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Summary Lecture notes - Take Home 2 (Week 9-15)
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Saturday, 20 May 2023CP Lecture 9
Organising Democratic Governance
Blok 5:
• Looking inside the system at speci c institutions and actors
• Today: parties and party systems
• Electoral systems, public opinion, representation, collective action, media
Recap - Development of Comparative Politics
Phase 3: Reaction to Behavioral Revolution/Second Scienti c Revolution (after
1967)
1) Bringing the State Back In: institutions as rules, procedures and social norms
that shape how individuals formulate preferences
2) Mid-range rather than universal theories
3) Shift from sociology to economics —> focus on rational actors that
can rank preferences and act accordingly
• Neither clocks nor clouds
Phase 3/4: Second Scienti c Revolution after 1989
1) Epistemological shift: construction and testing of causal theoretical models
2) Emphasis on research design that makes it possible to test theoretical
propositions
3) How are theories built?
• Focus on micro-foundations
• (Causal) theories can be falsi ed
• Individuals not purely instrumental or rational – ideas,
identities matter
How do people conceive of their interests in politics? What determines what
people want?
• Ultimately a philosophical question
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• Di erent disciplines tackle this in di erent ways and CP draws insights from
several related disciplines
• E.g. sociology and anthropology; economics; psychology
Con icts about redistribution – material interests
BdM et al – Rational Choice
• Leadership: political survival
• Everyone: material interests – access to public and private goods
Historical institutionalists: emphasize ideas and shared conception of interests
• Moore – di erent groups have di erent preferences for the (type of) state (Prussian
vs. English elite)
• No simple “more or less”
• Preferences can be “sticky” because of socialization
Political ideology = “a set of expectations that citizens have for the role of the
state” – stable, competing, elites, people
• Chhibber and Verma on India:
• Politics of Recognition
• “accommodation of the interests of historically marginalized social groups”
• Politics of Statism
• “state as the agent not just of economic development but also of social
transformation”
1) Theoretical approaches (generally) provide a guide to simplifying assumptions
about interests and how they are constructed and conceived.
• What do you want? What is important to you?
• In-depth interview, participant observation, surveys, observe behavior
consistent with assumed interest, etc.
• Which simplifying assumptions are you comfortable with
• Which bene ts does simpli cation o er?
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2) Many theoretical approaches in contemporary CP are open to the idea that
people care about more than only material interests (e.g. Wang; Suryanarayan and
White).
• People have preferences about the type of society they would like to live in, and
this can inform their political behavior.
• How do we know which interests and identities become politically relevant?
• And how does this in uence the nature of politics?
Organising Democratic Governance
1) Democracy and Parties
2) Parties and Party Systems
Democracy and Parties
• “Democracy is a systm in which parties lose elections” (Przeworski)
• “Democracy is a competitive political system in which competing leaders and
organizations de ne the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public
can participate in the decision-making process” (Schattschneider 1960)
- Elections engage larger segments of the population than other forms of
participation or collective action.
! Accountability
• Accountability is de ned as “the mechanisms by which leaders and parties are
held ‘accountable’- i.e. can be sanctioned daily or at xed intervals for their
actions” (Bardi et al 2014) —> “throw the rascals out”
• In a democracy, elections are the key mechanisms to hold leaders accountable.
—> link to The Logic of Political Survival
Why do we care about parties?
“Political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in
terms of political parties.” (Schattschneider 1942)
“As parties fail, I argue, so too fails popular democracy. [...] Without parties, and still
following Schattschneider, we would then be left with no real democracy and no real
system of representative government; or with what continues to be called
democracy, but which would be rede ned so as to downgrade or even exclude the
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popular component – since it is this popular component that depends so closely on
party.” - Peter Mair
What is a political party?
“A party is any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing
through elections, candidates for public o ce.”
(Sartori 1976/2005: 57).
Functions of parties:
1) aggregation
2) articulation
3) representation
4) political recruitment
Party Systems
“Parties make for a system only when they are parts (in the plural); and a party
system is precisely the system of interactions resulting from inter-party
competition.” (Sartori 1976/2005: 39)
The Emergence of Party Systems
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