identify differences between
states first
• Sweden
• A wealthy state with a very strong welfare system
• If we want to do comparison using a most similar system, what is our first
step?
• Second step?
• Most different systems:
• Based on idea that two countries with nothing in common should
have very different outcomes
• Despite this assumption, as above, it is often not the case.
• For example, despite differences in religion, geography, population, time
in which it happened and the regime which was overthrown, but China
and France experienced large social revolutions
• To use this system, one must identify the similarities first
• Norway has one of the world’s highest levels of purchasing
power parity
• What’s the first step if we want to do a most different systems
comparison?
• Second step?
• In comparative politics, there are usually additional steps of
comparison
• Comparative checking
• Process of adding cases to see whether initial observations continue to
hold validity
• Examples:
• Economic development and democracy
• Within-Case comparison
• Further scrutiny of a case over a longer-time period
• This can also be an approach to comparison – explaining different
outcomes within a state at different points in history
• Examples:
• The Province of
Alberta