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Summary of Theories of Comparative Politics: lecture notes, articles summaries
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08.09.2022 Lecture 1*week 5
• The seminar (leader)
- To come with an idea about what you want to do in the seminar
- This will involve a series of questions
- A series of ways in which to stimulate discussion
• Readings
- Be strategic
- Decide what is important
- Understanding what is important from the article and the book & what is important for
the class
Theories and comparative politics
- Often CP is more mid-range theory
- Tension between structure & agency
- Theory about Political parties and political mobilization
Demand & supply
- Theory about cleavages
• Lichbach and his argument
- Comparative politics has theory
- Comparative politics has a theoretical core
- Theory is crucial for the type of research that we do
- Comparative politics is not only about rational choice
- Comparative politics was political science
Ø Political science began from history
Ø Political science borrowed from sociology
Ø Political science borrowed from economics
- The move from history to sociology in the 1960s
Ø This was part of the behaviour revolution
Ø Talcot parsons and structural functionalism
- It failed and produced two strains
Ø Rational choice
Ø Fragmentation
- He says: there is a theoretical core to comparative politics, and it is more than rational
choice (NB: He is a rational choicer himself)
• Lichbach’s The three theories
But he tends to oversimply!
These different approaches have different advantages.
- Rational choice oriented
- Culturally oriented
- Institutional (structurally) oriented
• What is rational choice?
They have specific ideas how the world works and how the world wants to research
- It is about preference (desire, needs, wants) maximization
- Thus, individuals (parties, nations, people etc.,) have preferences, and they are able to
order them
- They act under constraints: individual and institutional
, But they have enough information to maximize their preferences
- They ultimate goals is to reach a sort of equilibrium for the given texts
- Individuals are rational
• What is culture?
- Publicly shared meanings
- Meanings that are shared between individuals/interactions with others
- Refer to symbols, languages, traditions and ways of doing things
It’s a broader thing
- These objects obtain their meaning through a collective interpretation
How you measure
Inter-subjective
Subjective (carriers of culture)
• What is structure?
- They focus is on entities that structure society
- They are containers in which actors are embedded in, for example, economic institution,
capitalism, states etc.,
- They can be more specific: institutions
- They can be very broad: society
- They are involved in concepts
- Structure is, in some sense, actions of individuals. They can guide a path.
- Structure creates opportunities, but also identities.
- Example? Italian party (Meloni), She won the election because of the structure.
• Beyond the theories
- Ontology
- Methodology
- Comparison
They have different assumptions. So they look at different OMC
• Why important?
- On the one hand, these are rather rigid
- In reality, there is most likely more overlap
- But this is the most important point
Ø There are underlying assumptions behind every approach
Ø It is not that one approach is better than the other
Ø But there are limits to each approach
• Ontology
- The way the world is constructed
- The nature of experience
- Rational choice
1) Methodological individualists
2) The world begins with the individual
3) They are interested in intentions
4) The individual must be cognizant of his/her intentions
5) Intentions are not rational (always)
6) Actually, interested in collective outcomes.
Collective outcomes are not always rational, but you can explain through actions of
rational individuals. Example? Climate change
- Culture
1) Holists
, 2) “norms are intersubjective and transindividual
3) Individuals are embedded in culture
4) “culture is constitutive of both consensus and conflict”
5) The cultural ontology believes that individuals are embedded
Ø Subjectivists
Ø Inter-subjectivists
- Structure
1) Holists
2) But they study linkages and networks from the whole system
3) They are about relationships
4) But also important regarding the relationship between the agent and the structure
- Rationalists: reason to satisfy interests
- Culturalists: rules constitute individual and group identities
- Structuralists: relations among actors in an institutional context
• Methodology
- Rationalists
1) Comparative statics – comparing events with external shocks
2) Use a sort thought experiment
3) They look to how external shocks influence individuals
4) But they are essentially interested in collective (irrational) outcomes
- Culture
1) Interpretation of meanings, frames, intentions
2) But the key is the process of meaning interpretations
- Structure
1) Realists – the world exists
2) But the world is built upon social kinds
States, parties, movements
3) The world needs to be uncovered
• Comparisons
- This is the key: social science is about explanations
- It is about generalizations
- Rational choice
Ø Positivist – the world exists
The world is there to observe
Ø The idea is to produce generalizations
- Culture
1) Interpretations
2) Case studies
3) Understanding
4) Cautious about generalizations
- Structure
1) Comparison is possible
2) Generalization is possible
3) But they are cautious in two ways
Ø Generalizations among kinds
Ø The scientists has to work to uncover these generalizations
, Summary - Comparative politics: rationality, culture, and structure - Lichbach & Zuckerman
• Introduction
- Todays’ comparative practice “theoretically informed empirical political analysis” and
adopt “diverse conceptual lenses” and “electric combinations”. They are interested in
“questions” and “empirical puzzles”.
- Comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study and comparativists are
mostly interested in solving real-world puzzles.
- If the problem orientation of the filed tends to relegate the role of theory mainly to that of
a tool of empirical research, the quest for causal generalizations, by contrasts, moves its
role to the forefront.
- Kant: good theory without good research design is empty; good research design without
good theory is blind.
- One must begin with theoretically embedded observations.
- Researchers must eventually reflect on the nature of that theory – which leads to
questions broadly defined as social theory or philosophy of social science.
• Section 1: three exemplars
Bates (rationalist) – political opportunities
- Economy shapes his or her preferences about economic and political institutions.
- Institutions shape the calculations of political entrepreneurs and hence affect how
material interests are defined, organized, and aggregated by vote-maximizing
politicians.
- Materially and politically determined
- Offers a rational/social choice study of how interests produce the dialectic of
reason and irrationality
Scott (culturalist) - mobilizing structures
- The interpretation they place on those conditions as mediated by values embedded
in concrete practices
- Traces the basis of a reasoning and nonrational class order to the creation of
identities and communities
- Account of how communities and identities constitute the dialectic in class
relations
Skocpol (structuralist) – cultural frames
- An impersonal and non-subjective viewpoint – one that emphasizes patterns of
relationships among groups and societies
- Interested in the institutionally determined situations and relations of groups
developing international structures.
- Behind the backs of individual
- Analysis of how social forces drive the dialectic in revolutions
• Section 2: the three research schools
Ontology: about the way the world is constructed. About the nature of existence – the entities
and their properties that populate our lives
- Rationalist
Ø Methodological individualists who argue that collectivities have no status
apart from the individuals who comprise them: only actors choose, prefer,
believe, learn, and so on.
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