SUMMARY POLITICAL SCIENCE
,LECTURE 1 INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE JUSTICE
CHAPTER 1 GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Political science = the study of the theory and practice of government and politics, focusing on the structure
and dynamics of institutions, political processes, and political behavior.
Social science = the study of human society and of the structured interactions among people within society.
Comparative politics = the systematic study of government and politics in different countries, designed to
better understand them by drawing out their contrasts and similarities.
The sub-fields of political science:
Sub-field Subject matter
Comparative The comparative study of government and politics in different settings.
politics
International The study of relations between and among states, including diplomacy, foreign policy,
relations international organizations, war and peace.
National The study of government and politics in individual states, including institutions and
politics political processes.
Political The study of the way we think about government and politics, addressing topics such as
philosophy authority, ethics, and freedom.
Political theory The study of abstract or generalized approaches to understanding political phenomena.
Public policy The study of the positions taken or avoided by governments in response to public needs.
THE BENEFITS OF COMPARISON
The benefits of comparison:
Purpose Qualities
Description Establishing the core facts about a political system.
Context Understanding the context within which a political system functions.
Rules Drawing up the rules about government and politics.
Understanding Helping us understand ourselves, those around us, and the global system.
Prediction Helping us predict political behavior and outcomes.
Making choices Helping us make better political choices.
- Describing government and politics:
o Comparison helps us search for facts; how governments are structured, how institutions
works and relate to one another
- Providing context:
o We have to put the information we know in context, so we can build a clearer picture of how
different systems work and how they evolved.
o What are contextual explanations for differences between several countries?
- Drawing up rules:
o Five examples of ‘laws’ that came out of comparative study:
All governments can count on the votes of only a minority of the electorate.
, In developed democracies, incumbents are re-elected more than half the time
thanks partly to their exploitation of state resources.
It is rare for incumbent parties to win much more than 60 per cent of the vote.
Incumbents typically lose support from term to term.
In democracies, the alternation of parties and leaders in office is usual.
- Improving understanding:
o We can better understand and appreciate the dynamics and character of political systems.
o It learns us about places which we are unfamiliar with.
- Making predictions:
o Comparison can help us make generalizations that can help us predict the outcome of
political events.
- Making better choices:
o States and political communities can use each other as laboratories for addressing public
needs, learning form successes and mistakes, and adapting policies pursued in other
countries to domestic needs and circumstances.
GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNANCE
Government = the institutions and processes through which societies are governed.
- They must develop procedures and institutions for making and enforcing collective decisions
- Government consists of all those institutions endowed with public authority and charged with
reaching and executing decisions for a community.
- It can apply to the group of people who govern, a specific administration, the form of the system of
rule, and the character of administration.
Institutions = a formal or informal organization or practice with rules and procedures, marked by durability and
internal complexity.
- These are usually the major bodies of national government, such as executives, legislatures, judiciaries
and political parties.
- It is also used to include the rules, interactions and practices that distinguish such entities as the
family, marriage, religion, money, law and even language.
The institutions of government:
Institution Role and purpose Examples
Governing, making policy, providing leadership Presidents, prime ministers,
Executive
and direction. ministers, cabinet.
Representing the interests of citizens; making Parliaments, congresses, national
Legislature
law; forming governments. assemblies, diets.
Judiciary and Supreme courts, constitutional
Upholding and interpreting the constitution.
courts courts.
Departments, ministries, divisions,
Bureaucracy Implementing policy.
agencies.
Offering policy alternatives, fielding candidates, Conservatives, liberals, socialists,
Political parties
forming governments and oppositions. greens, nationalists.
,Governance = the process by which decisions, laws, and policies are made, with or without the input of formal
institutions.
- Highlights the process and quality of collective decision-making.
- The emphasis is on the activity of governing.
- The term can also refer to what the institutions of government do and to how well or badly they do it
(good or bad governance).
POLITICS, POWER AND AUTHORITY
There are three concepts that are also important in government:
1. Politics = the process by which people negotiate and compete in making and executing shared or
collective decisions. There are three features of politics:
a. It is a collective activity, occurring between and among people.
b. It involves making decisions regarding a course of action to take or avoid, or a disagreement
to be resolved.
c. Political decisions become policy for the group, binding and committing its members even if
some of them continue to resist.
2. Power = the capacity to bring about intended effects. The term is often used as a synonym for
influence but is also used more narrowly to refer to more forceful modes of influence notably, getting
one’s way by threats. At the heart of politics is the distribution and manipulation of power. Three
dimensions of power:
a. Who prevails when preferences conflict? Decision-making. Decisions are made on issues over
which there is an observable conflict of interests.
b. Who controls whether preferences are expressed ? Non-decision-making. Decisions are
prevented from being taken on issues over which there is an observable conflict of interests.
c. Who shapes preferences? Ideological. Potential issues are kept out of politics altogether,
whether through social forces, institutional practices, or the decisions of individuals.
3. Authority = the right to rule. Authority creates its own power, so long as people accept that the
person in authority has the right to make decisions. Authority is the acknowledged right to rule. There
are three ways of validating political power:
a. By tradition, or the accepted way of doing things.
b. By charisma, or intense commitment to a leader and his or her message.
c. By appeal to legal-rational norms, based on the rule-governed powers of an office, rather
than a person.
REGIMES AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS
In democratic and authoritarian regimes the forces and influences surrounding government come together to
form both a regime and a political system.
- Regime = a political type, based on a set of principles, norms, rules and decision-making, procedures,
and including – for example – a democratic regime or an authoritarian regime (democracy,
dictatorship, elitist system, neoliberal system).
- Political system = the interactions and institutions that make up a regime (interactions through which
value are authoritatively allocated for a society).
,Although the political systems of states have many core elements in common, the manner in which these
elements work and relate to one another is far from the same. Political systems are moving targets; they evolve
and change, and often at a rapid pace.
POLITICAL TYPOLOGIES
Political typologies = the system by which the types of something (states, languages, personalities, buildings,
and organizations, for example) are classified according to their common features.
Aristotle identified three regime types:
1. Republican systems in which the people or some of the people had supreme power.
2. Monarchial systems in which one person rules on the basis of fixed and established laws.
3. Despotic systems in which a single person ruled on the basis of their own priorities and perspectives.
The world divided into three groups of countries based on ideological goals and political alliances:
1. First world: wealthy, democratic industrialized states, most of which were partners in the Western
alliance against communism.
2. Second world: communist systems, including most of those states ranged against the Western alliance.
3. Third world: poorer, less democratic, and less developed states, some of which took sides in the Cold
War, but some of which did not.
A replacement of this typology is:
- The Democracy Index maintained by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a UK-based organization related
to the news weekly The Economist.
- The Freedom in the World index maintained by the US-based research institute Freedom House.
ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
The relationship between politics and economics in particular is so intimate that there is an entire field of study
devoted to the subject, called political economy.
- Good governance is more likely to go hand-in-hand with a successful economy, and bad governance
less so.
Gross Domestic Product = the value of the total domestic and foreign output by residents of a country in a
given year the core measure of economic activity is output.
We must not forget the importance of understanding political systems by looking at their relative performances
in terms of helping provide their citizens with basic social needs Human Development Index.
- Combination of life expectancy, adult literacy, educational enrolment, and per capita GDP.
, CHAPTER 2 MAKING COMPARISONS
UNDERSTANDING COMPARISON
Comparative method = the process by which different cases are compared in order to better understand their
qualities and to develop hypotheses, theories, and concepts.
- The goal of comparison is to help encourage critical thinking about government and politics = the
careful and objective analysis of facts and data with a view to forming a judgement about a
phenomenon.
- Without critical thinking we are unlikely to understand the significance different arrangements, the
reasons behind them or the effects they might have on the way that government functions in political
systems using different kinds of executive.
In political research we need to be aware about two different perspectives:
1. Empirical approach = conclusions or inferences baes on facts, experience or observation rather than
logic or theory.
2. Normative approach = reaching judgements and prescriptions about what should have happened or
what ought to happen.
ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION
Behaviouralism = an approach to the study of politics that emphasizes people over institutions, focusing on the
systematic study of the behavior of individuals.
A grand theory of comparative politics = a 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.
Modern = a state with an industrial or post-industrial economy, affluence, specialized occupations, social
mobility, and an urban and educated population
Modernization = the process of acquiring the attributes of a modern society, or one reflecting contemporary
ideas, institutions and norms.
CHOOSING CASES
Comparative government and politics have a choice of different approaches to methodology = the 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:
- What is our unit of analysis? The objects of study in comparative analysis.
- What is our level of analysis? The level of study in comparative politics, ranging from the macro
(political system) level to the micro (individual) level.
- Other choices are: the variable that interests us and the question of whether to use quantitative,
qualitative or historical research methods.
