Comparative Government & Politics: What is Comparative Politics?

0:01 welcome to comparative government and politics this first lesson is going to be an introduction to comparative politics the big question that we're going to answer uh we're going to answer it simply and we're also going to answer it a bit more complexly is what is comparative politics comparative politics simply speaking is the study and the comparison of domestic politics across countries now politics in general generally speaking is the struggle in any group for power and with that power one or more people have the ability to make decisions for the larger group we can think about a few examples like in an office setting right there's office politics we can

0:47 think about in the government as we're probably going to talk about largely in this course or we can talk about it in more of an informal setting like on a soccer team how come i didn't get to play goalie when he got to play goalie or how come his kid got the start on the team and my kid didn't get the start on the team all of that is politics all right so in our politics definition we talked about the struggle in any group for power but what does power mean power is the ability to influence others or impose one's will on them so we have power we have politics we can now merge these two concepts so in politics we have a competition for public power and power is the ability to extend

1:36 one's will over people or over i guess things and we can contrast now comparative politics with international relations which is another subfield of political science international relations is the relations or relations between countries compared to politics again the study and comparison of domestic politics across countries so comparative politics we're looking within countries and comparing those insides international relations we don't really care so much about the insides even though it can explain some things we care more about the relations between or among countries there is some overlapping in international relations compared to politics for instance some some things within a state or a country

2:23 can explain relations among countries um but let's let's not go there right now in the most general form we can think about international relations as just relations between countries so we're dealing with three categories of thought in political science and comparative politics analytical concepts methods and ideals so let's go to analytical concepts all right fancy words here what do they mean well analytical concepts are assumptions and theories that guide our research we're talking about cause and effect between some variables variables or between one thing happening and another

3:10 thing happening what causes that one big concept that we use to evaluate comparative politics and we'll talk about this later in our lecture here is institutions institutions are organizations or activities that are self-perpetuating and valued simply for their own sake institutions lay out rules norms and structures one of my professors when i was doing my doctoral work defined institutions as simply the rules of the game right they provide rules or ways of doing things that's simply a lot of people understand and they do those things as a way of organizing society

3:56 all right so let's go to methods now what are methods methods are ways to study and to test those theories methods are tools that try to seek out explanations for why specific political events occur and third ideals ideals are beliefs and values about what we want to get out of politics the outcomes that we seek we can compare existing politics through ideals with a state of affairs that we prefer down the road one big ideal at the center of politics that we love to negotiate is the balance between

4:42 the ideal of freedom versus equality start thinking about in this first lecture what is more important to you in a society would you like ultimate freedom where maybe they were not as financially equal or do you prefer more of a completely equal society financially speaking or uh with income equality but maybe the state has to restrict your freedom in some sense think about which you know you might think about this for a long time or you might the answer might come to you pretty quickly but what is more important to you so where does comparative politics fit in comparative politics as i mentioned

5:27 before like international relations is a subfield that compares this pursuit of power across countries we use the methods of comparative politics to make arguments of cause and effect we ask questions like why are some countries democratic why are others authoritarian why is power more evenly distributed in some countries and more concentrated in others we can compare cases of south korea which is democratic versus north korea which is autocratic so while we have ideals as well and i personally prefer absolute freedom we should separate those ideals from the concepts and methods that we're talking about here when we're

6:12 trying to answer these questions that i just posed there so comparative politics can inform but it also can possibly challenge or even change our ideals down the road it can give alternatives it can question our assumptions about how societies should be governed or organized so while we're doing this kind of introduction of comparative politics what is comparative politics we're talking about the methods of comparative politics but the methods of comparative politics help us to do comparative politics well what does it mean to do comparative politics doing comparative politics means how we

6:59 go about comparing governments societies cultures institutions and the like there are specific methods of doing this comparison so the comparative method we could say is a way to compare cases and raw conclusions and derive conclusions we can seek out conclusions and generalizations that could be valid in other cases as well so if we're looking at one country say sierra leone and we noticed some phenomenon that's going on in sierra leone in this one case study maybe we can draw out some conclusions about sierra leone that might be applied to other countries say uruguay

7:45 um let's say in addition that we want to answer why democracy has failed to develop in some countries or why north korea is still communist and repressive why hasn't it collapsed yet again we could look at a single case study we can look at one country and form a hypothesis about why a country is the way it is um here we're going to look at the differences between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning inductive reasoning is where we're studying one case or a few cases and we're generating a hypothesis from that one case

8:30 the difficulty with doing this is that we can't really test that theory that we get from that one case but it's a good starting point on the other hand we can talk about deductive reasoning deductive reasoning is where we're starting with a puzzle and we generate some hypothesis about cause and effect and then we can test this hypothesis of this theory against a few or many other cases so to review just a little bit here inductive is where we're starting with evidence to uncover a hypothesis and deductive reasoning is where we're starting with a hypothesis and we're seeking out evidence similarly we can look at the difference between

9:15 correlation versus causation and this is a crucial difference that you're not only going to see in comparative politics but you're also going to see in other social sciences and also in the natural sciences sometimes called the hard sciences correlation is simply an association between variables and they're not necessarily caught not one doesn't necessarily cause the other whereas in causation we're talking about cause and effect between uh one or many variables so there are a few limitations in doing comparative politics as there are in many other social sciences the first limitation is that it is

10:02 difficult to control variables variables in the social sciences operate in the real world and the real world in society and dealing with individuals who act on their own subjective preferences at every moment of every day and there are how many people in the world are there close to seven billion people in the world today that's a whole lot of changing settings so there's all sorts of different settings they're often changing uh we're talking about geogra different geography different economies cultures uh resources and political structures so it is extremely difficult to control uh or to maintain or to ma

10:47 to keep steadiness of all of these differences the second limitation is that many variables are simply interconnected and these variables can interact with one another and when variables interact with one another it's difficult to see how one variable can uh affect the dependent variable we're trying to determine what causes one another or what so if variable a changes and you see a a change also in variable b it could be that variable a isn't necessarily associated with variable b it could be just associated with this other variable that we don't really know so this

11:33 where variables are interconnected and interact with one another is called multi-causality the third limitation is that information is necessarily limited uh when we're dealing with the social sciences information is always limited but in particular when we're talking about comparative politics how many countries are there what 206 right now we can point to so there's really not a lot of cases that we can draw from to look at regularities among domestic politics and countries so we're limited to um really just barely over 200 countries in the world therefore the number the samples or the

12:19 population that we're dealing with is very small the fourth limitation is that there are limited uh access there is limited access to the cases that we do have information the information that we have through these 206 cases is not easily acquired it costs money it takes time and there's often very difficult access to information in particular for dealing with governments who want to maintain some sort of secrecy and don't want to give you straight answers on particular phenomenon of politics then your access is very limited so doing interviews doing field work is

13:05 difficult because again you need that time and that money government archives you need to get access to international travel again costs money costs time and oftentimes there's language barriers to doing this research the fifth limitation is that the focus of comparative politics is often very skewed early on and really to this day a lot of the work most of the work is concentrated on europe it seems to be the more exciting region you know a very exciting region you know we talk about east asia as well so you know there are some parts of the world that simply are not very interesting to comparative politics uh scholars

13:51 and so why would you want to do research on something that's not very interesting uh so the focus is skewed most of the work is on europe or more exciting regions in the world and there's also there also tends to be the specialization in one area or region uh and so if you are a specialist say in uh sub-saharan africa then you may not be as geared into the developments in the rest of the world enough to be able to compare those cases against what your specialization is so it's great that we have specialization so we can really focus on the languages and the cultures and the institutions and the political structures of particular regions but by doing so it

14:39 also takes you away from other regions of the world so focus is often skewed when doing this research the sixth limitation is bias and one of the important biases that we should pay attention to in comparative politics is uh called selection bias for instance uh when we are selecting our cases say uh if we are trying to evaluate the relationship between inequality and revolutions well if we're looking at revolutions that had occurred uh where there were there was any vast income inequality in the society we can look at cases like mexico france russia china

15:27 um in iran again but we might be not choosing some interesting cases where there was vast income inequality but they didn't have a revolution like in brazil or south africa or in india or nigeria so selection bias is where we're only choosing one half of that coin and saying aha there's a relationship and we're forgetting about the second half of that so we need to be sure to include these latter cases um otherwise there just might not be a cause and effect relationship after all the last limitation um that we're going to focus on here them so there's plenty more limitations is trying to decipher which is the cause

16:12 and which is the effect of two variables or many variables so what if for instance countries with low rates of female literacy are less likely to be democratic which causes which so this trying to figure out whether female literacy causes the decline in democracy or the decline in democracy causes the low rates of female literacy this trying to figure out which causes which is called endogeneity so do we see in these instances uh authoritarians depressing and suppressing women's rights or does limited female literacy simply limit public participation so it's difficult

17:00 to find out which cause is which in these instances a science is comparative politics scientific can it be so let's look at the progress of political science and comparative politics from the more descriptive to over time being more scientific and what we mean by that uh aristotle the first figure that we're going to look at he did comparative research on existing political systems which we're going to call regimes in this co in this uh course he analyzed constitutions of 158 greek city states and asked the question why

17:46 are some despotic and others not and through his research he developed the modern uh practice of statecraft you may come across that term in international relations as well in foreign policy in other words statecraft is how to govern right the art of governing and this was an empirical science of politics for the people who lead countries and he developed this in his book politics now after aristotle politics remained in firmly within philosophy with an emphasis on how politics should be rather than how it actually is until

18:33 nicolo machiavelli came along and had a comparative approach of different political systems he came about generalizations about the successes and failure of these political systems and looked at how statesmen and leaders applied those successes and failures to uh try to avoid these same mistakes going forward along the lines of this art of statecraft that aristotle developed he sought to develop and seek out pragmatism in government to put diplomacy military strategy and

19:18 power wielding he is often considered the first modern political scientist and he developed a lot of these principles in his book the prince the next two we're going to look at are thomas hobbes and john locke these two guys are often talked about simultaneously together to talk about their assumptions about how government took root in the first place they used empirical observation to shape their ideals of particular governmental systems first we'll talk about thomas hobbs thomas hobbes was a social contract theorist he theorized that people surrender some liberties in favor of

20:05 order and that order comes about through the state or government uh down the road we will uh distinguish the two the government from state but for right now don't worry about that too much hobbes advocated a powerful state in his book leviathan john locke on the other hand was a also a social contract theorist but really focused on private property as being essential to individual freedom and prosperity he theorized about life liberty and property that each individual owns his life that he is uh that his rights are that he should be

20:52 left in a state of liberty without aggression from other people and that through that his he owns his life and his labor that property is a natural extension of that life and labor he advocated in contrast to hobbes a weak state in his book two treatises of government the next two people we'll talk about are jean-jacques rousseau and baron de montesquieu you may have heard about these theorists in maybe some of your studies uh on the constitution of the united states and even the french revolution these two thinkers weigh heavily on the development of the constitution

21:39 in many western states these two thinkers study the separation of power as well as civil liberties and uh we'll talk about jean-jacques rousseau who died even before the french revolution but had a great influence on the ideas that took root in the french revolution he posited that citizens rights are inalienable and cannot be taken away by the states so they exist prior to the state existing he um was really influential in the development of civil rights in the civil rights movement and he was also a social contract theorist and he developed a lot of these ideas in his book the social contract

22:25 montesquieu this is where the us constitution derives these ideas of the separation of powers that there should be that powers of the government should be separated within the the larger political structure of government uh and he developed this idea of separation of powers in his book the spirit of laws all of these books by the way will be linked in the uh lecture notes that i'll have with this video two other thinkers uh often not uh thought about together but we'll think about them together here um but you know generally speaking we can think about karl marx and max weber as both having analyzed the nature of political and economic organization

23:10 and power karl marx to begin with had a theory of economic development and inequality and he had a firm emphasis on class and uh an individual's belonging to a particular class as determining his politics and his uh his really social standing he uh two important works of his uh were um his and frederick angles were das capital and the communist manifesto uh and through these works he predicted the eventual collapse of capitalism upon itself and after this collapse of capitalism upon itself you would see eventually down the road a stateless

23:57 communist society taking its place max weber was a theorist and a commentator on bureaucracy on forms of authority as well as the impact of culture on economic and political development and he developed these forms in economy and society so these are a lot some of the figures that uh really develops the political science but also comparative politics through the years so by the beginning of the 1900s political science was a distinct field of study however uh it was still very descriptive and less what you might call

24:43 today as sciencey or scientific it was largely a theoretical and largely concentrated on europe as i was mentioning before we were talking about comparative politics as being skewed to a particular focus on europe and in the beginning of 1900s there was real no method of going about doing comparative politics however the turning point came with two world wars and a cold war coming about mid-century in the early stages of the cold war since right after world war ii in the late 1940s there was a growing movement toward making studying human behavior more rigorous and this took root in sociology and economics and politics and

25:30 really just the social sciences the world wars made people question whether scholars really knew anything about world affairs after all the two deadliest wars in world history occurred and this is right when we thought we were studying political science but it turns out we don't really know anything at all maybe we do maybe we don't so the nuclear cold war in addition made understanding comparative politics extremely necessary after all if we don't understand how the world works we might just not make it through because it's really necessary for survival to make it through you know this nuclear cold war and lastly technological innovation was huge in developing political science into a more of a science so computers gave way to this idea that

26:18 social problems can be solved through technological expertise and statistical analysis and really a managerial class whether it can or can't be this question really cannot be answered yet but it certainly gave way to this idea that it could be so by mid-century the development of political science and really comparative politics here as a subfield revolved around the ideas ideals of capitalism and democracy and uh the development of politics uh it came incrementally so it came through stages the scholars revolved around particular ideas uh and and saw those ideas through until they didn't see them as useful anymore or

27:04 they merged them with other new ideas to really develop this a science of politics the first really important idea after the world wars and in the development of political science was a modernization theory and modernization theory posited that as societies develop they become capitalist democracies eventually ultimately converging around a set of shared values and characteristics so the idea was that the u.s and the west were the furthest along in the path of quote-unquote modernization some however were diverted by nefarious forces like communism unlike the soviet union or north korea or cuba

27:49 um or fascism like in italy or germany but by and large this was how countries developed they would necessarily follow these steps through development through into being capitalist democracies well by the late 1950s and the 1960s modernization theorists began expanding their cases uh this included doing more field research and including statistical methods into their analysis so making it more robust and rigorous there was more data to go around to use to to figure out how things work so the the focus shifted away from studying institutions and more toward individual political behavior and this

28:35 merged into what we might call the behavioral revolution in the 1970s and this wasn't just in comparative politics this was also in economics and in other social science fields so the behavioral revolution generated theories and generalizations about human behavior and if we understand how human behavior operates we might be able to predict things about politics and political institutions and how governments might act and how social movements might behave so to rehash modernization and behavioralism these are two different things modernization theory is a set of hypotheses about how countries develop behavioralism was a set of methods on how to approach politics

29:22 and they didn't necessarily come about at the same time one kind of merges into another but they they they can work uh hand in hand however both were attempts to study politics more systematically and scientifically so as the 1970s tread along new theories and more sophisticated methods developed however authoritarianism and political violence still existed and they failed to give way to the predictions of modernization theory some say there was too much emphasis on methodology over understanding others said there was too much ideological bias

30:08 that there was too much focus on the western model of modernization that really political scientists and policy makers were trying to remake the world and the west's image so accordingly there were many lines of conflict and division within the comparative politics field that scholars were bickering about so there was a lack of consensus and we're going to talk about two big conflicts within the field of comparative politics in the next section here all right so two big conflicts in the field of comparative politics uh the first was methodology and this still exists today what do i mean by this well you know the big question was how best to gather and analyze data

30:54 and we're divided between qualitative methods and quantitative methods qualitative means basically quality we're describing things so if we're describing things we're generating data from interviews from observations from archival data in research and documentary research we're doing deep investigations of one or a few cases and these qualitative methods or investigations are typically inductive meaning we begin with case studies and then generate theory from those few cases the problem with qualitative methods quantitative people usually say is that the variables are not rigorously defined

31:40 and there's a small sample size oftentimes you can only describe so many cases at once so the quantitative method people or the quants they like to call themselves they like to use a wider array of cases they also use statistical analysis and mathematical models often derived from the economics profession and quantitative studies are usually deductive meaning they start with a theory and then they take a whole bunch of error they took a whole bunch of often variables or cases and they test them with a whole bunch of data so they test the theory with a whole bunch of data the problem with this is that the

32:26 qualitative people say is that the quant people can overly focus on variables that can be numerically expressed and thereby leaving out other variables that might be described with you know words so uh there tends to be an over quantification in quantitative studies without necessarily understanding the nuance of particular cases so qualitative has its shortcomings quantitative has its shortcomings so is it somewhere in the middle well somewhere in the middle it involves mixed methods so you do a little bit of qualitative you do a little bit of quantitative but again it doesn't necessarily make it better so here are shortcomings of both

33:14 strengths of both but the conflict over this methodology still exists this second conflict within comparative politics is over the assumptions of human behavior within theory explaining the data one big question is that are humans rational meaning do they weigh costs and benefits in decision making do they in other words an economic speak maximize utility if yes then we can use something called rational choice theory or game theory and through game theory we can study rules and games by which politics are played and how humans act on their subjective preferences

34:01 so these uh you know rct rational choice theory can help us understand voting patterns in choosing political parties and supporting a revolution or maybe not or joining a social movement or maybe not like black lives matter um rational choice theory can also help us explain political phenomena better and even possibly predict what might happen in the future however the critics of rational choice theory or game theory uh say that it ignores a lot of historical complexity uh the unintended consequences of human action and also cultural factors that

34:47 might influence behavior so we have these two large conflicts and there are other quibbles that scholars bicker about but ultimately what we're trying to do with comparative politics is to better people's lives and to try to figure out the best way of studying politics to help each other be better citizens and leaders so i want to finish this lecture by talking about two key ideas that are crucial for understanding comparative politics the first is a key concept called political institutions which we talked about before now institutions again embody the rules

35:32 norms and values that give meaning to human activity so we can think of democracy as being an institution democracy is part of our collective id identity as being americans and westerners institutions can also demand uh similar allegiance to to things like ethnic groups or religions and you know when we think about institutions as these sorts of things we can understand that there's really no single set of institutions that holds power over all the people around all of the world there are difference in institutions some overlap

36:18 but in the end we must understand these differences among institutions that bind people together we can think of again the world trade center as being an institution the world trade center um exemplified american values american culture and even capitalism the pentagon is a symbol and an institution it symbolizes american exceptionalism but even it could symbolize um american dominance over the rest of the world in particular and in particular regions of the world like the middle east the city of jerusalem is an institution it's an institution of multiple religions as the home of israelis and palestinians of jews

37:04 catholics and muslims so uh we can think of national institutions cultural institutions religious institutions um and when we're thinking about these different types of institutions we can think about two distinctions the first is formal institutions formal institutions are those institutions that are officially sanctioned rules and these rules are clearly known formal institutions often can involve physical structures again like the world trade center or the pentagon and we can differ formal institutions with

37:51 informal institutions informal institutions are unwritten they are unofficial however they're often if not more so how more powerful still very powerful even more so powerful than formal institutions why because a lot of times with informal institutions we don't know that we're violating those institutions or we don't know they exist until we violate them one example is that often we walk on the right side of the sidewalk you don't really know that you do that until you start walking down the left part of the sidewalk or if you're in a mall you're walking down the left side and you're running into people so informal institutions are often more uh powerful than formal institutions because oftentimes we don't even know

38:37 they exist uh and when we're talking about power in institutions we often talk about how well established they are within a society how entrenched they are in society and how entrenched an institution is in society is how sticky it is right this is you know it's the formal term that we talk about institutional stickiness but it's an actual term it's not just you know something clever that i just thought up off a whim here uh so institutional stickiness is how well entrenched an institution is in society and often a characteristic of stickiness of institutional stickiness is that when an institution is threatened it is

39:23 defended so uh one institution of uh american political culture whether we like it or not is the confederate flag particularly in the south it means different things to different people um but whenever people try to get rid of it it is defended whether it's defended well or not is another question the fact remains that it has a certain institutional stickiness after all the civil war ended in 1865 the confederacy ended in 1865 and we still see it around um so politics whether it's in the united states in germany or uganda is full of institutions they're full of

40:10 formal institutions as well as informal institutions we can think of the army police the legislature courts these are all institutions and institutions exist because again they provide rules and order we can obey institutions because often they're in our own self-interest but we also obey institutions because they are seen as legitimate ways of conducting politics for example taxation is an institution we obey taxes we pay our taxes because we don't want to go to jail well we also pay them because it's institutionalized because uh in often when taxation is well

40:57 entrenched we pay because it is legitimized and when we not we don't pay taxes as a society the political institutions that are in our society tend not to be legitimized very well and tax evasion tends to be rampant another institution are elections you know we know that really you know your individual vote really does not matter all that much however why do we vote because it's very well institutionalized in our society and elections we can tell if they're institutionalized or not if they have a certain stickiness or not is not so much when there's a winner to an election

41:43 but when the loser to an election respects the outcome of the election well we didn't see that too much in the last presidential election into 2016 when hillary uh clinton lost to donald trump you know or crying foul there was even this russia hoax that was this russian thing the propaganda that was yada yada we all know the story um but you could say that in that particular election um the outcome of that election was not very well legitimized so political institutions are important because they influence politics how they are constructed affects how politics is conducted

42:28 all right the second item i want to talk about uh as we end this lecture is uh the key ideal of weighing freedom and equality so people struggle for power we know this just in society and politics that's just what happens okay but what are people struggling for if a certain group of people gets power what do they want to achieve well how do we know well ideals ideals answer those questions of what they're struggling for and what they want to achieve and one of the biggest ideological ideas is the balance between freedom and equality

43:15 freedom we can define as an individual's ability to act independently without fear of restriction or punishment by the state or other individuals or groups in society now that's not the only definition of freedom but we can just use that definition right now equality can be defined as the material standard of living shared by individuals within a community society or country so we're talking about not equality on the law per se but income inequality material equality well are these two items concepts ideals mutually exclusive are they zero sum is is it that with greater personal freedom uh comes less equality

44:03 uh well here's the reasoning i mean there could be greater personal freedom therefore a smaller role for the state limits on government powers to redistribute income and but we we could also have a state in which there might be greater freedom but there also could be greater equality material equality the state could actually play a role in making people more inequal but the common assumption within politics at least uh in in current politics is that the greater freedom that we have uh the greater inequality there's going to be uh some say that inequality may undermine freedom if there's too many people if they you know too many people

44:50 feel like the political system doesn't care about their financial needs in the united states there's a high degree of economic inequality for a developed democracy in the world the question could be in the united states that we could examine is is american inequality undermining democratic institutions in the united states is it going to lead to some sort of political violence um whether political violence does occurred again doesn't necessarily mean that inequality caused that and so these are questions that we can look at conversely demands for greater income inequal or equality may lead a government to take away some private property and personal wealth in the name of redistribution

45:36 for the greater good quote unquote one extreme case was the soviet union the communist state held all economic power and controlled people's lives so one question that we can we can just continue to ask ourselves is does an increase in one necessarily mean a decrease in the other freedom versus equality maybe maybe not some say that they can't be truly free until the state guarantees a minimum level of income uh also what freedom and equality mean to people can change over time and can change culture to culture so think about these closing questions

46:21 i'm going to give you right now as you continue to the next lecture and as i actually uh get to making the next lecture um and uh really just just think about these things in your everyday life because you know i'm pondering various questions about questions about politics you know really 24 7. so that's kind of my life there but uh the closing questions that i'm going to post to you are how much should any individual or group be allowed to influence others or impose their will on them who should be empowered to make decisions about freedom and equality and should power be centralized or decentralized

47:07 public or private