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Political Science: book summary + notes
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This document contains the summary of the book: Comparative government and politics and the notes of the lectures.
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Constitution and Court system in Government of Ireland
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Week 1Political science helps us understand how government works, the role and authority of leaders and
institutions, political processes such as election, and why people act the way they do on political
matters.
Benefits of comparison:
1. Description: establishing the core facts about a political system
2. Providing context: understanding the context within which a political system functions
3. Rules: drawing up rules about government and politics
4. Understanding: helping understanding ourselves, those around us, and the global system
5. Making predictions: helping predicting political behaviour and outcomes
6. Making choices: helping making better political choices
Concept: a term, idea or category such as power or democracy
Conception: a broader understanding or interpretation of a concept.
Challenges for political theories:
1. Field of comparative politics is broad and full of possibilities that it includes numerous
theoretical approaches ranging from the general to the specific
2. The value of political theory is often compromised by the way in which it is the victim of
critics waiting to shoot it down and propose alternatives
3. Social science theories are sometimes based on shaky foundations
4. Political theory has been critized for focussing too much on ideas from Western tradition.
Government: institutions and processes trough which societies are governed
Institution: formal or informal organization or practice with rules and procedures, marked by
durability and internal complexity
Political institutions: democratic models, legislatures, executives, elections, sub-national government
Governance: process by which decisions, laws and policies are made, with or without the input of
formal institutions.
Politics: process by which people negotiate and compete in making and executing shared or
collective decisions.
- Political decisions are binding for its members
- Politics involves assessing different options and opinions, and ideally brings members of a
community together into a compromise course of action.
- Politics can also be seen as a competitive struggle for power and resources between
people/groups
Two approaches on politics:
1. Politics as an arena: behaviour becomes political because of where it takes place.
2. Politics as process: behaviour becomes political because of distinctive qualities
a. Inescapable presence of diversity and scarcity ensures that politics is an inevitable
feature of the human condition. Politics is, above all, a social activity.
Six approaches to study politics:
1. Institutional approach: institutions
2. Behavioural approach: individuals
3. Rational-choice approach: interests
4. Structural approach: interrelations of groups
5. Cultural approach: influence of societal cultural values
, 6. Interpretive approach: ideas
Politics as power by Lasswell: Lasswell: Who should get what, when and how?
Power: capacity to bring about intended effects
- The greater our capacity to determined our own fate, the more power we possess.
- Power (to): capacity to bring about intended effects; ability to achieve goals
- Power (over): ability to influence or force others to do something that would not otherwise
have been done
3 dimensions to measure power:
1. Power as decisions-making: who prevails when preferences conflict?
2. Power as non-decisions making (agenda setting): who controls whether preferences are
expressed?
3. Power as preference formation (thought control): who shapes preferences?
Political power: ability held by individuals and groups in a society that allows them to create and
enforce laws and policies for the community
Authority: right to exercise power and influence of a particular position that comes with that
position.
- Where power is the capacity to act, authority is the acknowledged right to do so.
3 ways of validation political power:
1. By tradition (king)
2. By charisma (influencers)
3. By legal-rational norms (prime-minister)
Legitimacy: citizens belief that power-holders have the right to exercise power and authority
Legality: being lawful
Jurisdiction: territory or sphere of activity over which the legal authority of power extends.
The influences surrounding government come together to form a regime and a political system.
Regime: political type, based on a set of principles, norms, rules and decision-making
Political system: interactions and institutions that make up a regime
The various parts of different regimes are influenced by different sets of norms and expectations.
Three classes of regimes:
1. (Liberal) Democracy: representative and limited government, guarantee of civil liberties and
individual rights, free and fair elections, system of checks and balances and independent
media.
2. Authoritarian regime: rulers above law and not accountable, rights are violated, no elections
or show elections, political participation is limited, independent parties are banned and the
media are controlled.
3. Hybrid regime: combination of democratic and authoritarian elements. Rulers are elected in
competitive elections, rulers exploit their position and interfere media, rule of law and
checks and balances are weak and rights are poorly established.
Typology: system by which the types of something (states, languages, buildings) are classified
according to their common features.
,Typology of political power:
1. Legislative: power to make laws and policies
2. Executive: power to put plans, policies, or laws into effect and enforce them
3. Judiciary: power to interpret laws and punish who break them
Typology of how to get political power:
1. Heredity: power and authority is passed on to one who is a member of (royal) family
2. Affiliation: power and authority is passed among members of a group/party
3. Election: power-holders are chosen by an electoral process
Aristotle dimensions to classify the class of political systems:
Who rules > One person The few The many
Who benefits \/
Rulers Tyranny Oligarchy Democracy
All Monarchy Aristocracy Polity
Montesquieu’s three regime types:
1. Republican: system in which the people or some of the people had supreme power
2. Monarchical: system in which one person ruled on the basis of fixed and established laws.
3. Despotic: system in which a single person ruled on the basis of their own priorities and
perspectives.
Three Worlds System:
1. First World of wealthy, democratic industrialized states, most of which were partners in the
Western alliance against communism.
2. Second World of communist systems, including most of those states ranged against the
Western alliance
3. Third World of poorer, less democratic, and less developed states, some of which took sides
in the Cold War, but some of which did not.
Gross domestic product: value of the total domestic and foreign output by residents of a country in a
given year.
- GDP per capita: gives a good idea of the relative economic size of different states.
Minimum of basic needs:
1. Adequate nutrition
2. Education
3. Health care
Political actors and behaviours: votes, political parties, political ideologies, political participation,
political culture
Political outcomes: quality of government, good governance.
Comparative method: process by which different cases are compared in order to better understand
their qualities and to develop hypotheses, theories and concepts.
Critical thinking: the careful and objective analyses of facts and data with a view to forming a
judgement about a phenomenon.
Empirical perspective: conclusions or inferences based on observation rather than logic or theory
Normative perspective: reaching judgements and prescriptions about what should have happened or
what ought to happen.
- Empirical research is often motivated by normative goals. And a normative argument without
empirical support is not persuasive.
, Comparative politics can be dated back to the late nineteenth century
1. Birth of comparative politics took place in the US, because they started to look at other
political systems then their own.
2. Attitudes changed after WWII, when the Cold War made Americans more interested in better
understanding their contemporary allies and enemies.
3. The end of the colonial era marked an emerging interest in newly independent state and in
the approach taken by comparative political scientists.
4. In the behavioural revolution, comparativists became more interested in studying the actions
as well as institutions of government
5. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the EU there were more transfer of
ideas between the study of domestic and comparative politics which added new interests
6. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a rebellion among American political scientists
against what they described as the “mathematicization of political science” and the
particular marginalization of comparative politics.
Behaviouralism: approach to study of politics that emphasizes people over institutions, focusing on
the systematic study of the behaviour of individuals.
Grand theory: broad and abstract form of theorizing that incorporates many other theories and tries
to explain broad areas of a discipline rather than more focused matters.
Modernization theory: traditional societies develop progressively as they adopt more modern
practices, and that democracy flourishes in modern high-income industrial or post-industrial states
with educated population.
- Middle-income states are more likely to be flawed democracies
- Low-income states are more likely to be authoritarian.
Lipset: the more well-to-do a country, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy:
1. Wealth softens class differences, producing a more equal distribution of income and reducing
the likelihood of class conflict.
2. Economic security improves governance by reducing stimuli for corruption.
3. Education and urbanization make a difference, because education encourages democratic
and tolerant values, while towns and cities have always been the wellspring of democracy.
Much has changed in recent decades:
1. There has been more research published on a wider variety of states
2. The sub-field of comparative politics has become broader and more varied, with new
concepts and ideas regularly shaking up old assumptions.
However:
1. Studies of democratic regimes still greatly outnumber those of authoritarian regimes.
2. Studies of bigger and/or older states still greatly outnumber those of smaller and/or newer
states.
3. Men have historically dominated the political science which results in gender imbalance in
political thinking.
Methodology: body of methods used, or the means used, to undertake the study of a phenomenon
or a problem.
There are differences of opinion about the best way of realizing the potential of comparison:
1. What is our unit of analysis? What is it that we want to compare (the study)
2. What is our level of analysis? Macro/micro?
3. We are then faced with several additional choices: the variable that interests us and the
question of where to use quantitative, qualitative or historical research methods.
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