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Lecture 1.1 – Introduction
• Constant interaction between domestic politics and international relations (Brexit).
• Book, articles and lectures are part of the exam.
• Exam: Wednesday 21 October, 13:00-16:00
• Most countries have a political system that resemble ‘classical cases’ such as the UK,
France, Germany or the US.
• Structure of lectures:
We will first discuss some political history, then the core institutions (government,
parliament, courts), contemporary political trends, comparisons.
What is Comparative Politics?
• A sub-discipline of political science just like IR
• But: label refers to method rather than substance
• Mainly discusses domestic politics, but compares those between states
1) It started out in the US as the study of (foreign) countries
o In the 1950s/60s
o Study of all countries that were not the US
o It was still very single country focused very little comparison being done
2) Later, it developed more and more into a research method (see Lijphart 1971)
o We should think about the act of comparison with the goal to develop theories,
classifications, hypotheses and possibly to be able to predict the future.
o Lijphart was one of the main comparative scholars and has developed many
different rules and strategies for comparing different cases.
3) How CP has been developing since the 1990s is a combination of substance and
method
o Combination of number 1 and 2
o This is what we will be following
o We are looking both for in-depth knowledge about particular cases as well as
the broad comparative aspect of comparing different cases in order to make
broader statements about political institutions.
• There is more and more overlap between CP and IR
o IR between US and other countries (interference of Russia in elections) and
domestic politics US are becoming more and more intertwined.
Why Compare?
1) To gather knowledge about other countries
If you don’t know anything about other countries than your own, then what
do you actually know about your own country?
“What know they of England, who only England know?”
- Rudyard Kipling, the English Flag
We compare in order to make sense of the world we live in and in doing so
we gather knowledge about other countries
2) To enable classifications and develop typologies
Are used to create order in a seemingly chaotic reality
3) To formulate and test hypotheses and theories
On the basis of different classifications and typologies
4) To make predictions about the future
We want to compare and see if there is a relationship and if there is sth we
can use to make predictions about the future
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Pitfalls of Comparing
1) Requires a lot of background information
About the cases under scrutiny
You need to know about the political history, cultural background,
institutional background
2) Different meanings of concepts in different cultural and linguistic contexts
‘Human rights’ has a different meaning in China than in the US
‘Liberal’ in Europe is right and in the US left
3) Ethnocentrism and stereotypes
Perhaps the most important
Ethnocentrism refers to the fact that when we are engaging in comparison,
we are always looking from the standpoint of our own political system in
which we were socialized.
4) Selection bias
When comparing it is good to be aware of potential selection bias
We know that some more cases are much more prominent than others
Stereotypes
• Like ethnocentrism, they are very persistent and hard to avoid.
• They are often used as mental shortcuts to understand the world around us.
• Over-generalized belief about a certain group of people.
• Can encourage prejudice and discrimination.
We should always be aware of them.
Lecture 1.2 – States & Nations
The State
• Main unit of political organization in the world
• There are few territories that are not claimed by states
• There is a distinction we should draw between a state, a country and a government
o The state refers to the formal political organization of the country. Only refers
to the political set-up of a country.
o Country is a much broader concept. It also refers to the nation and culture,
non-political elements.
o The government refers to set of people that are in charge of managing the state
at a certain point in time.
• Features of the state (since Peace of Westphalia, 1648 & Montevideo Convention,
1933):
what they should have
o Territory
o Population
o Sovereignty
Internal Sovereignty (monopoly of force; state only legitimate actor that can
use violence within its territory)
External Sovereignty (capacity to enter relations with other states; whether
they are recognized by other states as such); membership UN as key indicator
• Some cases are in the grey zone: Vatican City Observer member of UN does it
really have a population?
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Anomalies
• Supranational organizations (EU)
o Can the EU be seen as a state bc it has some state-like features (territory,
population, government)?
o But it is still composed of different sovereign states.
• Partially recognized states (Taiwan, Palestine)
o Are only recognized by some states and not all
• De facto states (Somaliland, TRNC)
o Have all the capacities of states but they are not recognized as states
o They work and operate as states but lack external sovereignty
o Turkish Republic on Northern Cyprus
• Failed states (Somalia, South Sudan)
o Mirror of de facto states
o States that do have external sovereignty, but they lack internal or domestic
sovereignty.
• Non-sovereign territories (Greenland, Puerto Rico)
o They are functioning like states but still have constitutional links with larger
metropolitan power
o They are not yet fully decolonized
o Greenland is still constitutionally part of Denmark
o Puerto Rico is constitutionally part of US
Europe, 1700
• The state emerged in Europe
• Before the state, we see that the map of Europe was scattered mostly with city-states
and larger kingdoms.
• ‘War made the state, and the state made war’
o The state emerged due to the process of war between these entities
o War requires an army in order to build an army you need to be able to levy
taxes if you want to levy taxes you need some form of bureaucracy,
centralized state and the capacity to enter into relations with other states
(diplomacy).
• The FR of 1789 created many different ideologies and it created the idea of the nation-
state (the idea that every nation should have its own state).
o It played a key role in the emergence of nationalism in Europe.
Europe, 1900
• A lot of city states have dissolved due to unification.
• Some of the large empires are also fragmenting due to the birth of nationalism.
• States expanded bc they became stronger in internal sovereignty:
o Centralization of the state
o Standardization of the state more uniformity in society
o Creation of a police force/army
o Mobilization ability to extract societal resources
o Differentiation capacity to develop different institutions from other
countries
o Emergence of the welfare state since end of WW2
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The Nation
• Very different from concept of state.
• Calhoun article
• ‘Imaged community’ (Anderson 1983) with territorial claim
o In contrast to the state which is a legal-political entity
o Imagined because it only exists in people’s heads
nothing on paper that binds people together
• Nation is a social construct; intersubjective fact
o The fact that only exists because the members all believe it
o Nations can be created
o In many countries we see that politicians try to create a nation (nationalism)
nation-building
• A nation seeks self-determination: sovereignty (political aim)
• Nationalism: modern force: right of the nation to be sovereign
o Push to have its own territory, sovereignty
o Born during French Revolution
o Was seen as a progressive force
• French Revolution: each nation should have a state; birth of the nation-state ideal
• Nationalist push to eradicate (ethnic) differences homogenize nation and
differentiate from other nations
o Before nations existed, there were often different groups living in a certain
territory remove these cultural differences.
o Post-colonialism hard to unite different groups with randomly drawn
borders.
• Nationhood versus citizenship
o Citizenship is only a legal term.
o Nationhood only exists in people’s heads.
Nationalism & Ethnicity
• Ethnicity is also (mostly) a social construct; notion of common descent & heritage
(some factual element)
o Members of the same ethnic group also often share a certain gene pool.
o You can empirically distinguish between different ethnic groups, whereas it
would be very difficult to distinguish empirically between different nations.
• Ethnicity: internal or cross cutting national and state boundaries
• Difference ethnicity and nation
= Does not necessarily translate into quest for political sovereignty
o It is not a political term
• Ethnicity can coincide with nationalism, or resist nationalist push
o Nationalism can be based on a certain ethnic group.
o Ethnic groups can resist uniting with different ethnic groups.
• Calhoun: nationalism often has an ethnic foundation old ethnic identities have not
disappeared.
o Strongest from of nationalism is the one rooted in ethnicity.
• Both ethnicity and nationalism are invoked by political leaders to mobilize people and
create legitimacy.
• Example: Yugoslavia
o There were different ethnicities living in Yugoslavia (in a single state).
