COMPARATIVE POLITICS

What is it? Why study it?

• Governments are central to the many other developments that shape the world we live in.

• Governments make war and peace, promote scientific research and take responsibility for the environment.

• Governments set the ground rules for international trade while managing public expenditures and influencing private enterprise at home.

• Governments decide what extent the people under their jurisdiction will be granted basic human rights.

Any clear understanding of the contemporary world therefore requires a concentrated focus on Governments and Politics.

Comparative PoliticsComparative Politics

It examines political realities in countries all over the world.

It looks at the many ways government operate and the ways people behave in political life.

More specifically...More specifically...

it examines how governments are structured and how they function, including different forms of democracy and various forms of non-democratic government. This area of inquiry focuses maninly on:

“governmental institutions”

• The process through which governments interact with their populations in pursuing community goals. The emphasis here is on Public PolicyPublic Policy such as health, economic and such policies

How political leaders and the population behave in politics, inducing the ideas they have about politics, and the ways they participate in politics through such mechanisms as elections, political parties, interest groups, and other modes of political activity. The focus here is on elite elite and mass political behaviorand mass political behavior andinclude such things as political ideologies and political ideologies and political participation.political participation.

How political leaders and mass public think and feel about politics, and how these attitudes affect theor behavior. This is known as Political Culture.Political Culture.

Comparative Politics and IRComparative Politics and IR

• What is the difference?

• How are they connected?

• Comaparative Politics examines political activities within countries. The focus is on each country and its internal politics

• International Politics, by contrast concerns relations between countries. The focus is on external relationships of individual countries.

The Purpose of ComparisonThe Purpose of Comparison• To understand political life

comprehensively, we must compare

• We can learn a great deal about any one particular case ( country X).

• It is like traveling abroad. It awakens us to a variety of human experience and shows us that there are different ways of doing things.

More specifically (principal More specifically (principal purposes)...purposes)...

• To widen understanding of politics in other countries

• To increase our appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of our political system and to enable us to learn from other countries

• To develop a more sophisticated understanding of politics in general, including the nature of democracy and non-democratic gvernments, the interdependencies connecting individual countries with the rest of the world.

• To help us see the relationship between politics around the world and such field as science and technology, environment, public health, law, business, religion, ethnicity, culture and the like

• To enable us to become more informed citizens so we can develop our own political opinions

• To sharpen our critical thinking skills applying scientific logic and coherent argumentation to our understanding of political phenomena