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Samenvatting - Comparative Political Institutions
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Hannah OngenaeComparative political institutions
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,Hannah Ongenae
Introduction to comparative politics
Politics
= making public authoritative decisions
- public : they concern every aspect of a society’s life, we focus only on public decisions
- authoritative: decisions are binding
What makes a decision authoritative? POWER
Power is the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to achieve their own goals, when other
are trying to prevent them to realise them (Max Weber): Here again: the decisions are public, made
by public institutions
3 types:
1) Traditional
2) Charismatic
3) Rational-legal
Political science:
- is a very young discipline, predecessors wrote in a non-normative way
- evolves a lot because societies change a lot
Predecessors: aristoteles - macchiavelli (photos: giovanni sartori - arend lijphart)
Comparative politics is a-normative= we are not judging whether a specific phenomenon is good or
bad
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,Hannah Ongenae
Split of definition of comparative political institutions:
- Comparative: refers to the methodology, how? (how do we know the way political party
systems have evolved? by comparing)
- Politics: what? we focus only on public decisions
EXAM = the human activity of making authoritative and public decisions
Public because it applies to all citizens, it has nothing to do with the private sphere of citizens
eg: rules of META are important because they affect millions of people BUT it doesn’t apply
to politics
! distinction is blurred. We in this course are only interested in the rules made by public
institutions. All private companies are affected by decisions made by public institutions
Aritstoteles: man is by nature a political animal
- EXAM Institutions: is a stable, valued, recurring pattern of behavior created by humans.
These are socially constructed, created by humans, they are not given: Build with time,
agreement, citizens, top-down or bottom-up processes.
eg of institutions: a parliament, NATO, marriage (more abstract, not a formal institution
because it does not have a physical place), a church (formal), the army (formal), elections
(formal because there is a law that specify how elections should be held), ownership (not
that concrete, contractualized), constitutions (declare that a republic is a republic),
international treaties, codes
1) Formal institutions: rule of law (approach to rules), written (character of rules),
potentially open to scrutiny (regarding transparency, they can be changed)
Example of non-written institutions: UK or Israël
2) Informal institutions: socially, shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created,
communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels, not open to
scrutiny
eg: respect, loyalty, honor, clan politics, social trust, clientelism (exchange between a
candidate and a voter, I give you something and in return you vote for me, illegal! or
take a picture of the vote and the candidate will give you something in return)
Example: Helmke and Levitski: The dedazo (not a written law; it is a habit)
Main tasks of comparative politics:
1) describe cases
2) explain cases (through hypothesis)
3) making predictions
eg: 2016 elections in USA, polls predicted that Hillary would win
Some predictions:
- Iron law of oligarchy by Roberto Michels
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, Hannah Ongenae
oligarchy: only few people have access to power
- Duverger laws
= if you have an electoral law that allow a small party to have a seat you will end up
the two-party system, smaller parties never have a change of winning
Link with last class
Political science is an evolving discipline:
The behavioural revolution: shifted the substance of comparative politics way from institutions,
mainly imported from sociology
before: interest in institutions, qualitative analyses, no big data available
=> Divergent patterns in different political systems (communist regimes, fasicst dictatorships) which
could not be understood within the narrow categories of Westeren Institutions. This turned the
attention away from institutions and directed it towards ideologies, belief systems and
communication. (a new language: systematic functionalism)
Walter Lipmann was very sceptical, public opinion is irrational/ published a very important study on
public opinion (=irrational)
after the behavioural revolution: seems that public opinion is more rational than we think
= cyclical process
The distinction between left and right : difficult to apply in countries such as Russia
Approaches in comparative politics
The most common approaches/subdisciplines in comparative politics (5 possible types of
explanation):
1) Institutions
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