Class notes Introduction to Comparative Politics (6441HICP8)
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Course
Introduction To Comparative Politics (6441HICP8)
Institution
Universiteit Leiden (UL)
These are my class notes for the course "Introduction to Comparative Politics". It is a single document in which you can find notes for lectures 1 to 13 (lecture 8 was a review session for which I did not specifically take notes). These notes were taken with Notion. The links at the very beginning ...
Comparative politics and comparative methods
Next to political theory and international relations, CP is one of the most important fields of
political sciences.
Comparative politics= sub-field of political science studying political structures, actors and
process within a political system, and analysing them empirically by exploring their
similarities and differences across political systems.
Comparative politics focuses on empirical questions. Why do young people choose to
participate in certain political occasions? Unlike international relations, which focuses
primarily on states, the level of analysis in CP are the political systems (e.g. democracies in
developing or individual countries). CP is a sub field of political science studying political
structures, actors and processes within a political system analysing them empirically by
exploring their similarities and differences across political systems. The substance of CP is
very broad. Focus on political actors are numerous (e.g. parties, individual voters),
parliaments and institutions and processes like government formation. If we think only about
the substance we see that it is very broad so we can say that CP focuses primarily on the
comparative method.
The importance of comparison
ICP CLASS 1 1
, The importance of CP stems from the importance of comparison in social sciences. CP lifts
these intuitive comparisons in a way to explain some sort of political phenomenon.
Four things we can do when we employ the comparative method are:
Knowledge about other countries: very often we tend to focus only on our countries of
origin. There are several ways one could acquire knowledge about other countries and
we usually tend to use culture as an “excuse” but cultural explanation must not be the
best way to explain some phenomena.
Classification/typologies: when we wish to make a comparison between two countries,
putting them one next to the other allows us to see how different they are. Comparison
allows us to cluster the differences into groups that share some common attributes.
Classifications are important because the are at the basis of a good comparison.
One question that has preoccupied political scientists since ever is “whether a certain level
of economic development is a necessary condition for democracy to survive” . In this case
we need a good classification to answer that question.
The other question is “the likelihood of democracy to successfully consolidate is related to
the previous of non-democratic regime”. We need a good classification to start to address
some questions.
Hypothesis testing: social sciences are full of types of hypothesis. They are just
propositions. We need to test certain hypothesis to see whether a preposition is valid or
not.
Predictions: comparison allows us to make predictions.
Countries matter but also concepts do. Most controversy in political science is not really
about theories but it’s about concepts that we use to describe or classify a certain political
phenomenon.
The importance of concepts
Concepts = ideas or terms with clear definitional structure.
Concepts do two things:
1. Concepts give meaning to reality: they are tools through which we think, reason, argue
and analyse;
Strong presidencies conceptually are a set of ideas. The state, in a non conceptual way, is
probably a political unity with a flag, an anthem, and a territory, but conceptually the state is
a set of ideas about how power should be distributed in the territorial sense.
ICP CLASS 1 2
, 2. Use of concepts sets us apart form the world of practical politics.
This course is about concepts, different types of concepts, classifications and typologies.
Comparative methods
Comparative methods = rules and standards of comparative analysis.
We usually speak about rules and standards about of comparative analysis, we try to answer a
question of how a comparison should be carried out in order to improve description, or
classification, or theory testing, or prediction.
There is an entire subfield that deals only about this method.
There are two important issues on use of comparative method:
1. CP focuses on very different units of analysis.
When we think of international relations we usually see that the discipline focuses on states.
However, as long as CP is concerned, states are rarely the unit of analysis. CP tends to use
components of the different political systems such as the parliament, government and other
types of institutions.
CP also identifies a distinction between the level and unit of analysis. Let’s make an example
to understand this distinction.
There are countries that are high patronage countries and countries that are low patronage
ones. The unit of analysis is the appointment of bureaucrats. The levels of analysis are the
different structures in which there is this unit of analysis. So there could be very different
levels of analysis.
2. There is no one comparative method.
To a large extent comparative method depends on the number of cases that we employ in the
analysis.
Lijphart (1971) makes a distinction between three different types of comparative methods:
Case study method
It focuses only on one case. It implies an intensive examination of one particular case and the
context in which that case exists. It seems to suggest that it is not really comparative. Some
are and some are not. Indeed, there are different types of case studies. There are two types of
case study method:
Deviant case study: it identifies and examines an exception to what is generally expected
from an established theory. This is useful to refine our theoretical understanding.
ICP CLASS 1 3
, Theory-testing case study: proving a theory in a new empirical context to which it is
supposed to apply.
Comparative method
It is a systematic analysis of a small number of cases (small-N analysis)
An example of question that can be answered using the comparative method could be “why
are small European countries economically more successful than their larger and
economically more powerful neighbours?”. The answer btw is that these countries adopted
corporatist model of policy-making.
The comparative method, however, has some problems. Problems of a small-n comparison in
this case. Too few cases, too many variables. In this case, economic performance could be
influenced also by other elements such as the level of freedom of enterprises to set up. How
can we isolate the most important factor that explains some sort of variation?
There are two solutions:
1. Increase the number of cases: we just put all sorts of other cases , the problem is that we
run out of cases and conceptual stretching ( = apply this case also to the other cases to
which it shouldn’t apply).
2. MSSD (most similar system design): we control, we select cases that have the common
variance that influence our analysis. However, this brings us in another problem that is
that we select our cases on the dependent variable (selection on dependent variable).
3. MDSD (most dissimilar system design): selects countries that are successful but are
different in that variable that is common to all of them that might explain this economic
performance.
Statistical method
Statistical method = comparative method based on a large N of cases, using statistical
techniques to examine relationships between variables.
The difference between the comparative method and the statistical method stems in how we
measure our dependent and independent variables (in this case always numerical) and the
second difference is how we draw our conclusions, in this case here we do that from a
statistical analysis studying the relationship between different variables.
Experimental method
It is not used that much. It’s limited in CP.
ICP CLASS 1 4
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