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Comparative politics is the comparative study of other countries, citizens, different political units either in whole or in part, and analyzes the similarities and differences between those political units. Comparative politics also entails the political study of non-US political thought. Here are a few tips when choosing resources for comparative political research:

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Comparative Politics: its Past, Present and Future

• Original Article
• Published: 15 July 2016
• Volume 1 , pages 397–411, ( 2016 )

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• Philippe C. Schmitter 1  

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Comparative politics has always been schzofrenic. It is a powerful method of analysis and a useful source of information. Both have a promising future, but to realize it both will have to change. This essay explores the dilemmas facing the sub-discipline and suggests some solutions regarding assumptions, concepts and units of analysis and description. One reason for optimism is its globalization and shift from a perspective rooted exclusively in the North and West to an increasing participation of scholars from the South and East.

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Comparaison n’est pas raison, Maurice Duverger Raisonner er n’est pas comparer , Philippe Schmitter

Comparative politics has a promising future, both as a method of analysis and as a provider of useful information. To realize that future, however, it will have to change some—but not all—of its presuppositions and practices. Presently, it is at a critical juncture due to the impact of transformations in the nature of ‘real-existing’ politics. Thanks to its globalization as a sub-discipline of political science, it is likely profit from the opportunity. The shift in the recruitment of its practitioners from the North and West toward the East and South should facilitate taking the necessary changes in presuppositions and practices. In other words, the future of comparative politics is not what it used to be. These are the principle theses of the essay that follows.

On the one hand, comparison is an analytical method—probably the best available one—for advancing valid and cumulative knowledge about politics. At least since Aristotle it has been argued that only by identifying and labeling the generic relations of power and then examining how they produce variable or invariable effects in otherwise different societies, can scholars claim that their discipline is scientific. The core of the method is really quite simple and it helps to explain why comparativists tend to be addicted to two things: (1) classification systems; and (2) the Latin expression, ceteris paribus . First, it is necessary to identify what units have in common by placing them in some generic category—say, democratic as opposed to autocratic regimes. Then, the category may be extended further into subtypes per genus et differentiam —say, democracies with single dominant party systems, with alternating two party systems, with alternating multiple party coalitional systems, and with hegemonic (non-alternating) multiparty systems. Once these factors have been controlled for, the Latin kicks in again, namely, the assumption that units in the same category share the same characteristics and, therefore, that “all things being equal” it must be something that they do not share—say, level of trade union organization that is responsible for producing the differences in outcome that the analyst is interested in—say, the level of public spending. Of course, waving that magic Latin wand does not really control for all of the potential things that might be causing variation in public spending, but it does help to eliminate some of them.

On the other hand, comparison has always had a practical objective, namely, to produce useful descriptive information about how politics is conducted in countries other than one’s own. Makers of public policy and investors of private funds, for example, need specialized bits of information to make reasonable choices when dealing with ‘exotic’ actors and organizations. They could not care less about the ‘scientific basis’ of the information, provided it is accurate and reliable. Predicting behavior and, thereby, lowering the risk involved in transactions with foreigners are what they are interested in, and fancy theories may be no better at this than simple projections from past experience or calculations of statistical probability.

While there is no reason why these two aspects of the sub-discipline should contradict each other in principal, they often do in practice. Accurate and reliable information for description usually comes in the form of expressions and perceptions generated by the actors themselves; cumulative and valid data for analysis depend on analogies and concepts rooted in generic categories, themselves embedded in specific theories. The closer they are to each other, the narrower will be the potential for comparison in time and space—until comparative politics becomes nothing more than a description of “other people’s politics,” and every case has its unique explanation. Footnote 1

1 A Challenging (but Rewarding) Specialization

The student in search of a field of specialization should be aware that the threshold for entry into comparative politics is high. You will normally be expected to learn at least one foreign language—the more the better and the more exotic the better! You will also have to spend long hours familiarizing yourself with someone else’s history and culture—and be willing to spend considerable time living away from home, often in rather uncomfortable places. The actors you study will be irrevocably “historical” in two senses: (1) their actions in the present will be affected by their memories of what happened in the past; and (2) their actions in the future will be altered by what they have learned from the present. If you have not spent those hours, you will not be able to understand what and why your subjects and their institutions behave the way they do.

If you do accept the challenge of comparing polities, be prepared to cope with controversy. There have been periods of relative tranquility when the sub-discipline was dominated by a single paradigm. For example, until the 1950s, scholarship consisted mostly of comparing constitutions and other formal institutions of Europe and North America, interspersed with wise comments about more informal aspects of national character and culture. ‘Behaviorialism’ became all the rage for a shorter while, during which time mass sample surveys were conducted across several polities in efforts to discover the common social bases of electoral results, to distinguish between “bourgeois/materialist” and “post-bourgeois/post-materialist” value sets, or to search for the ‘civic culture’ that was alleged to be a pre-requisite for stable democracy. ‘Aggregate data analysis’ of quantitative indicators of economic development, social structure, regime type and public policy at the national and sub-national levels emerged at roughly the same time. ‘Structural-functionalism’ responded to the challenge of bringing non-European and American polities into the purview of comparativists, by seeking to identify universal tasks that all political systems had to fulfill, regardless of differences in formal institutions or informal behaviors.

None of these approaches has completely disappeared and most major departments or faculties of political science are likely to have remnants of some of them. But none is “hegemonic” at the present moment. As one of its most distinguished practitioners described them, the present day comparativists are sitting at different tables, eating from different menus and not speaking to each other—not even to acknowledge their common inheritance from the same distinguished ancestors. Footnote 2

2 A Shifting Center of Gravity?

There is, however, one characteristic that they all share. Every one of these approaches originated in the United States of America, usually having been borrowed from some adjacent academic discipline. The prospective student interested in comparative politics had only to look at the dominant “fads and fashions” in American political science, trace their respective trajectories and intercepts, and he or she could predict where comparative politics would be going for the next decade or more. Who could doubt that this sub-discipline of political science as practiced in the United States of America showed the rest of the world “the face of its future”? Footnote 3

Nevertheless, a more rapidly growing number of comparativists have been coming from countries that barely recognized the discipline a few decades ago. There is a Chinese saying (exploited by Mao Tse-Dung): “Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind.” Increasingly, in comparative politics neither the East nor the West Wind prevails and the same is true of the North and South ones. The Winds of Change have become variable and more unpredictable. They no longer come overwhelmingly from a single direction (as Mao predicted), although it is not unimaginable that in a short time there will be more Chinese political scientists than American. Today, innovations in theories, concepts and methods can come from any direction.

One of the central assumptions of this essay is that the future of comparative politics should (and, hopefully, will) diverge to some degree from the trends and trajectories followed in recent years by many (if certainly not all) political scientists in the United States. As I have expressed it elsewhere, the sub-discipline is presently “at the crossroads” and the direction that its ontological and epistemological choices take in the near future will determine whether it will continue to be a major source of critical innovation for the discipline as a whole, or dissolve itself into the bland and conformist “Americo-centric” mainstream of that discipline. Footnote 4

3 An Improvement in Method and Design

Let me begin, however, with some self-congratulation. Thanks to the assiduous efforts of methodologically minded colleagues (mostly Americans, it is true), much fewer students applying the comparative method neglect to include in their dissertations: (1) an explicit defense of the cases selected—their number and analogous characteristics, (2) a conscious effort to ensure sufficient degrees of freedom between independent and dependent variables, (3) an awareness of the potential pitfalls involved in selecting the cases based on the latter, (4) a greater sensitivity to the universe of relevant units and to the limits to generalizing about the external validity of findings. Footnote 5

These important gains in methodological self-consciousness have produced (or been produced by) some diminution in the “class warfare” between quantitatively and qualitatively minded political scientists. Some of the former persist in asserting their intrinsic “scientific” superiority over the latter, but there is more and more agreement that many of the problems of design and inference are common to both and that the choice between the two should depend more on what it is the one wishes to explain or interpret than on the intrinsic superiority of one method over the other—or, worse, how one happens to have been trained as a graduate student. Indeed, from my recent experience in two highly cosmopolitan institutions, the European University Institute in Florence and the Central European University in Budapest, I have encountered an increasing number of dissertations in comparative politics that make calculated and intelligent use of both methods—frequently with an initial large N comparison wielding relatively simple quantitative indicators to establish the broad parameters of association, followed by a small N analysis of carefully selected cases with sets of qualitative variables to search for specific sequences and complex interactions to demonstrate causality (as well as the impact of neglected or ‘accidental’ factors). To use the imaginative vocabulary of Charles Tilly, such research combines the advantages of “lumping” and “splitting”. Footnote 6 Hopefully, this is a trend that will continue into the future.

The real challenge currently facing comparative politics, however, comes from a third alternative, namely, “formal modeling” almost invariably based on individualist, rational choice assumptions. Much of this stems from a strong desire on the part of American political scientists to imitate what they consider to be the “success” of the economics profession in acquiring greater status within academe by driving out of its ranks a wide range of dissident approaches and establishing a foundation of theoretical (neo-liberalism) and methodological (mathematical modeling) orthodoxy upon which their research is based. This path toward the future would diverge both methodologically and substantively from the previously competing quantitative and qualitative ones. It would involve the acceptance of a much stronger set of limiting initial assumptions, exclusive reliance on the rational calculations of individual actors to provide “micro-foundations,” deductive presumptions about the nature of their interactions and reliance on either “stylized facts” or “mathematical proofs” to demonstrate the correctness of initial assumptions and hypotheses derived from them. The comparative dimension enters into these equations to prove that individual behavior is invariant across units or, where it is not, that institutions (previously chosen rationally) can make a difference. The “bread and butter” of comparison—namely, the contingent nature of politics due to the relevance of context—is excluded. Given the same incentives, actors (always individuals) will always choose the same thing.

4 A Common (but Still Diverse) Perspective

Presently, most comparativists would (probably) call themselves: institutionalists, although there exist many different types of them. About all they seem to agree upon is that “institutions matter.” They differ widely on what institutions are, how they come about, why is it that they matter, and which ones matter more than others. Moreover, some of them will even admit that other things also matter: collective identities, citizen attitudes, cultural values, popular memories, external pressures, economic dependencies, even instinctive habits and informal practices—not mention the old favorites of Machiavelli, fortuna and virtù —when it comes to explaining and, especially, to understanding political outcomes.

Comparative politics finds itself at a critical crossroad. The safest thing one can say today about its future of comparative politics is that it should not and will not be the same as in the past. Of course, not everything is going to have to change. Comparative politics will continue to bear major responsibility for the objective description of processes and events in “other peoples’ countries” and, hence, for providing systematic and reliable information to those politicians (in and out of power) and to those administrators (at the top and bottom) charged with making and implementing national policies concerning these countries. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Empire has led to an impressive increase in the sheer number of polities whose (allegedly autonomous) behavior has to be described. The globalization of capitalism has produced increasingly indirect and articulated systems of cross-border production, transport and distribution that are much more sensitive to disturbances in the behavior of their most remote and marginal components. The ubiquitous penetration of information and communications technology (ICT) has meant that the happenings anywhere in the world are being immediately transmitted everywhere and comparativist pundits will be expected “to place them in context” for public consumption.

Comparison between “real-existing polities” will also remain the best available research method for analyzing similarities and differences in behavior and for inferring the existence of patterns of regularity with regard to the causes and consequences of politics. It will always be the second best instrument for this purpose, but as long as it remains impossible for students of politics to experiment with most of their subjects and subject matter, political scientists will have to settle for analyzing as systematically as possible variations they cannot control directly.

5 A Need for Adaptation

The core of my argument has been that comparative political analysis, if it is to remain significant, productive and innovative in the future, has to reflect the “real-existing” environment from which it should draw its observations and to which it should refer its findings. Most importantly, its assumptions and concepts will have to change to retain the same explanatory value. Take, for example, the admonition made by a comparativist advocate of rational choice, Carles Boix. He asserts that “clear models about actors and preferences, strategical interaction (i.e., ‘game theory PCS), endogenization of variables one-at-a-time” constitute a threesome that is capable of generating non-trivial findings about politics in the contemporary environment. But what if what is needed are “fuzzy and under-specified models about a plurality of types of actors with preferences that are contingent upon differences in political setting,” “strategic interaction between a large number of players at different levels of aggregation with inconsistent payoffs,” “constant communication and multiple interdependencies” and “endogenization not of single discrete variables, but of patterns of multiple variables within the same time frame”? Would not such a transposition from the simplified world of conceptual clarity, stylized two-person games and ‘stepwise’ causality risk producing findings that bare no relation to the complexity of the “real-existing” world of politics? My contention is that if their concepts, assumptions and hypotheses fail to capture, not all (that would be impossible), but at least some of the core characteristics of their subject matter, comparativists will at best report only trivial or irrelevant findings. They will address problems and provide answers to issues that are primarily internal to their own scholastic paradigm. These are not likely to be the problems that citizens and rulers have to cope with or the answers they expect comparative political research to provide.

One thing that differentiates comparativists from their colleagues who only study one polity or one international system is supposed to be greater sensitivity to contextual factors that are so deeply embedded that they are often taken for granted or treated as “exceptional” by Americanists or “unique” by international relations specialists. Inversely, they should be especially well equipped to identify and incorporate the trends that affect—admittedly, to differing degrees—virtually all the world’s polities.

6 A Change in the Unit of Analysis?

Two of these trends, in my opinion, are sufficiently pervasive as to affect the basic design and conduct of comparative research. They are: (1) increased complexity; and (2) increased interdependence. However independent their sources may be—for example, logically speaking, a polity may become more complex without increasing its interdependence upon other polities and a polity may enter into increasingly interdependent relations with others while reducing its internal complexity through specialization—these two trends tend to be related and, together, they produce something that Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane have called “complex interdependence”. Footnote 7

One major implication that I draw from this is that complex interdependence is having an increasing influence not just on the substance of politics, but also upon its form. It is changing, in other words, the units that we should be using for specifying our theories and collecting our data and the levels at which we should be analyzing these data.

Complexity: this undermines one of the key assumptions of most of traditional comparative political research, namely, that the variable selected and observed with equivalent measures will tend to produce the same or similar effect(s) across the units being compared.

Interdependence: this undermines the most important epistemological assumption in virtually all comparative research, namely, that the units selected for comparison are sufficiently independent of each other with regard to the cause–effect relationship being examined. Footnote 8

Complex Interdependence: the ‘compound’ condition makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine what constitutes an independent cause (and, hence, an independent effect) and whether the units involved have an independent political capacity to choose and implement (and, therefore, to act as agents connecting cause and effect).

When Aristoteles (allegedly) gathered data on the ‘social constitutions’ of 158 Greek city-states, he set an important and enduring precedent. The apposite units for comparison should be of the same generic type of polity and at the same level of aggregation. And they should be more-or-less self-sufficient and possess a distinctive identity. Since then, almost all theorizing and empirical analysis has followed this model. One could compare “empires” or “alliances of states” or “colonies of states,” but not across these categories. Most of all, the vast proportion of effort has gone into studying supposedly ‘sovereign’ states whose populations supposedly shared a unique ‘national identity.’ It was taken for granted that only this type of polity possessed the requisite capacity for “agency” and, therefore, could be treated as equivalent for comparative purposes.

In the contemporary setting, due to differing forms of complexity and degrees of interdependence, as well as the compound product of the two, it has become less and less possible to rely on the properties of sovereignty and nationality to identify equivalent units. No polity can realistically connect cause and effect and produced intended results without regard for the actions of others. Virtually all polities have persons and organizations within their borders that have identities, loyalties and interests that overlap with persons and organizations in other polities. Nor can one be assured that polities at the same formal level of political status or aggregation will have the same capacity for agency. Depending on their insertion into multi-layered systems of production, distribution and governance, their capacity to act or react independently to any specific opportunity or challenge can vary enormously.

From these observations, I conclude not only that comparativists need to dedicate much more thought to the collectivities they do choose and the properties these units of analysis supposedly share with regard to the specific institution, policy or behavior that is being examined. However, I should stress that comparativists should not panic. There still remains a great deal of differences that can only be explained by conditions within national polities, but exorcising or ignoring the complex external context in which these units are embedded would be equally foolish.

But what is the method one should apply when comparing units in such complex settings? The traditional answer is “to tell a story.” After all, what does a political historian—comparative or not—do but construct a narrative that attempts to pull together all the factors within a specified time period that contributed to producing a specific outcome. Unfortunately, such narratives—however insightful—are usually written in “ideographic” terms, i.e., those used by the actors or the authors themselves. Systematic and cumulative comparison across units (or even within the same unit over time) requires a “nomothetic” language, i.e., one that is based on terms that are specific to a particular approach or theory, not to a unique case. A first step would be to invent or re-invent “ideal-type” concepts so that they were more capable of grasping “fuzzy,” “contaminated,” and “layered” interrelationships among individuals and, especially, organizations (since the latter are much more salient components of contemporary political life).

7 A ‘Prime Mover’?

The practice of comparative political research does follow and should recognize changes in “real-existing politics,” but it always does so with a considerable delay. Footnote 9 As I mentioned above, the most important set of generic changes that have occurred in recent decades involves the spread of “complex interdependence.” There is absolutely nothing new about the fact that formally independent polities have extensive relations with each other. What is novel is not only the sheer magnitude and diversity of these exchanges, but also the extent to which they penetrate into virtually all social, economic and cultural groups and into almost all geographic areas within these polities. Previously, they were mainly concentrated among restricted elites living in a few favored cities or regions. Now, it takes an extraordinary political effort—a “firewall”—to prevent the population anywhere within national borders from becoming “contaminated” by the flow of foreign ideas and enticements. “Globalization” has become the catch-all term for these developments, even if it tends to exaggerate the evenness of their spread and scope across the planet.

Globalization has certainly become the independent variable—the ‘prime mover’—of contemporary political science. It can be defined as an array of transformations at the macro-level that tend to cluster together, reinforce each other and produce an ever accelerating cumulative impact. All of these changes have something to do with encouraging the number and variety of exchanges between individuals and social groups regardless of national borders by compressing their interactions in time and space, lowering their costs and more easily overcoming previous barriers—some technical, some geographical, but mostly political. By most accounts, the driving forces behind globalization have been economic. However, behind the formidable power of increased market competition and technological innovation in goods and services lies a myriad of decisions by national political authorities to tolerate, encourage and, sometimes, subsidize these exchanges, often by removing policy-related obstacles that existed previously—hence, the close association of the concept of globalization with that of liberalization. The day-to-day manifestations of globalization appear so natural and inevitable that we often forget they are the product of deliberate decisions by governments that presumably understood the consequences of what they have decided to laisser passer and laisser faire .

Its impact upon specific national institutions and practices is highly contentious, but two (admittedly hypothetical) trends would seem to have special relevance for the conduct of comparative political inquiry:

Globalization narrows the potential range of policy responses, undermines the capacity of (no longer) sovereign national states to respond autonomously to the demands of their citizenry and, thereby, weakens the legitimacy of traditional political intermediaries and state authorities;

Globalization widens the resources available to non-state actors acting across national borders and shifts policy responsibility upward to trans-national quasi-state actors—both of which undermine formal institutions and informal arrangements at the national level, and promote the development of trans-national interests and the diffusion of trans-national norms.

Comparativists have occasionally given some thought to the implications of these developments for their units of observation and analysis, but have usually rejected the need to change their most deeply entrenched strategy, namely, to rely almost exclusively upon the so-called “sovereign national state” as the basis for controlling variation and inferring similarities and differences in response to the impact of variation in (allegedly) independent conditions. They (correctly) observe that most individuals still identify primarily (and many exclusively) with this unit and that national variables when entered into statistical regressions or cross-tabulations continue to predict a significant amount of variation in attitudes and behavior. Hence, if one is researching, say, the relation between gender and voting preferences, most of the subjects surveyed will differ from national state to national state—and this will usually be greater than the variation between sub-units within respective national states.

My conclusion is that it has become less and less appropriate to rely on the properties of sovereignty, nationality and stateness when identifying the relevant units for theory, observation and inference. No doubt, comparative politics at the descriptive level will continue to dedicate most of its effort to formally sovereign national states. That is the level at which such information is normally consumed by policy makers, the media and the public at large. But at the analytical level, it will have to break through that boundary and recognize that units with the same formal status, e.g., all members of the United Nations or of some regional organization, may have radically different capabilities for taking and implementing collective decisions—and that virtually no national state can afford to presume that it is politically sovereign, economically self-sufficient and culturally distinct. In other words, comparativists have to give more thought to what constitutes a relevant and equivalent case once they have chosen a problem or puzzle to analyze and to do so before they select the number and identity of the units they will compare.

The most difficult challenge will come from abandoning the presumption of “stateness.” Sovereignty has long been an abstract concept that “everyone knew” was only a convenient fiction, just as they also “knew” that almost all states had social groups within them that did not share the same common political identity. One could pretend that the units were independent of each other in choosing their organizations and policies and one could get away with assuming that something called “the national interest” existed and, when invoked, did have an impact upon such collective choices. But the notion of stateness impregnates the furthest corners of the vocabulary we use to discuss politics—especially stable, iterative, “normal” politics. Whenever we refer to the number, location, authority, status, membership, capacity, identity, type or significance of political units, we employ concepts that implicitly or explicitly refer to a universe composed of states and “their” surrounding national societies. It seems self-evident to us that this particular form of organizing political life will continue to dominate all others, spend most publicly generated funds, authoritatively allocate most resources, enjoy a unique source of legitimacy and furnish most people with a distinctive identity. However we may recognize that the sovereign national state is under assault from a variety of directions—beneath and beyond its borders, its “considerable resilience” has been repeatedly asserted. Footnote 10 To expunge it (or even to qualify it significantly) would mean, literally, starting all over and creating a whole new language for talking about and analyzing politics. The assiduous reader will have noted that I have already tried to do this by frequently referring to “polity’ when the normal term should have been “state.” Before comparative politics can embrace complex interdependence, it will have to admit to a much wider variety of types of decision-making units and question whether those with the same formal status are necessarily equivalent and, hence, capable of behaving in a similar fashion.

8 A Focus on Patterns not Variables

Contemporary comparative politics has tended to focus on variables. The antiquated version tried to use distinct conditions to explain the behavior of whole cases—often one of them at a time. The usual approach has been to choose a problem, to select some variable(s) from an appropriate theory, to decide upon a universe of relevant cases, to fasten upon some subset of them to control for other potentially relevant variables, and to go searching for “significant” associations. Not only were the units chosen presumed to reproduce the underlying causal relations independently of each other, but each variable was supposed to make an independent and equivalent contribution to explaining the outcome. We have already called into question the first assumption, and now let us do the same with the second.

Complex interdependence requires that the researcher should attempt to understand the effect(s) of a set of variables (a “context” or “ideal-type” if you will) rather than those of a single variable. And, normally, the problem or puzzle one is working on has a multi-dimensional configuration as well. In neither case is it sufficient simply to standard score and add up several variables (as one does, for example, with such variables as economic or human development, working class militancy, ethnic hostility, quality of democracy, rule of law, etc.). Footnote 11 The idea is to capture the prior interactions and dependencies that form such a context and produce such an outcome. In other words, the strength of any one independent variable depends on its relation with others, just as the importance of any chosen dependent variable depends on how and where it fits within the system as a whole.

There is another way of expressing this point. In the classical ‘analytical’ tradition, you begin by decomposing a complicated problem, institution or process and examining its component parts individually. Once you have accomplished this satisfactorily, you then synthesize by putting them back together and announce your findings about the behavior of the whole. But what if the parts once decomposed change their function or identity and, even more seriously, what if the individual parts cannot be re-composed to form a convincing replica of the whole? In complex political arrangements, the contribution of the parts is contingent upon their role in an interdependent whole. We comparativists have long been aware of the so-called “ecological fallacy,” namely, the potential for error when one infers from the behavior of the whole, the behavior of individuals within it (or vice versa). For example, just because electoral districts in the Weimar Republic with a larger proportion of Protestants and farmers tended to vote more for the Nazi Party (NSDAP), there is no proof that individual Protestants and farmers were more likely to have voted for that party. This can only be demonstrated by data at the apposite level. But what is more important in today’s complex world is the inverse, i.e., “the individualistic fallacy.” This consists in simply adding up—usually without any weighting or multiplying—the observations about individuals and proclaiming an explanation for what they do together. Hence, the more “democratic” the values of sampled persons, the more “democratic” their polity will be. While I would admit that this may work reasonably well where the political process being studied is itself additive, i.e., voting, it can lead to serious fallacies of inference when ‘rational’ individuals interact unequally within pre-existing institutions and networks. Just try to imagine the re-composition of individual preferences and rational choices into a model that would try to predict, say, the level of public spending or the extent of redistribution across social classes!

My contention is that fuzzy “ideal–typical” concepts are virtually indispensable in political science, even if attempts (and there have been many) to pin them down to identical, least of all quantifiable, measures and to rank composites of them have failed. In a world of steadily increasing “complex interdependence,” comparativists will have to rely more and more on such concepts, both to do the explaining and to specify what has to be explained. Just think of all those elements of contemporary politics that involve lengthy chains of causality, the intervention of indirect or delayed agents, the impact of un-intended consequences, the possibility of multiple equilibria, the cooperation of several layers of authority, the emergence of new (and, often, contradictory), properties, the ‘chaotic’ effect of minor variations, the concurrent presence of discrete causes and their compound impact, the un-expected resistance of entrenched habits and standard operating procedures, the effect of random or unique contingencies, the role of anticipated reactions, the ‘invisible constraints’ imposed by established powers, not to mention, the inability of any actor to understand how the whole arrangement functions.

9 A Bunch of Concluding Thoughts

I conclude with three suggestions about the sub-discipline:

Political scientists should abolish the distinction between comparative politics and international relations and re-insert an ontological one between political situations that are subject to rules, embedded in competing institutions and not likely to be resolved by violence, and those in which no reliable set of common norms exists, where monopolistic institutions (including but not limited to states) are in more or less continuous conflict and likely only to resolve these conflicts by force or the threat of force. It used to be believed that this line ran between politics within states and politics between states. This being no longer the case—the probability of war has become greater within the former than between the latter for some time—there is no generic reason that these two “historical” sub-disciplines should be kept apart. How about separating the students of politics into those working on “ruly” and on “unruly” polities, whether they are national, sub-national, supra-national or inter-national?

Comparativists should attempt to include the United States in their research designs when it seems apposite, but they should not expect their Americanist colleagues to join them—at least, not for some time. The present direction of politics in the US is virtually diametrically opposed to the trends I have noted above. Americans (or, better, their present leaders) have reacted with hostility to the prospect of “complex interdependence” and made all possible effort to assert both their internal and external sovereignty. They have repeatedly denied the supremacy of supra-national norms and the utility of international organizations by refusing to regard those legal or organizational constraints that do exist as binding when they contradict or limit the pursuit of so-called national interests, and by withdrawing from them when it seems expedient to do so.

Comparativists—whether of ruly or unruly politics—should be equipping themselves to conceptualize, measure and understand the great increase in the complexity of relations of power, influence and authority in the world that surrounds them. Admittedly, “complexity” is still only a specter haunting the future of their sub-discipline and the answer to meeting this need probably cannot come only from within their own ranks. Hopefully, comparative politics will attract successful “grafts” of theory and method from disciplines in the physical and mathematical sciences that deal with analogous situations, but in the meantime the challenge should be met and the opportunity seized by us. Just picking up a few scattered concepts from within political science, such as multi-layeredness, polycentricity and governance—as I have done—will not carry comparativists far enough. Although, if my experience in studying what must be the most complex polity in the world, the European Union is any indication, ‘real-existing’ politicians and administrators who have to cope with all of this contingency and complexity will be inventing expressive new terms everyday. We should be listening to them, as well as to scholars in other disciplines, to pick up on these emerging arrangements, specify them more clearly where this is possible and search for points in our theoretical frameworks where they can be inserted.

I cannot escape the conviction that this is the most promising path forward for the sub-discipline. And it also seems uniquely capable of explaining something that I think will become more and more salient in the future, namely, equifinality. Since its Aristotelian origins, the comparative method has been applied mainly to explaining differences. Why is it that polities sharing some characteristics, nevertheless, behave so differently? This has allowed the sub-discipline largely to ignore what John Stuart Mill long ago identified as one of the major barriers to developing cumulative social science: the simple fact that, in the “real-existing” world of politics, identical or similar outcomes can have different causes. Perhaps, it is only because my recent research has focused on two areas where this phenomenon has been markedly present: European integration and democratization that I am so sensitive to this ontological problem. In both of these sub-fields, the units involved had quite different points of departure, followed different transition paths, chosen different institutional mixes, generated and responded to quite different distributions of public opinion and, yet, ended up in roughly the same place. Granted there remain significant quantitative and qualitative divergences to be explained—presumably, by relying on the usual national suspects—but the major message they suggest is that of equifinality, i.e., convergence toward similar outcomes.

Of course, not all of the world’s polities are converging toward each other either in institutions, policies or behaviors. There will still be lots of room for comparing differences at the level of national states.

If you have any doubt about whether a given piece of research is comparative, I suggest that you apply “Sartori’s Test.” Check its footnotes and compare the number of them that are devoted exclusively to the country or countries in question and those that refer to general sources, either non-country specific or that include countries not part of the study. The higher the ratio of the latter over the former, the more likely the author will be a genuine comparativist. If the citations are only about the country or countries being analyzed, then, it is very unlikely that the author has applied the comparative method – regardless of what is claimed in the title or flyleaf! “Comparazione e Metodo Comparato,” Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Vol. XX, No. 3 (Dicembre 1990), p. 400.

Gabriel Almond ( 1990 ).

“Americanists”—those who study American politics—only very rarely engage in comparison with other countries. On the one hand, they insist that the US is ‘exceptional’ in its favored (and exemplary) status and, therefore, cannot be compared with others. On the other, they claim that everything they observe about American politics—including the methods they apply for making these observations—is ‘universal.’ Comparativists are much less likely to be so schizophrenic.

"Comparative Politics at the Crossroads", Estudios-Working Papers, 1991/27, Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investicaciones (Madrid), 1991.

Here, considerable credit has to be given to the widespread use by comparativists of Gary King et al. ( 1994 ) and, more recently, to its critical counterpart, Henry et al. ( 2004 ). For a more European perspective, see Della Porta and Keating ( 2008 ).

Tilly C ( 1984 ).

Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane ( 1989 ).

This has been called “Galton”s Paradox,” so named for Sir Francis Galton who raised it at a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1889 by pointing out that the tribes studied by anthropologists might not be independent of each other and, therefore, that some of their traits could be the result of exogenous diffusion, not indigenous choice..The obvious solution to the paradox is to include unconscious diffusion and conscious imitation across units as potential explanatory variables – much as one should test for the spuriousness of any observed relationship. The major contemporary difference is the existence of multiple trans-national organizations – governmental and non-governmental – that are in the continuous business of promoting such exchanges at virtually all levels of society and the occasional existence of regional or global organizations that can back up these efforts with coercive authority or effective ‘conditionality.’

One of the repeated paradoxes of comparative politics is that scholars have a propensity for discovering and labeling novel phenomenon “at dusk, when the Owl of Minerva flies away,” i.e. at the very moment when the phenomenon is declining in importance or about to disappear. I suspect that this is because it is precisely institutions and practices that are in crisis that reveal themselves (and their internal workings) most clearly. Nevertheless, having been involved in “owl-chasing at dusk” several times, I can testify that it is a frustrating experience.

No one has insisted on this more consistently than Stanley Hoffmann ( 1982 ).

For a recent discussion of this trend, see Alexander Cooley and Jack Snyder ( 2015 ). For a criticism of this trend, see my “International Ratings and Rankings: Cure or Disease?” in the same volume.

Almond, Gabriel. 1990. A discipline divided. Schools and sects in political science . Newbury Park: Sage.

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Cooley, Alexander, and Jack Snyder. 2015. Ranking the world . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Della Porta, Donatella, and Michael Keating. 2008. Approaches and methods in the social sciences. A pluralistic perspective . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

King, Gary, and O. Robert. 1994. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nye, Joseph, and Robert Keohane. 1989. Power and interdependence: world politics in transition , 2nd ed. Boston: Little Brown.

Stanley Hoffmann. 1982. Obstinate or obsolete: the fate of the nation-state and the case of Western Europe,” Daedalus, Vol. 95, 862–915.

Tilly, C. 1984. Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons . New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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Schmitter, P.C. Comparative Politics: its Past, Present and Future. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 1 , 397–411 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-016-0038-7

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Received : 03 March 2016

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Issue Date : September 2016

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27 Overview of Comparative Politics

Carles Boix is the Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the Director of the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group at the University of Barcelona.

Susan Stokes is a John S. Saden Professor of Political Science and director of the Yale Program on Democracy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

• Published: 05 September 2013
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This article discusses several crucial questions that comparative political scientists address. These questions also form part of the basis of the current volume. The article first studies the theory and methods used in gathering data and evidence, and then focuses on the concepts of states, state formation, and political consent. Political regimes, political conflict, mass political mobilization, and political instability are other topics examined in this article. The latter portion of the article is devoted to determining how political demands are processed and viewing governance using a comparative perspective.

Why do authoritarian states democratize? What accounts for the contours, dynamics, and ideologies of the nation state? Under what conditions do civil wars and revolutions erupt? Why is political representation channeled through political parties in contemporary democracies? Why do some parties run on policy programs, others on patronage? Can citizens use elections and courts to hold governments accountable?

These are some of the crucial questions that the subfield of comparative politics addresses. And they are the questions, among others, around which we organized the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics ( Boix and Stokes 2007 ). We asked a set of top scholars in comparative politics to write critical surveys of areas of scholarship in which they are expert. We assembled the volume with two guiding principles. First, we were committed to the possibility (and desirability) of generating a systematic body of theoretical knowledge about politics. The discipline advances, we believe, through theoretical discovery and innovation. Second, we embraced a catholic approach to comparative methodology.

1 Comparative Politics as (Empirical) Political Science

In the last few decades, the discipline of comparative politics has experienced three main and defining changes: in its object of enquiry; in the methods it now deploys to gather data and test its empirical findings; and in the assumptions (about human and political behavior) it employs to build any theoretical propositions. In doing so, comparative politics has come of age, becoming a key contributor to empirical (as opposed to normative or philosophical) political enquiry. For organizational and administrative reasons, comparative politics is likely to remain a separate field in the discipline and in US departments (where most of today’s political research takes place) in the near future. But from an epistemological point of view, comparative politics is turning into a true science of politics—in the same way economic theory replaced the study of national economies at some point in the past.

Most graduate students in comparative politics who studied in leading departments in the 1960s through the 1980s were trained to conduct research in a single region or country. Indeed, the very term comparative was in most cases misleading. Comparative politics frequently entailed not making comparisons but studying the politics of a foreign country. This methodological choice came hand in hand with an epistemological one. The researcher had to show a deep understanding and a detailed analysis of the political intricacies of a particular polity. That descriptive work often came at the expense of any of the theoretical ambitions that had populated most classical political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill. With slight exaggeration one could think of that state of affairs as the State Department approach to comparative politics, where one scholar staffs the “Japan desk,” another the “Chile desk,” and so on. Of course there were extremely important exceptions. Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture compared citizens’ attitudes in five countries. Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship embarked in a parallel examination of the political and economic evolution of great powers since the early modern period.

The first way in which the field of comparative politics has changed has been epistemological. Even without abandoning the study of particular cases or countries, most comparatists have endorsed the construction and testing of causal theoretical models as the central task of the field. That shift in the object of research has had many progenitors. In part it came from realizing the limits of writing single case studies: Looking at one observation point in a plane will never tell us what forces brought it there. In part it was fed by a few yet very influential comparative pieces written by some modernization and political-development scholars (such as, again, Almond, Lipset, Moore, Rokkan, or Verba). Finally, the gradual introduction of statistical techniques and the mere exercise of data gathering spurred a general interest in cross-national comparisons.

Jointly with a growing acceptance among most researchers about the need to develop broad, general propositions about politics, comparative politics has also embraced the use of standard scientific practices to provisionally validate any theoretical claims. Large- n cross-national studies are now a prominent feature in the (comparative) study of politics—something that would have been hard to predict circa 1970s or even 1980s. But more important than the size of data-sets, what characterizes comparatists today (and rightly so, in our opinion) is a concern for a research design that makes it possible to test theoretical propositions. Provided there are enough degrees of freedom, this should be possible (at least in principle) to accomplish even with very few (but well-chosen) data points or cases. Interestingly, this growing consensus has come with an equally increasing and valuable skepticism about how much it can be accomplished by employing quasi-experimental methods of the kind comparatists usually employ. (In this, comparative politics is not alone: For good or ill, the debate over proper instrumentation has also taken over empirical economists. We will deal over this skepticism in more detail at the end of this chapter.)

In addition to a growing acceptance of the endeavors of theory-building and theory-testing through standard scientific procedures, the scientific enquiry of comparative politics has also shifted in the last decades or, one may say, over the course of the last three generations of scholars devoted to this field, in a third and probably more controversial way—namely, in the way in which theory is built. Probably influenced by the then-dominant approaches of structural sociology and Marxism, in the past comparatists relied on systemic, broad explanations to explain political outcomes. Just think of the initial theories of political modernization, the first articles relating democracy to development or the work on party formation laid out in the 1960s. Today, theory-building very often proceeds (or, perhaps more modestly, claims to proceed) from “microfoundations;” that is, it starts from the individual, and her interests and beliefs, to then make predictions about aggregate outcomes. We find this to constitute an advance in political science. Making us think hard about the final unit of analysis of the model, that is, about each individual (and his motives and actions), allows us to have theories that are more transparent (i.e. where one can truly probe the consistency and plausibility of assumptions) and easier to falsify.

At this point it is important, however, to pause to stress that embracing the principle of methodological individualism does not necessarily mean accepting a purely instrumental or rationalist model of human action. Nor does it mean that the interests and preferences of individuals are not shaped by social and political forces. Recent work in comparative politics has stressed that partisan, ethnic, national, and class identities are in important ways inculcated in individuals by parties, states, and other political actors. As is well known, our increasing reliance on microfoundations has been triggered to a considerable degree by an influx of mathematical and game-theoretic tools and by the influence of economic models in the discipline. But as Moon discussed in the Greenstein–Polsby handbook thirty years ago, models built on propositions about how individual actors will behave under certain circumstances may well employ a variegated set of assumptions about the interests and beliefs of the actors themselves. In fact, his claim (and our hunch) is that the only way to show that rationalistic assumptions do not work is to build models that are populated by intentional actors (with goals that are not strictly instrumental) and that these models perform better than those developed by rational choice theorists. To sum up, building theories of intentional actors and constructing models of (strictly) rationalist individuals are two different enterprises. The latter needs the former but the reverse is not true. Realizing that difference should save for all of us what has been a considerable source of conflict and confusion.

The growing emphasis on building broadly valid theoretical propositions (the first transformation of the field) together with the growing appreciation of the role of individuals and their motives (the third change of the field) have had a beneficial effect on comparative politics and, by definition, on political science. In a way, they have moved the study of politics much closer to our historical predecessors in the discipline. Classical political thinkers, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, made an effort to construct a set of theoretical propositions that could explain political life; that is, the foundations of political obligation and its consequences. Even Tocqueville’s celebrated study of America has weathered the passage of time due to the universal theoretical implications it develops in the discussion of a single case. What’s more, each classical political theory started with a particular conception of human nature. With different tools and with a different data-set (for one, we have some information about how real democracies work in practice), all these different (micro) models are, in the end, grounded on specific assumptions about human behavior. These assumptions are still deeply contested in comparative politics: They span from a purely instrumental conception of political actors intent on securing survival and maximizing power to a notion of individuals that may consent to particular structures contingent on others cooperating to, finally, visions of politics that appeal to the inherent sociability of humans. This contestation is unavoidable and healthy. Our guess is that as we move to build intentional models of politics, it should become easier to adjudicate among different points of departure.

2 States, State Formation, and Political Consent

The foundations of power and the sources of political obligation are without much doubt the two main building blocks of any theoretical inquiry in politics. Hence it is not surprising that contractarian theorists paid considerable attention to the mechanisms underlying the formation of states—although they did so mainly for normative reasons. From an empirical or positive point of view, the effort to build theories of state formation happened much later in time. When they appeared, they divided into neoclassical models, which stressed the construction of a coercive structure as part of a voluntary agreement between individuals specialized in coercion and individuals in need of protection, and Marxian models, which portrayed the state as an invention of an elite intent on the exploitation of the masses. Today, mostly as a result of neoinstitutionalist contributions from authors such as North and Olson, the formation of states is seen as a historical turning point in which those agents who specialize in the exercise of violence acquire the right incentives to shift from plundering a population of producers to protecting them from other plunderers. In other words, the founders of states were mostly bandits who, under the proper material and military circumstances, had the incentive to pacify and control a given territory and population in a systematic and orderly manner.

That last theoretical insight has had important empirical implications. It can be actually related to specific historical circumstances that began to take place 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, when agriculture was invented and states followed suit. And it probably explains why stateless societies, where permanent protection mechanisms are absent, have fared much worse in economic terms than human communities governed by state structures.

Still, the theoretical and empirical underdevelopment of the current theories of state formation calls for further scholarly research. Let us just mention two potential avenues of analysis. In the first place, neoinstitutionalists have reduced the foundation of states to a single cause: the transformation of bandits into lords. Yet that conclusion does not seem convincing on both historical and formal grounds. States may form (from a strictly logical point of view) and indeed were formed whenever some producers decided to join forces (that is, whenever they decided to accept a common, binding authority) to respond in some coordinated fashion to (internal or external) plunderers. In fact, in the absence of this second formative path, it seems impossible to explain why noncoercive types have been successful at constructing and maintaining states—a democratic transition, for example, should be seen as an instance of state formation since the problem of political obligation reappears, now in a new light (i.e. with different subjects and sovereigns), as political authority is transferred from one or a few to many. In the second place, theories of state formation have offered some plausible conjectures on the impact of states on economic growth (indeed most of them were mainly built to explain the latter). But they still have little to say about the distributive and social consequences of the emergence of political authority. 1

The monopoly of coercion and authority has grown exponentially in both scope and scale in the last half-millennium—it is probably appropriate to think about the modern state as a very different species from the ancient state. In an essay that is reproduced in this volume, Hendrik Spruyt provides a bird’s-eye overview of recent contributions to our understanding of modern state formation, an area of research that has grown substantially in the last three decades. He reviews the ways in which the modern state, with its absolute claims of sovereignty over a particular territory and population, formed and displaced all other forms of governance. This change came in response to a shift in war technology, the growth of commercial capitalism, and new ideas about legitimate government. Spruyt also examines several influential and still-unsettled debates about what caused the emergence of distinct types of constitutional and administrative regimes in the modern period. Most studies of state-building have focused on Europe in the modern period. The recent emergence of independent states outside of Europe in the last centuries is not adequately explained by these accounts. As Spruyt notes, state formation in the twentieth century allows us to evaluate the extent to which the international system, the economy, and the colonial legacy affect how sovereignty and legitimacy have expanded across the globe.

As conveyed by the dominant, Weberian definition of state, political authority relies both on coercion and on some form of legitimization. Accordingly, comparative politics has also considered the ideological dimensions of state formation and of intrastate identity conflict. 2 Research on the ideological underpinnings of the modern state has focused on the formation of national identities. Although the debate on the sources, structure, and dimensions of national adscription and nationalism is far from settled, the scholarly community now sees nations as mostly “modern constructs,” i.e. as separate communities to whom individuals perceive themselves as belonging with particular moral attachments and political obligations. Here a, or perhaps the, fundamental point of contention among scholars results from disagreements about the ultimate trigger that caused the appearance of national sentiments. For some, nationalism is the functional response in the political sphere to the demands of industrialization. For others, it derives from the decline of traditional mindsets and the emergence of print capitalism and media markets. Yet for others, nationalism arose in modern times as a response to an upsetting of traditional hierarchies which led, in turn, to a reinterpretation of everyone’s political position as one of belonging to a nation of equals. 3

3 Political Regimes and Transitions

Given the democratic revolution of the past quarter-century, it is scarcely surprising that democracy has been a central concern—perhaps the central concern—of comparative politics.

Over the last fifty years, democratization theory has developed several, at times overlapping, at times contradictory, insights and models. Empirically, there seems to be a strong correlation between levels of development and democracy ( Lipset 1959 ; Przeworski and Limongi 1997 ; Boix and Stokes 2003 ). Theoretically, the initial structural explanations ( Moore 1966 ) gave way to game-theory models stripped of any sociological foundations—either employed in a metaphorical way, e.g. O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986) , or in a strict, analytical manner, e.g. Przeworski (1990) . Those two theoretical approaches have recently been combined to point out why the political consequences of different constitutional institutions account for the social and economic underpinnings of democratic regimes (e.g. Boix 2003 ). In a chapter reproduced in this volume, Barbara Geddes reviews these theories. She claims that we still have few firm and uncontested conclusions about democracy’s causes and that our empirical results are less robust than one would like, changing with the sample of countries studied, the timeframe considered, and the specification of estimations. The problem is not an absence of theory. Our theories of democratization have become increasingly sophisticated and explicit. Rather, Geddes suggests, the problem may lie in the heterogeneity of the explanandum, democratization. Transitions from absolutist monarchy to constitutional monarchy or to republics may be fundamentally different than transitions from modern military dictatorship to mass democracy. Separating these distinct phenomena, analyzing them—and, more to the point, developing distinct theories of them—is the key, in her view, to gaining firmer knowledge of why countries democratize.

Although behavioral studies and the use of mass surveys spearheaded the transformation of political science into a more comparative and hence more scientific endeavor, the examination of opinion surveys has been somewhat of a laggard in the field of democratization studies. In the volume we edited, Welzel and Inglehart partly correct that imbalance. Reporting findings from a series of recent cross-national studies that have analyzed the effects of mass beliefs on the broadest possible basis, they show that the process of socioeconomic modernization nurtures liberal mass orientations which have, in turn, a positive effect on democracy.

With the exception of Hobbes, the relationship between civic culture and political regimes has been one of the central preoccupations of all modern political theorists. Embracing the new methods that characterized the self-consciously empirical political science that emerged after the Second World War, Almond and Verba in the 1960s tackled this secular concern in their highly influential book on civic culture. Yet this attempt to put the study of the relationship on solid empirical grounds proved unsuccessful. 4 The problem with this research agenda had less to do with the (still) very contentious notion of culture than with the ways in which researchers categorized democracy and political culture. They entertained too limited a conception of democracy, restricted to the institutional mechanisms that determine governance at the national level. They thus disregarded the vast number of democratic practices that operate at the local level and in intermediate social bodies. They defined political culture, in turn, as a set of beliefs and dispositions toward certain political objects. But this notion proved to be unsatisfactory: The role that these beliefs and attitudes played in sustaining democratic life and practices was unclear; their origins remained unknown; and, from a purely empirical point, there was no clear proof that democratic stability was bolstered by a particular democratic culture. Nonetheless, it was precisely at the time when the political culture approach had gone down a “degenerative path” that researchers rescued the concept of culture and hence the problem of its political effects by stressing its eminently relational nature. In the late 1980s, Gambetta put trust back into the research agenda. Several researchers emphasized the need to understand interpersonal networks to explain particular behavior. Coleman drew on game-theoretic concepts to develop the notion of social capital. And Putnam then transformed our way of understanding governance and culture in his famous study of Italian regional politics. This new approach is still in its infancy: We know little (both theoretically and empirically) about the mechanisms that go from social capital to good governance, and next to nothing about the dynamics that create, sustain, or deplete civic virtue. And some of us may doubt that trust, as opposed to an engaged skepticism, is the appropriate posture of citizens in democratic polities. But the new approach may well be putting us in the right path to “untangle the complex relationship between democracy and civic culture” ( Sabetti 2007 , 357).

More than thirty years ago, Juan Linz wrote a highly influential piece on dictatorships for the Handbook of Political Science , edited by Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby. Linz’s approach was mostly conceptual and sociological and drew on the literature on totalitarianism and authoritarianism that had been developing since the Second World War. Nondemocratic regimes, according to Linz, could be defined by their degree of internal pluralism, their ideology, and the level of political mobilization which they demanded of their subject populations. Typological approaches have limited empirical purchase, however. Realizing that no single principle can accommodate all the variety of autocracies in place, researchers responded by building a sprawling and mostly ad hoc list of types, such as military dictatorships, traditional absolutist monarchies, one-party states, totalitarian and post-totalitarian systems, parliamentary democracies, city-state oligarchies, “sultanistic” principalities, and so on. These ideal types have turned out to be scarcely informative about the mechanisms through which autocracies work. In this scientific tradition, researchers describe the traits of each type—in other words, they engage in the process of tallying the most frequent elements of each ideal model. But they hardly explain the mechanisms through which power is maintained and the consequences those different institutional structures may have on political stability, citizen compliance, and economic development.

After a period of relative neglect (perhaps a result of the third wave of democratization), the literature on dictatorships has experienced a notable transformation in recent years. Several political economists have started to abandon the strict typological tradition and have instead examined the incentives and mechanisms that structure power and the process of governance in authoritarian systems. Wintrobe (2007) , for example, in an essay in the volume we edited, offers an account of dictatorships that starts from rationalist assumptions. To rule, dictators have to combine some degree of repression with the construction of political loyalty. Given the two variables—repression and loyalty—and the objective functions dictators may have, Wintrobe distinguishes between tinpot dictators (who maximize consumption and minimize repression levels), totalitarian dictators (intent on maximizing power), tyrants (who repress without achieving much “loyalty”), and timocrats (who invest in creating loyalty and gaining their citizens’ love). Besides Wintrobe’s work, other scholars have made important contributions to our understanding of electoral autocracies ( Magalone 2006 ), the use of parties and legislatures in authoritarian regimes ( Geddes 1999 ; Wright 2008 ; Gandhi 2008 ), or the dynamics of conflict within authoritarian elites ( Svolik 2007 ).

4 Political Instability, Political Conflict

In a vibrant and by now classic debate, scholars argued first that revolutions occur exclusively as a result of social and economic modernization (Moore, Skocpol, Huntington). More recently, an influential line of argument, brought forth by Goldstone, has framed revolutions as the outbreak that follows a Malthusian imbalance between a growing population and its environment. In an important essay published in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics , Steve Pincus claims that the necessary prerequisite for revolution was always state modernization. State modernization programs simultaneously bring new social groups and new regions into direct contact with the state, and legitimize ideologies of change. These two developments create a social basis and a language on which to build revolutionary movements. Revolutions lead to very different political outcomes. In part following in the steps of Barrington Moore, Jr., Pincus argues that revolutions lead to open, democratic regimes when the state relies on merchant communities and foreign trade. Absent the latter, however, revolutions typically result in the imposition of an authoritarian regime.

In the last decades reality has put civil wars in a central place on the agenda of comparatists. Research on the sources of modern political violence (in the form of civil wars and guerrilla warfare) has gone through several theoretical turns since its inception as a comparative endeavor almost fifty years ago. Modernization scholars explained rebellions as a function of economic inequality ( Russett 1964 ; Paige 1975 ; Midlarsky 1988 ; Muller 1985 ), the impact of social and economic development, and the status and political claims of particular social groups ( Huntington 1968 ; Wolf 1969 ; Gurr 1973 ). That strand of enquiry was joined by a second line of research relating violent conflict to ethnic nationalism and the distribution of resources along ethnic lines ( Horowitz 1985 ; Connor 1994 ). In recent years almost all scholars have de-emphasized the role of economic factors, existing social grievances, or political ideologies in igniting violent conflicts, to stress instead the context of economic and political opportunities in which potential rebels may decide to engage in violent action. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) link the emergence of rebellious activities to the availability of both finance—namely, abundant natural resources—and potential recruits—individuals with reduced prospects of material advancement through peaceful activities. Fearon and Laitin hypothesize that civil wars happen in “fragile states with limited administrative control of their peripheries” (2003, 88). Writing from a different angle, rooted in the examination of the micrologic of violence deployed in civil wars, Kalyvas downplays the presence of single, sociologically unique motivations and describes civil wars as “imperfect, mulilayered, and fluid aggregations of highly complex, partially overlapping, diverse, and localized civil wars with pronounced differences from region to region and valley to valley” ( Kalyvas 2006 , 371). In the volume we edited, Kalyvas insists as well that war-driven conditions are themselves likely to shape the outcomes of interest: Much changes as civil wars unfold, including the distribution of populations, the preferences of key actors, and the value of resources over which combatants seek control. The exploration of political conflict has also generated an important literature on contentious politics (episodic public collective action) and social movements (sustained challenge to holders of power). Modernization and the spread of democracy spawned the invention of social movements. Yet at the same time, the time and location of social movements (that is, their interaction with political institutions, society, and cultural practices) determined the form in which they emerged ( Tarrow and Tilly 2007 ; Lichbach and deVries 2007 ).

5 Mass Political Mobilization

Modern democracies are representative democracies. As such they are also party democracies: Political representatives generally coordinate in stable organizations for the purposes of contesting elections and governing. In a chapter reproduced in this volume, Herbert Kitschelt offers of a broad review of the questions that scholars ask about party systems and the way they answer them. Why do democracies feature parties in the first place, as almost all do? Why do many parties compete in some democracies whereas in others competition is restricted to two major parties (or two major ones and a minor one)? Why do some parties compete with the currency of programs, others with valence issues, and still others with clientelism and patronage? Why are elections perennially close in some systems, lopsided in others? Kitschelt reviews the measures that scholars find helpful in answering these questions—party-system fractionalization, the effective number of parties, electoral volatility, and cleavages. The problems afflicting party politics are regionally specific: Whereas scholars of advanced industrial systems worry, as Kitschelt notes, about the decay of party–voter linkages, scholars of new democracies worry about whether such linkages will ever take shape.

Beyond the systemic or functional elements of parties and party systems, and starting with Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) seminal contribution, researchers have also devoted considerable efforts to understanding why parties formed in the way they did; why and how parties and party systems developed in Western Europe and North America from rather loose networks of politicians, catering to small and strictly delimited electorates, in the early nineteenth century to mass-based, well-organized electoral machines in the twentieth century; and why the number and ideologies of parties varied across countries. As shown in Boix (2007) , the nature of parties and party systems can be traced to the underlying structures of preferences, which could be either uni- or multidimensional. But these preferences or political dimensions were mobilized as a function of several additional key factors: the parties’ beliefs about which electoral strategy would maximize their chances of winning, and the electoral institutions that mediate between voters’ choices and the distribution of seats in national parliaments. (These electoral institutions, as shown in Boix 1999 , were themselves the product of strategic action by parties.) In a way, that chapter may be read as a response to two types of dominant approaches in the discipline: those institutionalist models that describe political outcomes as equilibria and that, somehow trapped in static applications of game theory, hardly reflect on the origins of the institutions that they claim constrain political actors; and those narratives that stress the contingency and path dependency of all political phenomena while refusing to impose any theoretical structure on them. By contrast, we think it should be possible to build historical accounts in which we reveal (1) how political actors make strategic choices according to a general set of assumptions about their beliefs and interests and (2) how their choices in turn shape the choice set of future political actors.

One of the central contentions of the comparative work done in the 1960s was that partisan attachments and party systems had remained frozen since the advent of democracy in the West. Yet in the last forty years party–voter linkages have substantially thawed ( Wren and McElwain 2007 ). Economic growth, the decline of class differences, and the emergence of postmaterialist values lie in part behind this transformation. In the wake of changes in the electorate and its preferences, it took party bureaucracies some time to adjust. Taking advantage of the slow rate of adjustment of the older parties, new parties sprang up to lure away dissatisfied voters.

Yet party dealignment and electoral volatility have not diminished, even after new parties that should have stabilized the electoral market have entered these party systems. Therefore, to explain continued volatility, we must look beyond changes in the structure of voter preferences. Weakening party–voter ties must be put in the context of a shift in the educational level of the population and new technologies (radios and TV). As parties became less important as informational shortcuts, politics has grown more candidate centered and party elites have been able to pursue electoral campaigns without relying on the old party machinery. If Wren and McElwain are right, our old models of, and intuitions about, party-centered democracy should give way to a more “Americanized” notion of democracies, where personal candidacies and television campaigns determine how politicians are elected and policy made.

In the last two decades, democracy has become the dominant system of government across the world, both as a normative ideal and as a fact. But not all nominal democracies generate accountable, clean governments. In a chapter reproduced in this volume, Susan Stokes addresses one of the possible causes of malfunctioning democracies by looking at the practices, causes, and consequences of clientelism. Clientelism, or the “proffering of material goods [by the patron] in return for electoral support [by the client],” was a hot topic of research in the 1960s and 1970s, buoyed by the emergence of new nations. Shaped by a sociological approach, researchers at that time explained clientelism as a practice underpinned by a set of norms of reciprocity. Yet, as Stokes claims, clientelism must rather be seen as a game in which patrons and clients behave strategically and in which they understand that, given certain external conditions (such as a certain level of development and the organizational conditions that allow for the effective monitoring of the other side), they are better off sustaining a pattern of exchange over the long run. Such a theoretical account then allows us to make predictions, which are beginning to be tested empirically, about the institutions underpinning clientelistic practices, the electoral strategies pursued by patrons, and the potential economic and political effects of clientelism: whether it depresses economic development and political competition.

Political activism has also spawned a large body of research. In her chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics , Pippa Norris (2007) reviews the social and psychological model of participation developed by Verba and Nie, as well as the critiques generated from a rational choice perspective. She then examines how key developments in the research community and the political world have affected the ways in which we evaluate this subfield. She notes a growing interest in the role of institutions in shaping participation in general and turnout in particular. Echoing Wren and McElwain, she draws our attention to changes in party membership, which was widespread and hence instrumental in many advanced democracies but has progressively shrunk, with consequences that are still widely debated among scholars. The constructs of trust and social capital, pioneered by Coleman and Putnam, are also relevant to our expectations about levels of participation. Norris also identifies causeoriented forms of activism as a distinct type of participation, activism that includes demonstrations and protests, consumer politics, professional interest groups, and more diffuse “new” social movements and transnational advocacy networks. All of these, she notes, have expanded and in a way marginalized the more institutionalized, party- and union-based mechanisms of participation that dominated in the past.

6 Processing Political Demands

In the magisterial five-volume Handbook of Political Science published thirty years ago by Greenstein and Polsby, the term accountability appears not once. The term representation appears sporadically and, outside of the volume on political theory, only a handful of times. Thirty years later, accountability has emerged as an organizing concept in comparative politics, with representation not far behind.

In democracies, how do citizens’ preferences get translated into demands for one public policy over another? If everyone in a society had the same preferences, the problem would not be a problem at all. But never is this the case. And scholarship on preference aggregation must come to grips with social choice theory, which should lead us to doubt that citizens in any setting in which politics is multidimensional can evince any stable set of policy preferences. The dominant strains of research, some of which come to grips with the social choice challenge and others of which ignore it, include examinations of the congruence (between preferences and outcomes) of various sorts ( Powell 2007 ). One kind of congruence study looks at the fit between constituents’ preferences and the issue positions of their representatives. Another looks at the fit between electoral outcomes and the allocation of elected offices, treating citizens’ policy preferences as though they were fully expressed by their votes. Another sort of congruence study examines the coherence of issue positions among co-partisans, both political elites and citizens who identify with parties, and tends to find a good deal more coherence among the former than among the latter. Yet another deals with the congruence between electoral platforms and campaign promises, and government policy. Given the role institutions play in aggregating preferences, a big chunk of political science is again devoted to the study of the former—we say “again” because institutions were a key part of the study of politics until the sociological and survey revolution that gripped the discipline in the 1930s and 1940s. Neoinstitutional scholars have focused their attention on electoral rules, executives, legislatures, federalism and, more recently, the judiciary.

Since Duverger’s seminal work, research on electoral rules has focused on the ways (mechanical and psychological) in which electoral systems affect the voting behavior of electors and, as a result, the election of candidates, the structure of parties and party systems, and the politics of coalition-building in democracies ( Duverger 1954 ; Cox 1997 ; Taagapera 2007 ).

The existing work on executives and legislatures has centered on two broad topics. First, what is the effect of a constitutional structure based on the separation of powers? Second, what determines the patterns of coalition-making in governments? In the volume we edited, Samuels (2007) reviews what we know about the impact of the separation of powers on accountability. The conventional view in the United States is that a separation of powers is so central to democratic accountability that this separation is nearly definitional of democracy. Samuels evaluates this proposition empirically. His own research and that of other authors which he reviews address questions of accountability and representation, as well as the effects of a separation of powers on the policy process and on regime stability. Among his central findings is that presidentialism has several deleterious effects; a separation of executive from legislative powers increases the chances for policy deadlock and for the breakdown of democracy. In turn, Strom and Nyblade (2007) critically assess the literature on coalition-making, particularly regarding the formation of governments in parliamentary democracies. Drawing on neoinstitutionalism and, more specifically, on the transaction costs literature, they show how the costs of negotiation and the demands of the electorate, interested in monitoring parties’ performance, reduce cycles and push politicians to strike relatively stable pacts. They note that theories of coalition formation began with William Riker’s application of the “size principle,” which predicted that parties would try to minimize the number of actors in a coalition. Although influential theoretically, this approach proved to be rather unsatisfactory empirically. In response, Strom and Nyblade relax Riker’s fundamental assumptions about payoffs, about the role of information, and about the effects of decision rules and institutions, to reach a much richer theory, and one that fits the data more closely.

As discussed by Pablo Beramendi in a thought-provoking chapter, we know far less than we should about federalism. Our theories on the origins of federalism are still sketchy—security threats, the level of heterogeneity, and the evolution of the world economy (in terms of its level of integration) shape the extent of decentralization in a critical manner. The study of the consequences of federalism is slightly more advanced. The relationship between democracy and federalism seems to be conditional, as far as we know, on the particular internal structure of federalism. The effects on the economy of having a federal structure, in turn, depend on how the federal institutions allocate power and responsibilities between the center and regional governments.

The study of the judiciary was traditionally reserved to legal scholars. In their chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics , John Ferejohn, Frances Rosenbluth, and Charles Shipan (2007) remind us why that is not the case any more. After examining the conditions under which courts attain independence, especially from executives but also from legislatures (an independence which O’Donnell and others consider a necessary condition for vertical accountability), they also explain other aspects of cross-national variation, such as why courts everywhere are not enabled to carry out judicial review and why courts are sometimes more active in the legislative process, other times less.

Assessing judicial independence, as these authors acknowledge, is not always straightforward. They advocate two measures: the frequency with which courts reverse governments, and the frequency with which they reverse governments that nationalize parts of the economy (or attempt to do so). The authors note that a drawback of either approach is that courts, which seek (among other objectives) not to have their decisions reversed, may rule against governments only when they anticipate not being reversed, in which case these measures would tend to overestimate their independence. Another difficulty is that courts may rule in favor of governments when they find governments’ actions to be lawful or when they spontaneously agree with governments’ actions. Hence, whereas rulings against governments probably indicate independence, rulings in their favor are less certain indications of dependence (see Helmke 2002; 2005 ).

7 Governance in Comparative Perspective

It was in the 1970s, that is, about two decades after comparative politics started to develop causal, testable theories, that political scientists ventured in a systematic way into the effects of politics on economic outcomes (and vice versa). Part of that growing interest in political economics started with the analysis by political sociologists of voting and, particularly, of economic voting. The first models presented a simple rule of thumb that voters could—and did—apply when deciding whether to vote for incumbents: If the economy had performed well on their watch, retain them; if it hadn’t, turn them out. Recent scholarly developments place economic voting in institutional contexts and present more nuanced stories about what voters need to know to carry off “simple” economic voting. Raymond Duch’s chapter in our volume reflects and advances this new agenda. Duch (2007) develops a series of propositions about how varying institutional contexts, coalition governments, and informational settings will mediate between economic conditions and voters’ appraisal of them. Factors that Duch suggests will influence economic voting include party-system size, the size of government, coalition governments, trade openness, and the relative strength of governing and opposition parties in the legislature.

At the same time that a few scholars studied how voters react to economic conditions, other researchers began exploring how politicians affect the economy (and therefore voting decisions). After Nordhaus published a seminal paper in 1975 on electoral business cycles, the scholarly literature has evolved in three (complementary) directions. A first set of studies has examined the impact of electoral cycles on the economy. Scholars now tend to agree that the presence of politically induced economic cycles is rather irregular. But, of course, this opens up an important question (particularly from the point of view of democratic representation): Why should voters accept policy manipulation and leave governments unpunished? In our volume, James Alt and Shanna Rose (2007) argue that political business cycles must be understood as a particular instance of the broader phenomenon of political accountability in democratic regimes. Political business cycles are not merely the result of a signaling game in which politicians try to build their reputation as competent policy-makers. Rather, the manipulation of economic policy and outcomes is an inevitable result of voters’ willingness to accept the transfer of some rents to politicians in exchange for the election of competent policy-makers. A second set of studies has focused on the effect that parties, mostly as congealed preferences, may have on macroeconomic policies. Here scholars detect some, generally mild and mostly transitory, effect on macroeconomic factors: Left-wing governments tend to get lower unemployment than right-wing governments for a while, at the cost of permanently higher (and even accelerating) inflation ( Alesina et al. 1997 ). Yet these effects are mostly conditional on the institutional setup (of central banks and wage bargaining institutions) in which governments operate: This last insight has generated the third set of works in the political economics literature ( Hall and Franzese 1998 ; Alvarez, Garrett, and Lange 1991 ).

After the first papers and books on the topic were written within the framework of modernization theory, welfare state scholars moved to assess the impact of power politics (through parties and unions) on the construction of different types of welfare states. That class-based orientation, however, had limited validity beyond some archetypical cases with high levels of union mobilization and strong left-wing parties.

Accordingly, researchers switched to explore the impact of cross-class coalitions—hence dwelling on the role of middle classes, agricultural producers, and employers. In doing so, they have shifted our attention from the pure redistributive components of the welfare state, which were the keystone of pure class-based, power politics accounts, to social policies as insurance tools that address the problem of risk and volatility in the economy. Related to this change in perspective, welfare state scholars have progressively spent more time mulling over the impact of the international economy on social policy. Two path-breaking pieces by Cameron and Katzenstein showing economic openness and the welfare state to be positively correlated have been followed by an exciting scholarly debate that has alternatively related the result to a governmental response to higher risk (due to more economic volatility in open economies), denied the correlation completely, or called for models that take openness and social policy as jointly determined. As Carnes and Mares (2007) discuss in the essay we edited, the welfare state literature has indeed traveled a long way from its inception. Yet it still has a very exciting research agenda ahead of it: First, it should become truly global and extend the insights (and problems) of a field built around Europe and North America to the whole world; second, it should offer analytical models that combine the different parameters of the successive generations of research in the area; third, it should take seriously the preferences and beliefs of voters across the world (and the cultural differences we observe about the proper role of the state); and, finally, it ought to integrate the consequences of welfare states (something about which we know much less than we should) with the forces that erect them.

Whether the transition to democracy in many developing countries in recent decades has meant a shift to accountable, effective government is a question that has concerned many scholars of comparative politics. Although both the number of researchers and the theories on the topic have multiplied considerably, we still know little about the relationship between growth and political regimes. We know that policy and performance vary considerably across democracies. Poor democracies show lower growth rates and worse public policies than rich democracies. In a nutshell, in spite of having formal mechanisms that should have increased political accountability and the welfare of the population in poor democracies, the provision of public goods and economic performance remain thoroughly deficient in those countries. In our edited volume, Keefer (2007) claims that, since the key parameters of democracy and redistribution (inequality and the struggle for political control between elites and nonelites) cannot explain that outcome (since low development and democratization are cast as contradictory), it must be political market imperfections that explain the failure of governments to deliver in democracies. In young, poor democracies, politicians lack the credibility to run campaigns that promise the delivery of universal benefits and public goods. Accordingly, they shift to building personal networks and delivering particular goods. This type of electoral connection, compounded by low levels of information among voters, who can scarcely monitor politicians, results in extreme levels of corruption and bad governance.

The promise of economic voting was that voters would be able to use economic conditions as a measure of the success or failure of governments; the anticipation of being thus measured would induce politicians to improve economic conditions on their watch. Economic voting would enforce accountability. Yet, as José María Maravall shows in his contribution to our edited volume, “in parliamentary democracies losses of office by prime ministers depend in one half of the cases on decisions by politicians, not by voters” (2007, 935). This fact would not be so dire if prime ministers were removed from office by colleagues who anticipated bad electoral outcomes—if, as Maravall puts it, “voters and politicians … share the same criteria for punishing prime ministers.” But they do not. Whereas prime ministers are more likely to be turned out by voters when economic times are bad, they are more likely to be turned out by their colleagues when economic times are good. Hence politicians who hold their comrades to account seem to practice a reverse kind of “economic voting.” Maravall’s chapter cautions us against excessive optimism regarding democracy, accountability, and economic voting. If (as economic voting implies) officeholders who produce bad economic outcomes will face the wrath of voters, why would they ever risk a costly transition to a liberalized economy? Whether asked in the context of post-Communist countries undertaking a “leap to the market” or in developing countries elsewhere in the world under pressure to move away from statist policies, the question has preoccupied comparative politics and political economy for more than a decade. Reviewing the literature on economic transitions in Eastern Europe, Timothy Frye identifies a number of factors, from the quality of domestic governance to membership in the European Union, that make governments more likely to undertake reforms and then stick with them ( Frye 2007 ). Yet serious gaps remain in our understanding of the determinants of market reforms, including what role is played by institutional legacies from the past, and by contemporary social institutions—networks, business associations, reputational mechanisms—state institutions—courts, bureaucracies, legislatures—and the interaction of the two.

8 Theory and Methods

The questions posed above and others that our contributors raise are too complex, and too important, to restrict ourselves to one or another methodology in our attempts to answer them. It is not that, methodologically speaking, “anything goes;” some research designs and methods for gathering and analyzing evidence are not fruitful. But the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics explain the advantages and pitfalls of a wide range of techniques deployed by compara-tists, from econometric analysis of cross-national data-sets and observational data to extended stints of fieldwork. They employ a variegated tool kit to make sense of political processes and outcomes.

The volume we edited includes several studies that take stock of what we would lose should the traditional comparative enterprise, with its emphasis on close knowledge of the language, history, and culture of a country or region, be abandoned altogether, and should the activity supporting that approach, the extended period of work in the field, be lost along with it. John Gerring (2007) contends that neither case studies nor large- n comparisons are an unalloyed good; rather, both entail tradeoffs, and we are therefore well advised as a discipline to retain both approaches in our collective repertoire. Where case studies are good for building theory and developing insights, Gerring argues, large- n research is good for confirming or refuting theory. Where case studies offer internal validity, large- n studies offer external validity. Where case studies allow scholars to explore causal mechanisms, large- n comparisons allow them to identify causal effects. Elisabeth Wood’s chapter alerts us to what we are in danger of losing should we as a profession give up on field research ( Wood 2007 ). To the rhetorical question, “Why ever leave one’s office?” she gives several answers. Interacting personally with subjects in their own setting may be the only way to get a handle on many crucial research questions, such as which of many potential political identities subjects embrace and what their self-defined interests are. Fieldwork is not without perils, Wood explains, both intellectual and personal. Interview subjects may be evasive and even strategically dissimulating; field researchers may have strong personal reactions, positive or negative, to their subjects, reactions that may then color their conclusions; and fieldwork is a lonely endeavor, with predictable highs and lows. Wood suggests strategies for dealing with these pitfalls. James Mahoney and Celso Villegas (2007) discuss another variant of qualitative research: comparative historical studies. The aims of this research differ from those of cross-national studies, they contend. Comparative historical scholars “ask questions about the causes of major outcomes in particular cases,” and hence seek to explain “each and every case that falls within their argument’s scope.” By contrast, large- n researchers “are concerned with generalizing about average causal effects for large populations and … do not ordinarily seek to explain specific outcomes in particular cases.”

Robert Franzese’s chapter defends, in turn, large- n , quantitative techniques against some of the critiques that other contributors level against them ( Franzese 2007 ). Comparative political scientists, like empirically oriented sociologists and economists, are bedeviled by four problems: a trade-off between quantity and quality in the collection of data; multicausality; context-conditionality, that is, the fact all the effects of our variables are conditional on other variables; and endogeneity. Yet as Franzese argues, these obstacles, which are in fact inherent to our trade, should not lead us to dodge quantitative strategies of research. On the contrary, a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the plausible loss of precision involved in measuring large numbers of observations does not justify retreating to qualitative studies of a few cases—even if we attain very precise knowledge about small samples, they fail to yield robust inferences. Similarly, the presence of multiple and conditional causality cannot be solved easily by case studies (although good process tracing may alleviate these problems). Finally, qualitative case-study research does not necessarily escape problems of endogeneity. To move from correlational analysis to causal propositions, Franzese contends, we need to employ more sophisticated techniques, such as variable instrumentation, matching, or vector autoregression. But even these techniques are not sufficient. Here we would like to add that, influenced by a few macroeconomists and political economists, part of the discipline seems on the verge of uncritically embracing the use of instrumentation to deflect all the critiques that are leveraged against any work on the grounds that the latter suffer from endogeneity. It turns out that there are very few, if any, instruments that are truly exogenous—basically, geography. Their use has extraordinary theoretical implications that researchers have either hardly thought about (for example, that weather determines regime, in a sort of Montesquieuian manner) or simply dodge (when they posit that the instrument is simply a statistical artefact with no theoretical value on its own and then insist that it is the right one to substitute for the variable of interest). Thus, we want to stress with Franzese that only theory-building can truly help us in reducing the problem of endogenous causation.

Adam Przeworski (2007) offers a less optimistic perspective on observational research, large- n or otherwise. Observational studies, ones that do not (and cannot fully) ensure that the cases we compare are matched in all respects other than the “treatment,” cannot deal adequately with problems of endogeneity. “We need to study the causes of effects,” he writes, “as well as the effects of causes.” Some covariates (traits a unit has prior to the application of a treatment) are unobserved. These unobserved covariates may determine both the likelihood of a unit’s being subjected to the treatment and the likelihood of its evincing the effect. Because these covariates are unobserved, we cannot test the proposition that they, rather than the treatment or putative cause, are actually responsible for the effect.

Przeworski discusses traditional as well as more novel approaches to dealing with endogeneity, but his chapter leans toward pessimism. “To identify causal effects we need assumptions and some of these assumptions are untestable.” His chapter will be must reading for comparatists as they assess the promise and limitations of observational versus experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

But perhaps the mood of the chapter is more pessimistic than it need be. Theory should help us distinguish cases in which endogeneity is plausibly present from ones in which it is not. One way of reading Przeworski’s chapter is that a crucial research task is to shift key covariates from the unobserved to the observed category. This task is implied by a hypothetical example that Przeworski offers. A researcher wishes to assess the impact of governing regime on economic growth. Future leaders of some countries study at universities where they become pro-democratic and learn how to manage economies, whereas others study at universities that make them prodictatorial and teach them nothing about economic management. Both kinds return home to become leaders and govern their societies and economies in the manner consistent with their training. It therefore appears that democracy produces economic growth. The training of leaders is a variable that we cannot observe systematically, in Przeworski’s view. But there is a difference between unobserved and unobserv able . It is not obvious to us why this variable could never be systematically observed, should our theory—and, perhaps, our close, case-study-informed knowledge—tell us that we should worry about it.

Whether one studies a large or small number of cases, and whether one employs econometrics or other techniques, Robert Bates’s chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics argues that one should do theoretically sophisticated work informed by game theory ( Bates 2007 ). Indeed, the use of game-theoretical models, of varying degrees of formalization, is a strong recent trend in comparative politics. Illustrating his methodological claims with his recent research on the politics of coffee production and commercialization, Bates offers a comprehensive strategy for comparative study. The first step of research is apprehension: a detailed study and understanding of a particular time and place. Verstehen is then followed by explanation: The researcher apportions the things she knows “between causes or consequences” and attempts to develop “lines of logic to link them.” In Bates’s view, the explanatory drive should begin with the assumption (or principle) of rationality and use game theory to impose a structure on the phenomena we observe. The structure of the game allows us to push from the particular to the construction of broader theories, themselves susceptible of validation. The construction of theoretical explanations must then be subject to the test of confirmation: This implies progressively moving from small- n comparisons to much larger data-sets in which researchers can evaluate their theories against a broad set of alternatives and controls.

An analysis of the methodological foundations of contemporary political research would be incomplete without an exploration of the role of rationalist assumptions in the discipline. Eleanor Ostrom (2007) takes as her point of departure the proposition that “the theory of collective action is the central subject of political science” and that the problem of collective action is rooted in a social dilemma (or, in game theory terms, a prisoner’s dilemma) in which, as is well known, rational individuals in pursuit of their optimal outcome may end up not cooperating even if it was in their interest to do so. Ostrom assesses the first generation of studies of collective action, which stress the structural conditions (number of players, type of benefits, heterogeneity of players, the degree of communication among them, and the iteration of games) that may increase the likelihood of achieving cooperation. She finds these studies wanting. Ostrom recognizes that the rationalist model only explains part of human behavior. Hence she calls for a shift toward a theory of boundedly rational, norm-based human behavior. Instead of positing a rationalistic individual, we should consider agents who are inherently living in a situation of informational uncertainty and who structure their actions, adopt their norms of behavior, and acquire their knowledge from the social and institutional context in which they live. In this broader theory of human behavior, humans are “adaptive creatures who attempt to do as well as they can given the constraints of the situations in which they find themselves (or the ones that they seek out).” They “learn norms, heuristics, and full analytical strategies from one another, from feedback from the world, and from their own capacity to engage in self-reflection. They are capable of designing new tools—including institutions—that can change the structure of the worlds they face for good or evil purposes. They adopt both short-term and long-term perspectives dependent on the structure of opportunities they face.” All in all, Ostrom’s approach encompasses a broader range of types of human action—from individuals who are fully “rational” (normally in those environments in which they live in repetitive, highly competitive situations) to “sociological agents” (whose behavior simply follows shared social norms). To some extent, the discipline seems to come full circle with this contribution: moving from cultural approaches under the aegis of modernization theory to the rationalist assumptions of institutionalist scholars and now back to a richer (perhaps looser but certainly closer to the way our classical thinkers thought about human nature) understanding of human agency. This journey has not been useless. On the contrary, as we traveled from one point to the other we have learned that a good theory of politics must be based on solid microfoundations; that is, on a plausible characterization of the interests, beliefs, and actions of individuals.

9 Looking Ahead

When we pause to take stock of the evolution of empirical political science in the last three decades, we think we should be pleased with the progress we have made as a community of scholars. The discipline has moved forward substantially in modeling certain political outcomes. We can offer the first inklings of theories of state formation and democratization. We are in a position to understand how power is sustained and exercised in dictatorships. We have fruitful models of the impact of institutions in preference aggregation and electoral behavior. We are beginning to tackle with some analytical precision the problem of political accountability. As we argued at the beginning of the chapter, we think this progress has been brought about by three conceptual engines: a renewed commitment to solve the central theoretical problems already debated by our forefathers; the decision to harness our empirical work (be it cases or cross-country regressions) to standard scientific practices; and a commitment to build “transparent” theoretical propositions; that is, propositions based on assumptions which can in turn be debated and from which we can derive results in a logical way.

There may be a hundred different things that need to be changed, improved, or altogether invented in our discipline. We will only stress one here. Many of our most successful models are simply equilibria. The gains from that type of methodological choice are clear. But we still know little about the ways in which political institutions, social practices, norms, and arrays of political interests originate and collapse. History was important in the broad, sociological literature written a few decades ago. Yet the way in which it was tackled was messy or unsystematic. Institutionalists altogether abandoned historical work. We think that, with the new tools we have in our hands, the right time has come to deal with that question again. To some extent, given the problems of endogenous causation we are confronted with, engaging in this type of work is now becoming inevitable.

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Introduction

Resources on this page are intended to introduce you to the key resources for conducting research in comparative politics. For more resources that support the study of comparative political affairs, review the resources described in the International Relations Research Guide .

Resource Guides and Directories

Listed below are directories and resource guides of website that provide politics-related information in countries throughout the world.

• Constitute -- offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics. The site includes the currently-in-force constitution for nearly every independent state in the world, as well as some draft and historical texts with a search engine that facilitates finding relevant excerpts on a particular subject. Filtered searching can be used to view results for a specific region or time period or to explore draft or historical texts. All URLs are deep links, meaning you can link to a particular topic search, constitutional comparison, or a specific constitutional provision directly.
• Environmental Law Net -- this site provides federal, state, international, transnational, and tribal laws and regulations; decisions of U.S. federal and state courts, international courts, courts of countries around the world, and tribal courts; and links to essential guidance documents, policies, and databases from U.S. federal and state agencies, and agencies of governments around the world.
• Features of Parliamentary Websites -- a comprehensive directory of the world’s legislative websites resources from the Library of Congress.
• Legislationline --  a free-of-charge online legislative database that provides direct access to international norms and standards relating to specific human dimension issues as well as to domestic legislation and other documents of relevance to these issues. These data and other information available from the site is the most comprehensive resource on legislation related to issues such as human trafficking, gender equality, elections, migration, counter-terrorism, freedom of assembly, and citizenship across the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) region. Also included is a link to the criminal codes of member nations. 
• Luxembourg Income Study -- a cross-national Data Archive and a  Research Institute that contains two primary databases. The  LIS Database includes income microdata from a large number of countries at multiple points in time. The newer  LWS Database includes wealth microdata from a smaller selection of countries. Both databases include labor market and demographic data as well. Registered users may access the microdata for social scientific research using a remote-access system. All visitors to the website may download the  LIS Key Figures, which provide country-level poverty and inequality indicators.
• Women in Politics Bibliographic Database -- provides access to books and articles produced throughout the world on the subject of women in politics. The database covers titles representing international, regional, country-by-country as well as thematic perspectives. Site also includes a lists of useful links on this subject.
• World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples -- this online directory of minorities and indigenous peoples has been restructured into database format, updated and expanded, and the entire text is now available free of charge for the use of all those throughout the world with an interest in any aspect of minorities and indigenous peoples, their rights, their historical, political or geographical context.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Resources Guides and Databases

Listed below are scholarly databases and research resources that cover international political affairs and will help you find information about specific countries.

NEWSPAPERS AND POPULAR MEDIA

• Access World News   -- comprehensive news collection for exploring issues and events at the local, regional, national and international level. Source types include print and online-only newspapers, blogs, newswires, journals, broadcast transcripts and videos.
• ABYZ News Links -- a directory of links to online news sources from around the world with contents organized on a geographical basis. The directory contains links to newspapers and other sites with news content such as broadcast stations, internet services, magazines, and press agencies.
• AccessUN   -- indexes the majority of United Nations documents and publications. Articles appearing in UN periodicals are individually indexed as well as bilateral and multilateral treaties in the UN Treaty Series.
• Europa: Gateway to the European Union   -- provides up-to-date coverage of European Union affairs and essential information on European integration. Users can consult all legislation currently in force or under discussion, access the websites of each of the EU institutions, and find out about the policies administered by the European Union under the powers devolved to it by the Treaties.
• IREON [International Relations and Area Studies Gateway] -- a database produced by research organizations, libraries, and documentation centers from various European countries that enables searching for journals, collected essays, conference and research papers, official publications, books, and international treaties in the areas of foreign and security policy, international cooperation and development, international economics, European and transatlantic issues, and foreign cultural policy.
• OECDiLibrary   -- this is the full-text publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As well as collecting comparable statistics and economic and social data, OECD monitors trends, analyzes and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.
• United Nations iLibrary -- provides a single digital destination for accessing research reports, journals, data, and publication series distributed by the United Nations Secretariat and its funds and programs.
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts -- provides indexing of the international journal literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration and policy. Over 1,700 titles are monitored for coverage and, of these, 67% are published outside of the United States.

COUNTRY INFORMATION

• BBC Country Profiles -- a comprehensive guide to history, politics, and economic background of countries and territories, and background on key institutions. Also included are audio and video clips from BBC archives.
• CIA World Factbook   -- provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.
• Economist Intelligence Unit [EIU] Country Reports   -- a source of business intelligence on political and economic trends in 200 countries from 1996 to the present. An overall profile of each country is provided annually and a current report is produced quarterly. Both include current detailed statistics.
• Europa World – a meticulously researched resource of political, economic, and statistical information for more than 250 countries and territories, as well as international and regional organizations. Contents include authoritative information on every country, providing context for the world’s major political and economic developments; up-to-date government lists and recent election results for every country in the world; the ability to directly compare national statistics in graph and tabular form; coverage of 2,000 international organizations, commissions, and specialized bodies’ topical essays and commodity overviews for major regions of the world; current and comprehensive statistical and directory data for all countries and territories; impartial coverage of issues of national and regional importance from acknowledged experts; and, a directory of major political figures with biographical information and facts. An excellent source of current information about specific countries and regions of the world.

U.S. Department of State Country Reports

• Human Rights Practices -- annual reports to Congress on the status of internationally recognized human rights practices per country. Online archive from 1999-present.
• Religious Freedom -- describes the status of religious freedom in each foreign country, government policies violating religious belief and practices of groups, religious denominations, and individuals, and U.S. policies to promote religious freedom around the world. Online archive from 1999-present.
• Terrorism -- reports on where terrorist acts have occurred, state sponsorship of terrorism and assessments of terrorist groups. Online archive from 1995-present.
• Trafficking of Persons -- an annually updated, global look at the nature and scope of trafficking in persons and the broad range of government actions to confront and eliminate it. Online archive from 2001-present.

Regional Databases

Listed below are scholarly databases that provide access to journal articles, research reports, and other literature published by scholars outside of the United States and Canada.

• African Journals Online -- the world's largest online collection of African-published, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. The site currently hosts over 370 peer-reviewed journals from 27 African countries, many focused on international affairs.
• Arab World Research Source -- a resource of scholarly journals, quality magazines, trade publications, industry profiles, country reports, market research reports and conference papers related to the Arab World. This resource reaches across all major subject disciplines, including business, economics, science, technology, humanities and sociology. The database contains more than 140 scholarly full text titles, with the majority of the journals featuring Arabic full text.
• Bibliography of Asian Studies -- contains over 740,000 records on all subjects, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.
• Caribbean Search -- a multidisciplinary database that provides a comprehensive guide to English-language articles pertinent to the countries and people of the Caribbean region. The collection contains over 730 Caribbean-focused scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, reports and reference books.
• China Academic Journals -- full-text articles from 1208 Chinese journal titles (a limited number in English) in the areas of economics, politics, law and related disciplines dating from 1994 to the present. Retrospective articles, dating back to 1915, are included for 27 journal titles.
• Hispanic American Periodicals Index -- source for authoritative, worldwide information about current political, economic, and social issues concerning Central and South America, Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean basin, the United States-Mexico border region, and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States. Includes sources in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
• Index Islamicus -- indexes literature on Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Records in the database cover almost 100 years of publications and include not only works written about the Middle East, but also about the other main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere.
• MideastWire.com -- an Internet-based service of translated news briefs covering key political, cultural, economic, and opinion pieces appearing in the Arab media.
• Political Database of the Americas -- offers information about institutions and political processes, national constitutions, branches of government, elections, political constitutional studies and other subjects related to democracy in the Americas.
• World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean -- brings together primary source documents about Latin America and the Caribbean; academic journals and news-feeds covering the region; reference articles and commentary; maps and statistics; and audio and video. World Scholar covers topics such as politics, economics, religion, culture, international affairs, the environment, science, and technology.

International Statistics

Listed below are sources of international statistics that can used to quantifiably analyze and compare two or more variables.

• EuroStat -- the statistical office of the European Union and provides statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions.
• Human Development Data -- human development data utilized in the preparation of the Human Development Index (HDI) and other composite indices featured in the Human Development Report are provided by a variety of public international sources.
• International Financial Statistics -- all aspects of international and domestic finance, with history to 1948.
• Direction of Trade -- value of exports and imports between countries and their trading partners, with history to 1980.
• Balance of Payments -- international economic transactions data and International Investment Position, with history to 1960.
• Government Finance Statistics -- budgetary and extra-budgetary financial operations data of governments, with history to 1990.
• MacroDataGuide -- this is a compilation of data sources that include general databases containing social and economic data, large, general datasets with a number of political variables, indicators and indices produced by non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations, and datasets compiled by independent researchers. The information provided in this site is collected from the various institutions’ and research projects’ websites. Excellent place to begin looking for international social science data.
• OECDiLibrary   -- this is the full-text publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and includes comparable statistics and economic and social data. The OECD monitors trends, analyzes and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.
• UNdata   -- database facilitates searching and downloading of official statistics produced by countries and compiled by United Nations data system, including estimates and projection, and a variety of statistical resources from the UN system. The domains covered are agriculture, crime, education, energy, industry, labor, national accounts, population and tourism.
• World Development Indicators   [WDI] -- contains statistical data for over 550 development indicators and time series data from 1960 to the present for over 200 countries and 18 country groups.
• Worldwide Governance Indicators [WGI] -- reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2006, for six dimensions of governance: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law , and Control of Corruption.

MEASUREMENT INDEXES AND DATA SETS

• International Tax Competitiveness Index
• Transparency International

Democratic Governance

• Freedom House
• International Property Rights Index

Social Justice and Well-Being

• Global Age Watch Index
• Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex)
• Global Hunger Index
• Legatum Prosperity Index
• OECD Better Life Index
• Social Unrest Index
• Comparative Welfare States
• Comparative Welfare Entitlements [ copy and paste thi s link: http://cwed2.org/ ]
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Introduction │  Key Reference   │ Country Profiles  │ Subject Databases │ Data Resources

Introduction

Key reference.

• International Encyclopedia of Political Science: Comparative Politics Provides a definitive, comprehensive picture of all aspects of political life. The eight volumes cover every field of politics, from political theory and methodology to political sociology, comparative politics, public policies, and international relations.
• The Oxford Companion to Comparative Politics Focuses on the major theories, concepts, and conclusions that define the field of comparative politics, analyzing the similarities and differences between political units. Entries cover such topics as failed states, grand strategies, soft power, capital punishment, gender and politics, and totalitarianism, as well as countries such as China and Afghanistan.
• The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics presents in one volume an authoritative overview of the theoretical, methodological, and substantive elements of comparative political science. The 28 specially commissioned chapters, written by renowned comparative scholars, guide the reader through the central issues and debates, presenting a state-of-the-art guide to the past, present, and possible futures of the field.

Country profiles include basic facts and figures including political, economic, and statistical information about the world's countries and territories. They also provide summaries of geography, demographics, history, and current political events.

• CQ Press Political Handbook of the World Provides country-by-country data (e.g., population, languages) as well as detailed information about political history, politics, social movements, economics, and current issues.
• EMIS Professional (Emerging Markets Information Service) Provides country information on Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. Includes country profiles; macroeconomic statistics, forecasts, and analysis; reports on financial markets, companies, and industries; exchange rates; analyst reports; and business news.
• Europa World Plus Europa World Plus is the online version of the famous reference source, Europa World Year Book. It provides political, economic, and historical information, including statistics, for over 250 countries and territories.  Europa World Plus also contains the nine-volume Europa Regional Surveys of the World series.  
• FitchConnect Although primarily used in the fields of business and economics, FitchConnect also provides in-depth political risk ratings and analysis, including 10-year forecasts. Each report includes a "Political SWOT" (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) assessment of current political events and a "Political Outlook" section.
• The Statesman's Yearbook The Statesman's Yearbook provides information on international affairs, covering key historical events, population, city profiles, social statistics, climate, recent elections, current leaders, defense, international relations, economy, energy and natural resources, industry, international trade, religion, culture, and diplomatic representatives, as well as fact sheets and more.

Subject Databases

• Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) A source for theory and research in international affairs. It includes scholarship, working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals, case studies for teaching, and policy briefs.
• PAIS PAIS contains journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies for public affairs, public and social policies, and international relations.
• Policy File Provides online access to abstracts and full-text articles on public policy research and analysis from think tanks, university research programs, research organizations, and publishers. Offers access to U.S. foreign and domestic policy papers and gray literature, with abstracts and links to timely reports, papers, and documents from think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutes, advocacy groups, agencies, and other entities.
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts Provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration. 67% of the more than 1500 monitored journals are published outside the United States, and there are nearly 500,000 records beginning in 1975. Some of the records have full-text links and coverage including all aspects of political science, as well as international relations and comparative politics.

Comparative Political Data Resources

• The Berggruen Governance Index The Berggruen Governance Index Project is a collaborative project between the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Berggruen Institute. The current iteration of the Index examines the performance of 134 countries in key areas over a 20-year period to advance our understanding of why some countries are better managed and enjoy a higher quality of life than others. The index analyzes the relationship between democratic accountability, state capacity, and the provision of goods to serve public needs.
• OECD iLibrary (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) The OECD iLibrary provides comparative economic and political statistics and data coverage of 38 OECD countries including development, education, energy, environment, technology, and social issues.
• ParlGov - Parliaments and Governments Database ParlGov contains comparative statistical data and information for all EU and most OECD democracies (37 countries).
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POLS 330: Topics in Comparative Politics (HC)

Women and peace keeping, introduction.

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            A  UNAMID peacekeeper speaks with a woman in a refugee camp in Dafur, Sept. 2018 (Source: flickr - Setyo Budi (UNAMID)

This guide focuses on the topics in your course and outlines research strategies and resources for the work you are doing.  Use the searches and linked examples as jumping off points for exploration.  

Use the Background page  to help in developing research questions and understanding the broader context for your specific topics.  Journal Articles and Books will give you material for analysis and comparison.  Further, more specific types of resources are outlined in the pages for Reports, Research Groups & Data  and News .

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Comparative Politics

One of the central themes of comparative politics is the study of political institutions, including constitutions, electoral systems, legislatures, judiciaries, and bureaucracies. Comparative analysis of political institutions can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of different governance systems, as well as the conditions that promote or hinder effective decision-making and democratic participation. For example, the comparison of electoral systems across different countries can provide insights into the ways in which electoral rules affect voter behavior, party competition, and representation.

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, comparative politics research paper topics.

• The impact of different electoral systems on party systems
• The role of civil society in promoting democratic norms and practices
• Comparative analysis of the welfare state in advanced industrial democracies
• The effect of gender quotas on political representation
• Comparative study of judicial activism and judicial restraint in different legal systems
• The relationship between economic development and political liberalization
• The role of political culture in shaping democratic consolidation
• The impact of decentralization on political power and accountability
• The politics of immigration and border control in different countries
• Comparative analysis of public opinion and political behavior in different societies
• The role of the media in shaping political opinion and decision-making
• The impact of globalization on state sovereignty and power
• Comparative study of civil-military relations in different societies
• The relationship between natural resources and political stability
• The impact of international organizations on domestic politics
• Comparative analysis of federalism and unitary states
• The role of interest groups in shaping policy outcomes
• The impact of constitutional design on political stability and democratic consolidation
• Comparative study of party systems in new democracies
• The relationship between corruption and economic development
• Comparative analysis of populist movements and parties
• The role of religion in shaping political behavior and attitudes
• The impact of demographic change on politics and policy
• Comparative study of authoritarian regimes and their stability
• The impact of regime change on economic development and political stability
• Comparative analysis of social movements and political change
• The role of identity politics in shaping political outcomes
• The impact of colonial legacies on contemporary politics
• Comparative study of labor relations in different societies
• The impact of environmental policy on political outcomes
• Comparative analysis of the role of the state in economic development
• The impact of trade agreements on domestic politics and policy
• Comparative study of regional integration and its effects on politics and policy
• The role of civil conflict in shaping political outcomes
• The impact of digital technologies on political communication and decision-making
• Comparative analysis of the relationship between democracy and development
• The impact of immigration on political attitudes and behavior
• Comparative study of the politics of welfare reform in different societies
• The role of international norms and values in shaping domestic politics and policy
• Comparative analysis of the politics of energy policy
• The impact of social media on political mobilization and participation
• Comparative study of political parties and their strategies for gaining and maintaining power
• The impact of globalization on income inequality and political conflict
• Comparative analysis of the politics of trade and protectionism
• The role of ethnic and linguistic diversity in shaping political outcomes
• Comparative study of the role of women in politics and policy-making
• The impact of digital surveillance on civil liberties and political participation
• Comparative analysis of the politics of climate change
• The role of education in shaping political attitudes and behavior
• Comparative study of the politics of healthcare reform in different societies.

Another key theme of comparative politics is the study of political culture and ideology. Political culture refers to the attitudes, values, and beliefs that shape political behavior and institutions, while ideology is a set of beliefs and principles that guide political action. Comparative analysis of political culture and ideology can reveal the sources of political conflict, the roots of political stability, and the factors that influence political change. For example, the comparison of the political cultures of liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes can help us understand the role of civic values and civil society in promoting democratic norms and practices.

A third important theme of comparative politics is the study of political economy, which explores the relationship between politics and economics. Comparative analysis of political economy can reveal the ways in which economic structures and processes influence political decision-making and outcomes, as well as the ways in which political institutions and actors shape economic development and growth. For example, the comparison of economic policies across different countries can provide insights into the conditions that promote or hinder economic growth, and the role of state intervention in economic affairs.

Finally, comparative politics also explores the dynamics of power and conflict within and between political systems. This theme encompasses the study of political parties, interest groups, social movements, and other political actors, as well as the causes and consequences of political violence and conflict. Comparative analysis of power and conflict can reveal the sources of political legitimacy, the strategies used by political actors to gain and maintain power, and the factors that contribute to political instability and violence. For example, the comparison of ethnic and religious conflict across different countries can help us understand the role of identity politics in shaping political outcomes.

In conclusion, comparative politics is a vital subfield of political science that helps us understand and explain the similarities and differences between political systems and their structures, processes, and actors. By examining political institutions, culture and ideology, political economy, and power and conflict, comparative politics sheds light on the conditions that promote or hinder effective governance, democratic participation, and economic growth, as well as the factors that contribute to political instability and conflict. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, the study of comparative politics is more important than ever in helping us navigate the challenges and opportunities of the global political landscape.

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Article contents

Comparative foreign policy analysis.

• Jeffrey S. Lantis Jeffrey S. Lantis Department of Political Science, The College of Wooster
•  and  Ryan Beasley Ryan Beasley School of International Relations, University of St Andrews
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.398
• Published online: 24 May 2017

Comparative foreign policy analysis (CFP) is a vibrant and dynamic subfield of international relations. It examines foreign policy decision making processes related to momentous events as well as patterns in day-to-day foreign interactions of nearly 200 different states (along with thousands of international and nongovernmental organizations). Scholars explore the causes of these behaviors as well as their implications by constructing, testing, and refining theories of foreign policy decision making in comparative perspective. In turn, CFP also offers valuable lessons to government leaders.

This article surveys the evolution of CFP as a subfield over time, with special attention to its contributions to academic understanding and policymaking. It begins with a review of the characteristics and contributions of CFP, followed by acknowledgment of early works that helped establish this area of study. The next section of the article reviews major thematic focuses of CFP, including theories of international pressures and factors that may drive state foreign policy as well as strong foundations in studies of domestic politics. Key internal actors and conditions that can influence state foreign policies include individual leaders, institutions and legislatures, bureaucratic organizations and government agencies, and public opinion and nongovernmental organizations. Following this survey of actors and contemporary theories of their role in foreign policy decision-making, the article develops two illustrations of new directions in CFP studies focused on political party factions and role theory in comparative perspective.

• comparative foreign policy
• decision-making
• international conflict and cooperation
• domestic actors
• international relations theory
• factionalism
• role theory

Introduction

Comparative foreign policy analysis (CFP) is a vibrant and dynamic subfield of international relations. It examines foreign policy decision-making processes related to momentous events as well as patterns in day-to-day interactions of nearly 200 different states (along with thousands of international and nongovernmental organizations). In many ways, CFP offers theoretical frameworks that help to capture the “heartbeat” of global politics. Scholars explore key questions and problems over time, including the causes of state behaviors as well as their implications by constructing, testing, and refining theories of foreign policy decision-making in comparative perspective (Brummer & Hudson, 2015 ; Breuning, 2007 ). In turn, CFP also offers valuable lessons for governance (Kaarbo, 2015 ; Houghton, 2007 ; Hudson, 2005 ).

This article proceeds as follows. First, it examines distinguishing characteristics of the development of the comparative foreign policy subfield, including its evolutionary focus and interdisciplinarity. It explores key actors engaged in foreign policy-making, from individual decision makers and small groups to states and international organizations. Second, the article examines contemporary areas of focus in the scholarship, including questions of links to international relations theories such as neorealism and constructivism, and agent-structure explorations of how domestic and individual-level factors may impact state foreign policy behaviors. Third, it surveys methodological approaches in the subfield, with special attention to the blend of richness and rigor in many studies. Finally, this article explores several promising avenues of current investigation—the applicability of social psychological models to explain majority-minority interactions in foreign policy-making and the potential for national role conceptions to influence state foreign policy in predictable patterns. Both examine critical questions of agency and structure and illustrate opportunities for advancement of middle-range theory in the subfield.

Studying Foreign Policy in Comparative Perspective

The development of the comparative foreign policy subfield reflects several key characteristics. First, even though CFP has deep roots, it is relatively young. The origins of this area of study date back to mid- 20th-century scholarship (Snyder, Bruck, & Sapin, 1954 ; Sprout & Sprout, 1957 ; Rosenau, 1966 ). Second, CFP is inherently interdisciplinary—drawing from theories and ideas in many related disciplines. Third, and perhaps surprisingly, CFP also is a rather cohesive subfield, populated by several generations of scholars who sought to advance theoretical understanding of foreign policy-making in comparative perspective. These qualities have enabled advancements in theory that represent fascinating potential contributions to broader international relations scholarship. Fourth, CFP is also a highly policy-relevant subfield, with insights about subjects, lessons of history, actors, factors, and conditions that can be incredibly useful for decision-makers. Each of these qualities of CFP is explored in further detail below.

CFP emerged as a variant of international relations and diplomacy studies in the mid- 20th century and quickly evolved original frameworks for policy analysis. It connects the study of international relations (the way states relate to each other in international politics) with the study of domestic politics (the functioning of governments and the relationships among individuals, groups, and institutions). Because theories of international relations are primarily concerned with state behavior, the study of international relations includes explanations of foreign policy. Traditional theories, however, tend to focus on the external environment as the primary or single explanation of why states do what they do in global affairs. Those who study foreign policy certainly draw on these theories, as will be discussed shortly, but they also look at theories of domestic politics focused inside the state for further explanation. Theories of domestic politics, found in the study of U.S. politics and in the study of comparative politics, share this attention to internal factors. These theories, however, tend to explain the functioning of the state or political system and the domestic policies that are chosen—they rarely comment about the effects of internal politics on a state’s foreign policies.

Up to the 20th century , scholar Deborah Gerner argues, “neither foreign policy nor international relations constituted a distinct field. Diplomatic history probably came the closest to what is now labeled as ‘foreign policy,’ and much of what we call international relations came under the rubric of international law, institutional analysis, or history” ( 1992 , p. 126). Driving much of nascent international relations theorizing at the time was realism, though it is important to note that the liberal (idealist) worldview did emerge as a way to study policymaking in the interwar years (Neack, Hey, & Haney, 1995 ). International relations assumed its contemporary form as an academic discipline after World War II. In some ways, this was in response to the rigidity of the realist framework as a search for powerful alternative theories.

Many of the founding works in the CFP subfield were interdisciplinary in nature. For example, Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin ( 1954 ) drew on insights from psychology to propose a systematic decision making framework for the study of international relations, in contrast to the virtual dismissal of human agency in realism. They championed a decision making focus of study, analyzing behaviors of “those acting in the name of the state” ( 1954 , p. 65). In essence, national interest does not represent an objective universal. Rather, foreign policy choices derive from multiple sources, including the backgrounds of individual decision makers and the organizational framework in which decisions are made. In a similar vein, Harold and Margaret Sprout’s article, “Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics” (Sprout & Sprout, 1957 ) called for greater attention to the “psycho milieu” of individuals and groups involved in foreign policy decisions. This focused on the international context as it is was perceived and interpreted by these decision makers. James Rosenau championed a more scientific study of foreign policy, linking domestic and international conditions in his classic article, “Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy” ( 1966 ). He argued that comparative politics offered valuable insights on the “internal influences on external behavior” and that this study would bridge the fields of international and comparative politics. Critically, he called for the advancement of theory frameworks by proposing relationships between variables such as natural attributes and state behavior.

The foreign policy analysis subfield is rather cohesive. Several generations of scholarship have built on early foundations to explore the causes and implications of foreign policy decisions. Subjects of study also have proliferated (read: moving from traditional diplomatic studies of great power behaviors to developing countries, and from realist-infused structural frameworks to new and alternative paradigmatic perspectives such as dependency theory). In the behavioral era of the 1960s and 1970s, many CFP scholars appeared to “catch the fever” of Rosenau’s call for generalizeable theory and the search for a scientific study of foreign policy (McGowan & Shapiro, 1973 ). The inability of such approaches to generate substantial progress toward overarching theories of foreign policy led some to see CFP as having failed, but others argued that this ultimately resulted in a broader and more tolerant field (White, 1999 ). Indeed, subsequent generations of researchers have continued to build on and help shape the canon of CFP scholarship, and even as theory lenses have widened, comparative analysis has remained a key feature.

The CFP subfield is also policy-relevant. Drawing on insights from decades of inquiry, foreign policy analysis has made valuable contributions to theory development and policy prescriptions (Zambernardi, 2016 ). Early examples of applications of foreign policy frames include studies of wars over independence and decolonization (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993 ), attempts to manage the Arab-Israeli conflict (Aoun, 2003 ; Hinnebusch & Ehteshami, 2014 ), and studies of humanitarian intervention (Clarke & Herbst, 1997 ; Smillie & Minear, 2004 ). CFP scholars also played a prominent role in articulating and shaping the democratic peace thesis (Maoz & Russett, 1993 ; Doyle, 2011 ). CFP scholars have contributed a great deal to understanding transitions to democracy and the critical role that different forms of democracy can play in shaping foreign policy in the post-Cold War era (Blanton, 2005 ; Coleman & Lawson-Remer, 2013 ). Alexander George, one of the pioneers in the study of foreign policy, made explicit the call for scholars and practitioners to “bridge the gap” ( 1993 ) in the hopes of improving policy and policymaking.

The next section explores some of the key questions and problems that have motivated research on CFP over time. Several defining features have come to characterize much comparative foreign policy analysis research. First, it is agent-centered, taking seriously the importance of actors that are involved in making foreign policies. Second, both the international system and domestic political contexts are viewed as important influences on foreign policy and policymakers. Third, while objective material conditions are seen as important, the subjective understandings and interpretations of individuals are also viewed as a significant factor shaping foreign policy. Fourth, while generally committed to developing theories and trying to explain foreign policy through causal inferences, the field embraces a very wide variety of specific research methods, spanning both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Finally, CFP research can be usefully organized into different “levels of analysis” (see Singer, 1961 ) defined by the primary factors that are used to explain foreign policy, ranging from those external to states to those internal to the minds of foreign policy decision makers. This serves as an organizational platform for the discussion that follows, drawing attention to agency, contextualism, subjectivity, and different methodologies.

Contemporary Dimensions of Study in CFP

CFP analysis begins with theories that identify different factors, actors, and conditions that can influence state foreign policies. Scholars recognize that any such explanation typically involves multiple factors, or “variables,” that drive research in CFP. Levels of analysis offer a framework for categorizing the impact of these factors. First, international system dynamics may help to explain state foreign policy development—such as how the international system is organized, the characteristics of contemporary international relations, and the actions of others. Scholars posit that these factors can cause the state to react in certain ways. The second category points to internal factors such as characteristics of the domestic political system—institutions and groups—that can shape a state’s foreign policy. A third category explores the influence of individual leaders and offers agent-focused perspectives on foreign policy-making.

External Factors and Foreign Policy

States are situated within an international system that may constrain the latitude of their behaviors. In a comparative sense, the global distribution of economic wealth and military power allows some powerful states to pursue their preferred options in foreign policy, but disadvantages others. For example, the People’s Republic of China may have greater opportunity to influence regional politics than does the Philippines or Vietnam. Realism has been a dominant framework of explanation in international relations scholarship for nearly a century, and scholars have argued that states’ foreign policies are solely a product of the international system—merely a reaction to external conditions and other actors. Realism operates on the assumption of anarchy—the absence of an overarching government in the international system—as one of the most important external conditions that affect foreign policies. In an anarchic world, states must look out for their own interests. The result, realists argue, is distrust, competition, and conflict among states (Wohlforth, 2008 ; Lobell, Ripsman, & Taliaferro, 2009 ). These are reflected in challenges such as the difficulty of constructing security communities in the Asia-Pacific region or negotiating an end to tensions in the Middle East (Acharya, 2001 ).

Although various approaches to realism can capture important aspects influencing state foreign policies—the primacy of security interests and the drive for power among all states—they do have some noted limitations. Neorealism, or “structural” realism, for example, has been critiqued for focusing on structures and anarchy, which are relatively constant, while at the same time trying to account for variations in individual states’ foreign policy behaviors (Barkin, 2009 ). Indeed, it is not entirely clear whether Neorealism is a theory of foreign policy at all: Offensive realists, such as Mearsheimer clearly claim to explain the power-seeking propensities of states ( 2001 ), while defensive realists like Waltz explicitly deny this represents a theory of foreign policy (Waltz, 1979 ). Neo-Classical Realism (cf. Rose, 1998 ) focuses on foreign policy and has continued to give primacy to power as the driver of states’ behaviors while introducing various factors inside the state into their explanations.

Economic power, and not just economic wealth to purchase military capability, can give a state influence in international politics through programs such as sanctions or promises of an economically rewarding relationship. Indeed, because of changes in the international system, economic power may be more significant in an era of increasing interdependence and globalization (Wivel, 2005 ). Liberalism focuses on the emergence of interdependence in the international system (Keohane & Nye, 1997 ) that persuades states to find cooperation, rather than conflict, more in line with their interests (Doyle, 1997 ). Economic liberalism argues that all states will be better off if they cooperate in a worldwide division of labor, with each state capitalizing on its comparative advantage in production.

Theories of liberalism cast a wide net for explanations of foreign policy. A centerpiece is their attention to the importance of international organizations to help coordinate cooperative efforts by states. What autonomy may be sacrificed in the short term, liberals believe, is offset by the long-term benefits of stability, efficiency, and greater wealth (Keohane, 1984 ; Martin & Simmons, 1998 ). International governmental organizations have especially strong potential influence in the modern system, seen in the capacities of organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization to shape different states’ foreign policies. Liberalism also recognizes the growing power of non-state actors in a complex, interdependent system, and these actors increasingly influence the foreign policies of states. The rise of multinational corporations and their influence in a globalized system has changed international political dynamics. Globalization may connect more economies in worldwide financial and trading markets, but it has not done so evenly. Dynamics of regional economic integration illustrate contemporary opportunities and challenges in globalization. Both rich and poor states are engaging in agreements and dialogues to establish greater interdependence at the regional level. The European Union (EU) is the most successful effort, particularly with the establishment in 1999 of a common currency. There have been other recent attempts at regional integration in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America in response, in part, to globalization. Thus, regional integration provides another layer of external factors that may affect states’ foreign policies. Interestingly, however, EU states have persistently struggled to coordinate their non-economic foreign policies.

Constructivism offers valuable contributions to CFP and international relations. From a constructivist perspective, the international system is composed of the social interactions of states and shared understandings of them in international society (Kaarbo, 2015 ). For constructivism, anarchy and interests are not defined structural constraints; rather they are constituted of the actions of agents, such as states, and the meanings, or ideas, that agents attach to them (Onuf & Klink, 1989 ; Wendt, 1999 ). Norms of appropriate behavior, for example, become international structures that constrain states’ foreign policies (Kratochwil, 1989 ). Whether or not states should intervene for humanitarian reasons, trade slaves, or develop nuclear weapons are all examples of norms that have changed over time. States may contribute to the development of norms, such as actions by the Austrian government to promote a humanitarian norm related to banning nuclear weapons or the role of Canada in fostering international negotiations on banning land mines. Constructivists also argue that states often avoid violating norms, even if it is in their interest to do so, and when they do violate standards of appropriate behavior, other actors may sanction them or shame them, even if they lack traditional notions of power or if condemnation is not in line with their material interests (Keck & Sikkink, 1998 ). Although states do not always comply with international laws, the system does seem to carry some kind of moral, normative authority that states support (Lantis, 2016 ; Hurd, 2007 ; Ku & Diehl, 1998 ). In these ways, ideational, and not just material conditions, do shape foreign policies.

Neo-Marxist dependency theory offers an alternative set of explanations for foreign policy in comparative perspective (Wallerstein, 1974 ). For example, some studies of African foreign economic relations highlight the importance of their post-colonial drives for development and their relations with international organizations including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Callaghy, 2009 ). These relationships sometimes complicate questions of independence, however, as developing countries see domestic and even foreign policy decisions impacted by their need for strong relations with benefactors. Other studies highlight the dependent asymmetry of many ties between developing countries and international organizations (Shaw & Okolo, 1994 ; Nzomo & Nweke, 1982 ), which can translate through voting patterns in the United Nations or other initiatives (Moon, 1983 ; Holloway & Tomlinson, 1995 ). Related studies have examined dependency and foreign policy implications in Asia (Weinstein, 2006 ) sub-Saharan Africa (Ahiakpor, 1985 ), and Latin America and the Caribbean (Ferris & Lincoln, 1981 ; Mora & Hey, 2004 ; Braveboy-Wagner, 2008 ). And in recent work, Giacalone ( 2015 ) adapts a dependency lens to analyze Latin American foreign policies as hybrid extensions of realism (what she terms “peripheral neo-realism”) and idealist approaches (“peripheral neo-idealism”).

In summary, scholars have proposed a range of external factors that may impact states’ foreign policies. Realism proposes that states motivated by self-interests will seek military power and create alliances, and that weak states will often submit to more powerful actors. Liberalism suggests that an interdependent international system will result in more cooperative foreign policies, support for organizations that help coordinate activities, and submission of economically weak states to the forces of the international marketplace. Constructivist perspectives point to socially created meanings that develop into international norms which in turn guide actors’ behaviors. Proponents of each of these perspectives agree that foreign policies are a result of states’ rank, status, and links to other actors in the international system.

Internal Factors and Foreign Policy

CFP scholars have developed a substantial literature focused on internal sources of foreign policy. These works highlight the CFP focus on agents within domestic political contexts and examine the great diversity of political systems, cultures, and leaders that may result in different foreign policy decisions by states, even in the face of similar external pressures. These often challenge the parsimony of realism or the international institutional focus of liberalism to introduce greater complexity associated with the actors, factors, and conditions that may drive state behavior more directly. These works also showcase connections to comparative politics research on domestic political systems, by showing how these factors may alter states’ international behavior.

Government institutions represent a first set of domestic actors and conditions that can impact foreign policy decision making. The prevailing scholarship in CFP focuses on democratic systems where decision making authority is somewhat diffuse, while other work attends to authoritarian systems. The foreign policy process can be quite different for democracies—decision making authority tends to be diffused across democratic institutions, and thus more actors are involved. While leaders in authoritarian systems may prefer to make decisions by themselves, they too can face domestic constraints (Weeks, 2012 ) and may have to deal with divided institutional authority (Hagan, 1994 ). Democratic leaders, however, are directly accountable to political parties and the public and thus must often build a consensus for foreign policy.

Liberal theory argues that because of these differences in government organization, democracies will behave more peacefully than will authoritarian systems (Bausch, 2015 ; Maoz & Russett, 1993 ; Jakobsen, Jakobsen, & Ekevold, 2016 ). The difficulty of building a consensus among a larger set of actors and mobilizing them for conflict constrains the war-making abilities of democratic leaders. Furthermore, democratic institutions are built on and create a political culture that is likely to emphasize the value of peaceful resolution. However, despite these expectations, the proposition that democracies are generally more peaceful in their foreign policy is not supported by most evidence. Democracies and authoritarian governments, it seems, are both likely to be involved in and initiate conflict. Democracies, however, rarely fight other democracies (Rosenau, 1966 ). Other scholars (Calleros-Alarcón, 2009 ; Zakaria, 2003 ) focus on links between degrees of democracy and conflict, arguing that illiberal systems tend not to formulate foreign policies that promote global peace.

Second, bureaucratic structures and processes also affect foreign policy. State bureaucracies are charged with gathering information, developing proposals, offering advice, implementing policy, and, at times, making foreign policy decisions. Because of the complexities involved in dealing with the many issues of international politics, governments organize themselves bureaucratically, assigning responsibility for different areas or jurisdictions of policy to separate agencies or departments. Scholars have shown that this has serious implications for foreign policy (Kaarbo, 1998a , 1998b ; Allison, 1974 ; Hollis & Smith, 1986 ; Marsh, 2014 ). Bureaucratic conflict is a common problem, for example, in the process of making foreign policy in the United States and Japan. The conflict in viewpoints may create inconsistent foreign policy if departments are acting on their own, rather than in coordination. It may also result in compromises that are not necessarily in the best interests of the state (Ball, 1974 ). While many studies have focused on applications in a few select countries, scholars have begun to explore applicability of bureaucratic politics to other cases of foreign policy decision making in countries such as China (Qingmin, 2016 ), Argentina and Chile (Gertner, 2016 ), and Sweden and Finland (’t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 1997 ).

Societal groups represent a third important set of actors that can impact foreign policy decision-making. Studies show that leaders may be more likely to pay attention to and react to the opinions of specific, organized societal groups than to the society at large, as they play the role of linking society to the state or of opposing and competing with the state. Interest groups articulate a particular societal sector’s position and mobilize that sector to pressure and persuade the government (Beyers, Eising, & Maloney, 2008 ; Kirk, 2008 ; Haney & Vanderbush, 1999 ). These groups are varied and may be based on a single issue, on ethnic identification, on religious affiliation, or on economics. Economic groups often have an interest in foreign relations as they seek to promote their foreign business adventures abroad or to protect markets from competitors at home (Krasner, 1978 ). For example, China’s foreign policy engagement in Africa has been heavily influenced by economic and business interests (Sun, 2014 ), and similar dynamics are at work in Australian commitments to India (Wesley & DeSilva-Ranasinghe, 2011 ). Watanabe ( 1984 ) argues policy-makers and interest groups may establish mutually supportive relationships to help achieve policy goals. He describes these “symbiotic relationships” as involving exchanges of influence and political advocacy for valuable resources such as information, votes, and campaign contributions. In this context, Congress becomes both a “target and ally” ( 1984 , p. 61). Ultimately, the impact of an interest group on foreign policy may depend on the particular issue, how organized the group is, its resources, and the relationship between the interest group and the government (Glastris et al., 1997 ; Haney & Vanderbush, 2005 ).

Political parties, although often part of the government, also play the role of linking societal opinion to political leadership (Hagan, 1993 ). In many ways, political parties function much like interest groups. In some countries, such as Iran, only one party exists or dominates the political system, and the party’s ideology can be important in setting the boundaries for debate over foreign policy decisions and in providing rhetoric for leaders’ speeches. In such cases, parties become less important than factions, which often develop within political parties. Factions are also important in political systems in which one party holds a majority in parliament and rules alone. In these countries too, factions may disagree over the direction of the country’s foreign policy, as have the pro- versus anti-European integration factions in the British Conservative Party (Benedetto & Hix, 2007 ; Rathbun, 2013 ). Party factions may seek to outmaneuver each other or they may be forced to compromise for the sake of party unity. Even if there is a consensus within the party, foreign policy might get captured by the intraparty fighting as factions compete with one another for party leadership. In some countries with multiparty systems, such as India, Germany, and Israel, the political scene is so fragmented that parties must enter into coalitions and share the power to make policy. In such cases, each foreign policy decision can be a struggle between coalition partners, who must get along to keep the coalition together (Ozkececi-Taner, 2006 ; Kaarbo & Beasley, 2008 ).

Public opinion and attitudes represent a fourth dimension of domestic factors that can impact foreign policy development. In democratic systems public opinion may, for example, be for or against their state intervening militarily in another country or signing a particular trade agreement. The public may agree on an issue or may be deeply divided. Scholars continue to debate the impact of public opinion on foreign policy, even in highly democratized states in which policy supposedly reflects “the will of the people.” Some argue that leaders drive public opinion through framing messages in line with their preferences or that they ignore the public altogether (Entman, 2004 ; Shapiro & Jacobs, 2000 ; Foyle, 2004 ; Chan & Safran, 2006 ). But this is challenged by other works asserting that public attitudes can and do impact foreign policy decision making at different stages (Jentleson, 1992 ; Knecht & Weatherford, 2006 ). Research argues that how leaders perceive and respond to public opinion can matter in select circumstances, and that public attitudes can be catalyzed by highly salient issues (Nacos, Shapiro, & Isernia, 2000 ). The media also play a role in this relationship as it too may influence public opinion on foreign policy. The information that the media provides the public may also be biased in favor of the government’s policies (Entman, 2004 ; Holsti, 1992 ).

Finally, core values and national identities are also connected to a society’s political culture—the values, norms, and traditions that are widely shared by its people and are relatively enduring over time. These enduring cultural features may also set parameters for foreign policy (Johnston, 1995 ; Katzenstein, 1996 ; Berger, 1998 ). A country’s culture may value, for example, individualism, collectivism, pragmatism, or moralism, and these culturally based values may affect foreign policy. Cultures that place a premium on morality over practicality, for example, may be more likely to pass moral judgment over the internal affairs and foreign policy behaviors of others. Culture may also affect the way foreign policy is made. Cultures in which consensual decision making is the norm, for example, may take longer to make policy, because the process of consultation with many people may be just as important as the final decision (Sampson, 1987 ). However, despite the general recognition that cultural particularities do affect foreign policy, such concepts can be difficult to operationalize and measure (whether quantitatively or qualitatively), and this has limited some assessments of culture and foreign policy (Lantis, 2015 ).

Individual Leaders and Foreign Policy

Leaders sit “at the top” of government. In many political systems, the head of state or head of government has substantial authority to allocate state resources and make foreign policy. CFP provides fertile ground for the development of substantial comparative work on leadership in foreign policy, in part because the potential influence of key individuals in power represents an important commonality across different political systems and regions (Kamrava, 2011 ; Korany, Hillal Dessouki, & Aḥmad, 2001 ). For example, fascinating studies have been developed on the role of leadership in the foreign policy of Arab states (Hinnebusch & Ehteshami, 2014 ), former President Dilma Rousseff’s influence on Brazilian foreign policy (De Jesus, 2014 ), and the impact of individual leaders on nuclear weapons programs in France, Australia, Argentina, and India (Hymans, 2006 ).

Studies show that individual characteristics of leaders matter in influencing foreign policy decisions (Hermann, 1980 ; Levy, 2003 ). Characteristics of leaders seem to be more important when the situation is ambiguous, uncertain, and complex, and when the leader is involved in the actual decision making rather than delegating his or her authority to advisers (Gallagher & Allen, 2014 ; Greenstein, 1975 ). Under such conditions a leader’s personality and beliefs may be especially influential in foreign policy, but determining whether or not leaders have influenced foreign policy can be challenging (Jervis, 2013 ).

CFP analysts also have explored the roots of individual leaders’ decisions in their personal history. Childhood or early political experiences, for example, may have taught policy-makers how certain values and ways of handling problems are important. Leaders’ cognitions and belief systems also influence foreign policy (Rosati, 2000 ). Human beings tend to prefer consistency in ordering the world around them and thus often ignore or distort information that contradicts what they already believe (Beasley, 2016 ). Studies show this is especially likely when we have strongly held “images” of other countries. Leaders who see another country as their enemy, for example, will often selectively attend to or perceive information about that country in a way that confirms their original belief. For this reason, images are extremely resistant to change, even if the “enemy” is making cooperative gestures (Holsti, 1976 ; Jervis, 1976 ; Vertzberger, 1990 ).

Political psychologists have made important contributions to understanding foreign policy decision making. Here, scholars argue that leaders can be categorized into types of personalities. Some leaders, for example, may be motivated by a need to dominate others and may thus be more conflictual in foreign policy, whereas others may be more concerned with being accepted and may therefore be more cooperative. Some leaders are more nationalistic, more distrustful, and believe that the world is a place of conflict that can only be solved through the use of force, whereas others see themselves and their state as part of the world community that can be trusted and believe that problems are best solved multilaterally (Dyson, 2006 ; Schafer & Walker, 2006 ; Hermann, 1980 ). Leaders’ decision making style or how they manage information and the people around them can also be important. Some leaders may choose to be quite active in foreign policy-making, whereas others champion isolationism. Some leaders are “crusaders” who come to office committed to a foreign policy goal; others are interested in keeping power or bridging conflicts. They tend to be sensitive to advice and are reluctant to make decisions without consultation and consensus (Goemans & Chiozza, 2011 ; Hermann, 1993 ; Kaarbo, 1997 ).

Methodologies

Given the breadth of issues that concern those who study foreign policy, it is perhaps not surprising that CFP researchers employ a wide variety of methods in their efforts to investigate factors influencing the behavior of states. This pluralism, however, is tempered by a somewhat more narrow epistemological commitment by most CFP work to developing generalizable explanations of foreign policy. In this sense, much CFP work stands in contrast to epistemological approaches emphasizing subjective “understanding” (Hollis & Smith, 1986 ) or any of a variety of other approaches that eschew explanation and generalizability as research goals (Tickner, 1997 ; White, 1999 ; Houghton, 2007 ). But consistent with its early focus on the interpretations of decision makers, a number of approaches take seriously the subjective experiences of individuals as they seek to understand the world.

CFP has deep roots in comparative politics and draws from the methods employed in that subfield. Lijphart’s ( 1971 ) seminal work closely examined the comparative method and the logic of comparative analysis with a small number of cases (“small-n” studies), contrasting it with experiments, statistical analysis, and single case studies. Subsequently, small-n analysis has been refined, and more sophisticated approaches to case selection and comparative case study design have emerged (Kaarbo & Beasley, 1999 ). In particular, “process tracing” has been put forward as an important contribution to case study methods (Beach & Pedersen, 2013 ; George & Bennett, 2005 ) as a technique for exploring the underlying causal mechanisms involved (Falleti & Lynch, 2009 ). The case study method is particularly attractive to CFP researchers who are interested in specific decisions, or who may be motivated to improve actual policymaking processes.

In contrast to comparative case study approaches, many CFP scholars have employed broad statistical comparisons using established data sets, such as the Correlates of War (Singer, 1961 ) data set and the Militarized Interstate Disputes (Ghosn, Palmer, & Bremer, 2004 ) data set. The development of large events-based data sets for the study of foreign policy—such as the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB; Azar, 1980 ) and the Comparative Research on the Events of Nations (CREON; Hermann, East, Hermann, Salmore, & Salmore, 1973 ) data set—were driven by the desire to bridge traditional and more quantitative approaches (Schrodt, 1995 ). Indeed, events data offer a more nuanced and wide-ranging set of dependent variables than the more conflict-oriented data sets that focus more on conflict and war (Oktay & Beasley, 2016 ). Moving toward more event-based data sets, McClelland ( 1978 ), for example, created the World Event Interaction Survey (WEIS), data set which coded the discreet behaviors of countries around the world. Scholars such as Goldstein ( 1992 ) translated these categories into levels of conflict or cooperation, offering opportunities for more nuanced examinations beyond war and militarized disputes. This trend has continued, offering new sources for the statistical study of foreign policy (Gerner & Schrodt, 1994 ; Merritt, 1994 ).

Scholars of CFP who seek explanations that lie with individuals and small groups of decision makers can have difficulty accessing relevant data, often relying on archival analysis of decision making and detailed historical case studies. Content analysis and “at-a-distance” techniques, however, have offered ways to study decision makers and infer individual-level characteristics. These studies rely primarily on analyzing speeches and writings, often using computer software, and large data sets have been constructed that include measures of world leaders’ beliefs and personality traits (Young & Schafer, 1998 ). Such data collection techniques are not without problems, but they have allowed scholars to link individual-level characteristics with foreign policy decisions, giving greater access to subjective qualities of actors and their impact on foreign policy outcomes. Finally, concern with the micro-processes of individual and group decision making has led scholars to employ laboratory experiments as a way of testing specific psychological dynamics in a controlled environment (Geva, Mayhar, & Skorick, 2000 ; McDermott, 2011 ).

Foreign Policy Theories in Action

This section briefly explores pathways that link theory and practice in foreign policy development. This work underlines the important contributions of the subfield to date and offers examples of avenues for future advancement of the subfield.

Social Psychology and Minority Influence in Foreign Policy

Among the many fertile areas for further research on foreign policy in comparative perspective is the study of the relationship between factionalism and foreign policy. Factions can be defined as “any intra-party combination, clique, or grouping whose members share common identity or purpose, and are organized to act collectively—as a distinct bloc within a party—to achieve their goals” (Zariski, 1960 , p. 33). In studies of factionalism in Britain, Canada, Italy, and Japan, Francoise Boucek observes, “Political parties are not monolithic structures but collective entities in which competition, divided opinions and dissent create internal pressure” ( 2009 , p. 455; 2012 ). Additional studies in comparative politics examine typologies of intra-party groups with different attributes, including organization, function, and role, and they discuss projected impacts on political outcomes (Boucek, 2009 , p. 456; Belloni & Beller, 1978 ). Other work identifies links between factionalism, party government, and cabinet durability in parliamentary regimes (Köllner & Basedau, 2005 ).

Emerging studies recognizing factions as agents of change open exciting new avenues for foreign policy analysis in comparative perspective (Koger, Masket, & Noel, 2010 ; Barrett & Eshbaugh-Soha, 2007 ). For example, Peake ( 2002 ) studies links between intraparty factionalism and U.S. foreign policy outcomes. He explores conditions that contribute to foreign policy challenges, as well as factors that might lead to greater opportunity for presidential coalition-building and advancement of their foreign policy agendas (Peake, 2002 ; Peake, Krutz, & Hughes, 2012 ). Gvosdev and Marsh ( 2013 ) also examine how different interests and factions have influenced Russian foreign policy in the Putin-Medvedev eras.

Contemporary research in social psychology also offers promising insights on how intraparty factionalism, or majority-minority differences, may influence the political process. For much of the 20th century , the traditional “conformity thesis” held that dissident voices in groups tend to yield to the majority position even when it is incorrect (Allen, 1965 ; Sherif, 1935 ; Maass & Clark, 1984 ; Milgram, 1963 ). However, Moscovici and others (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969 ; Moscovici & Faucheux, 1972 ) successfully challenge traditional assumptions by showing how group members may exhibit deviance or nonconformity by attempting to persuade others to endorse alternative decisions. Minority views must be consistent in presentation and support for policy change. Over time, numerous studies (Maass & Clark, 1984 ) have reinforced the central premise of minority influence theory: consistent behavior by minorities will exert influence, whereas inconsistent behavior is likely to fail to bring about any change of the majority’s attitudes and perceptions (Tanford & Penrod, 1984 ). Related studies find minority influence to be most effective if alternative voices have enough time to present their position (Wachtler, 1977 ), argue in a firm but flexible manner (Mugny, 1975 ), and share the same social category as the majority (Maass, Clark, & Haberkorn, 1982 ). Hagan, Everts, Fukui, and Stempel ( 2001 ) also have argued that the interactions between minority and majority positions, or between government and opposition, can produce alternative outcomes including deadlock, compromise, and more serious policy inconsistencies. Kaarbo ( 2008 , p. 57) asserts, “The psychological processes involved in group polarization, persuasion, and other influence strategies” play critical roles in shaping outcomes.

Social psychological studies of factionalism offer potential for further comparative analysis of foreign policies. These themes are ripe for application to the study of phenomena such as centrifugal forces in the European Union (with the 2016 “Brexit” referendum and dynamic tensions over issues such as debt relief and Syria policy), efforts to consolidate democracy in post-war Iraq, or how the factionalism in major political parties in the United States during the 2016 presidential election threatened major foreign policy changes. This frame provides a conceptual bridge between individual and domestic levels of analysis and offers a rich avenue for future research on foreign policy in comparative perspective.

Role Theory and Foreign Policy

Role theory has burgeoned recently as an approach to comparative foreign policy analysis. In contrast to the work on party factionalism, role theory focuses more centrally on the interplay between the international system and the way in which states situate themselves within that system through their foreign policies. Role theory originates from a sociological perspective that views roles as social positions within groups, which provide cues for behavior. Roles themselves are socially constructed through the interactions of individuals within a given social system, and they provide more or less clear guidelines that direct behaviors and set expectations. CFP scholars adapt role theory to the international system by viewing it as a society of states, each of whom can take on specific roles. In this way role theorists manage to bridge material and ideational factors, domestic and international dimensions, and agents and structures (e.g., Barnett, 1993 ; Harnisch, 2011 ; Breuning, 2011 ).

Holsti ( 1970 ) is credited with bringing role theory to the study of foreign policy. His work was situated in the Cold War period, and he drew attention to the ways in which classes of states were conceived of within the international system according to the roles that they played, such as “regional leader” or “faithful ally.” He explicitly connected the domestic context to the national role conception of any given state but recognized the importance of other actors and international institutions as shaping role conceptions as well. Subsequently, role theorists have unpacked various dimensions associated with roles within the international system and sought to understand the processes through which roles are developed, enacted, resisted, contested, and changed (cf. Cantir & Kaarbo, 2016 ; Harnisch, 2012 ; McCourt, 2012 ; Walker, 1987 ).

While there are many concepts associated with role theory generally, some have been more frequently applied by foreign policy scholars (Thies, 2010 ). For example, scholars often label actors pursuing a role as “Ego,” and others within the international system who respond as “Alter(s).” Roles are social categories involving a role conception by Ego about what the role it is pursuing involves, as well as role expectations by Alter(s) about appropriate and inappropriate role behaviors. Role enactment is the foreign policy behavior of Ego, and attempts to change Ego’s role involve alter-casting Ego into a different role by providing cues or sanctions. This interplay between Ego and Alter(s) is the process of role socialization, which usually involves a dominant or primary socializer. A state needs to have both the material resources and social status to effectively assume a role within the international system, that is, its master status must be consistent with the role it is taking (Thies, 2013 ).

Role theory illustrates several key dimensions associated with CFP research. Role theory research is interested in the interaction of both domestic and international factors, as states and their leaders seek to enact roles consistent with their domestic context and expectations, while international actors may sanction role-inappropriate behavior and alter-cast states into different roles. Role theory also embraces subjectivism, as roles must be understood and socially constructed through interactive processes between social agents who are interpreting cues, demands, and expectations. Role theory is also sensitive to contexts, as different international systems allow for different roles, and states seek to enact particular roles in the face of situational demands and the specific cues and expectations of key players. Roles have also been studied at different levels of analysis, ranging from the beliefs of leaders (cf. Holsti, 1970 ) to national culture, to multi-level analyses (Walker, 1979 ), and this variety has been noted as both a strength of and challenge for role theory.

A number of contemporary role theory studies have examined European actors, such as the Czech Republic, Germany, and the EU (Beneš & Harnisch, 2015 ), Denmark and the Netherlands (Kaarbo & Cantir, 2013 ), and European foreign policy more generally (Aggestam, 2006 ). Other applications have examined role theory in non-European regional contexts such as the Middle East (Barnett, 1993 ; Ovah, 2013 ), former Soviet republics (Chafetz, Abramson, & Grillot, 1996 ), and Latin America (Wehner, 2015 ). Individual country studies such as those on Indian foreign policy (Hansel & Möller, 2015 ), British foreign policy (McCourt, 2011 ), Chinese foreign policy (Harnisch, Bersick, & Gottwald, 2016 ) and Moldovan foreign policy (Cantir & Kennedy, 2015 ) have also illustrated the value of role theory in helping to account for state behavior.

Role theory offers several avenues for future research. A key issue involves the degree to which both material and ideational factors can be integrated within role theory accounts of states’ behaviors. This could potentially bridge foreign policy approaches with broader international relations theories. Some recent work (Beasley & Kaarbo, 2017 ) has sought to explore the nature of sovereignty within the international system as it conditions the types of roles available to states and the way states socialize one another into or out of particular roles. The relationship between sovereignty and roles, however, is not entirely clear and would benefit from examinations that consider regional differences in sovereignty. Regional transformations of sovereignty associated with the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, for example, would undoubtedly benefit from an examination of the changing roles of key actors. Similarly, recent work on China’s role in the international system (Harnisch, Bersick, & Gottwald, 2016 ) could be extended to consider the different ways in which sovereignty and roles are transformed with the changing security dynamics in the East Asian region. Such efforts might serve to better connect the comparative foreign policy approach to role theory with broader theories of international relations.

This article has explored a number of key questions and themes that have motivated CFP research over time. It has examined some of the major theoretical frameworks and variables that have driven research, as well as offered samples of the types of work that link factors to foreign policy outcomes in comparative perspective. The article also illustrates characteristics of the development of the CFP subfield over time, including its relative “youth,” interdisciplinarity, and scholarly commitment to cohesion. Most CFP scholarship devotes attention to agency within the broader international system and domestic political contexts, and it embraces a wide variety of specific research methods, spanning both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The subfield also draws in critical observations from related disciplines regarding subjective understandings of the foreign policy context. Along with a commitment to cohesion and cumulation of knowledge (especially of middle-range theory), these qualities have enabled advancements in scholarship in a relatively short period of time. Finally, this article outlines important avenues for future progress in CFP analysis. The subfield is well positioned to continue to support rich and diverse studies—with great relevance for understanding and making policy in the 21st century .

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2: How to Study Comparative Politics - Using Comparative Methods

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• Dino Bozonelos, Julia Wendt, & Masahiro Omae
• Victor Valley College, Berkeley City College, Allan Hancock College, San Diego City College, Cuyamaca College, Houston Community College, and Long Beach City College via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)
• 2.1: The Scientific Method and Comparative Politics
• 2.2: Four Approaches to Research
• 2.3: Case Selection (Or, How to Use Cases in Your Comparative Analysis)
• 2.4: References
• 2.5: Student Resources

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6 Chapter 8: Comparative Politics

Comparative politics centers its inquiry into politics around a method, not a particular object of study. This makes it unique since all the other subfields are orientated around a subject or focus of study. The comparative method is one of four main methodological approaches in the sciences (the others being statistical method, experimental method, and case study method). The method involves analyzing the relationship between variables that are different or similar to one another. Comparative politics commonly uses this comparative method on two or more countries and evaluating a specific variable across these countries, such as a political structure, institution, behavior, or policy. For example, you may be interested in what form of representative democracy best brings about consensus in government. You may compare majoritarian and proportional representation systems, such as the United States and Sweden, and evaluate the degree to which consensus develops in these governments. Conversely, you may take two proportional systems, such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, and evaluate whether there is any difference in consensus-building among similar forms of representative government. Although comparative politics often makes comparisons across countries, it can also conduct comparative analysis within one country, looking at different governments or political phenomena through time.

The comparative method is important to political science because the other main scientific methodologies are more difficult to employ. Experiments are very difficult to conduct in political science—there simply is not the level of recurrence and exactitude in politics as there is in the natural world. The statistical method is used more often in political science but requires mathematical manipulation of quantitative data over a large number of cases. The higher the number of cases (the letter N is used to denote number of cases), the stronger your inferences from the data. For a smaller number of cases, like countries, of which there is a limited number, the comparative method may be superior to statistical methodology. In short, the comparative method is useful to the study of politics in smaller cases that require comparative analysis between variables.

Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD)

This strategy is predicated on comparing very similar cases which differ in their dependent variable. In other words, two systems or processes are producing very different outcomes—why? The assumption here is that comparing similar cases that bring about different outcomes will make it easier for the researcher to control factors that are not the causal agent and isolate the independent variable that explains the presence or absence of the dependent variable. A benefit of this strategy is that it keeps confusing or irrelevant variables out of the mix by identifying two similar cases at the outset. Two similar cases implied a number of control variables—elements that make the cases similar—and very few elements that are dissimilar. Among those dissimilar elements is likely your independent variable that produced the presence/absence of your dependent variable. A downside to this approach is that when comparing across countries, it can be difficult to find similar cases due to a limited number of them. There can be a more strict or loose application of the MSSD model—similarities may be fairly exact or roughly the same, depending on the characteristic involved, and will influence your research project accordingly.

Example 8.1

Suppose you want to study how well forms of representative government develop consensus and agreement over policy matters. You may observe that nearly identical representative systems of government exist in County A and Country B, but are producing very different results.

• Country A has a proportional representation system and has a long and successful track record of producing consensus among lawmakers over a number of policy issues.
• Country B, however, is riddled with partisan disagreement and a lack of consensus over a similar kind and number of policy issues.

In this instance, you may also observe a number of similarities that act as control variables in your research—both countries have a bicameral legislature, a similar number of representatives per capita. This is a research project well suited to the MSSD approach, as it allows multiple control points (proportional representation, bicameral legislature, number of representatives, etc.) and allows for the researcher to focus on fine grain points of difference among the cases. You may observe in this example one intriguing difference in demographics—County A’s population is smaller and largely homogenous, whereas Country B’s population is larger and more diverse. It may be that in Country B this diverse population is well represented in the legislature but leads to more policy disputes and a relative lack of consensus when compared to Country A.

Most Different Systems Design (MDSD)

This strategy is predicated on comparing very different cases that are all have the same dependent variable. This strategy allows the research to identify a point of similarity between otherwise different cases and thus identify the independent variable that is causing the outcome. In other words, the cases we observe may have very different variables between them yet we can identify the same outcome happening—why do we have different systems producing the same outcome? The task is to then sift through the variables existing between the cases and isolate those that are in fact similar, since a similar variable between the cases may in fact be the causal agent that is producing the same outcome. An advantage to the MDSD approach is that it doesn’t have as many variables that need to be analyzed as the MSSD approach does—a researcher only needs to identify the same variable that exists across all different cases. The MSSD approach, on the other hand, tends to have a lot more variables that have to be considered although it may provide a more precise link between the independent and dependent variables.

Example 8.2

Let’s use an example that will help illustrate the MDSD approach. Suppose you observe two very different forms of representative government producing the same outcome: Country A has a majoritarian, winner-take-all representational system and Country B has a proportional representation system, yet in both countries there is a high degree of efficiency and consensus in the legislative process.

Why do two systems have the same outcome?

You may list a number of variables and compare them across the two cases, sifting through to locate similar variables. Unlike the MSSD approach, which seeks to locate different variables across similar cases, the MDSD approach is the opposite—the task is to locate similar variables across different cases. You may observe that despite the fact that these two countries have very different systems of representation, both have unicameral legislatures and a low number of representatives per capita. These factors may produce higher levels of efficiency and consensus in the legislative process, thus explaining the same dependent variable despite different cases.

The Nation-State

Much of comparative politics focuses on comparisons across countries, so it is necessary to examine the basic unit of comparative politics research—the nation-state.

A nation is a group of people bound together by a similar culture, language, and common descent, whereas a state is a political sovereign entity with geographic boundaries and a system of government. A nation-state, in an ideal sense, is when the boundaries of a national community are the same as the boundaries of a political entity. In this sense, we may say that a nation-state is a country in which the majority of its citizens share the same culture and reflect this shared identity in a sovereign political entity located somewhere in the world. Nation-states are therefore countries with a predominant ethnic group that articulates a culturally and politically shared identity. As should be apparent, this definition has some gray areas—culture is fluid and changes over time; migration patterns can change the make up of a nation-state and thus influence cultural and political changes; minority populations may substantially contribute to the characteristics that make up a shared national identity, and so on.

Nations may include a diaspora or population of people that live outside the nation-state. Some nations do not have states. The Kurdish nation is an example of a distinct ethnic group that lacks a state—the Kurds live in a region that straddles the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Some other examples of nations without states include the numerous indigenous nations of the Americas, the Catalan and Basque nations in Spain, the Palestinian people in the Middle East, the Tibetan and Uyghur people in China, the Yoruba people of West Africa, and the Assamese people in India. Some previously stateless nations have since attained statehood—the former Yugoslav republics, East Timor, and South Sudan are somewhat recent examples. Not all stateless nations seek their own state, but many if not most have some kind of movement for greater autonomy if not independence. Some autonomous of breakaway regions are nations that have by force exercised autonomy from another country that claims that region. There are many such regions in the former Soviet Union: Abkhazia and South Ossetia (breakaway regions from Georgia), Transdniestria (breakaway region from Moldovia), Nagorno-Karabagh (breakaway region from Azerbaijan), and the recent self-declared autonomous provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Ukraine. Most of these movements for autonomy are actively supported by Russia in an effort to control their sphere of influence. Abkhazians, South Ossetians, Trandniestrians, and residents of Luhansk and Donetsk can apply for Russian passports.

Lastly, some countries are not nation-states either because they do not possess a predominate ethnic majority or have structured a political system of more devolved power for semi-autonomous or autonomous regions. Belgium, for example, is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system with three highly autonomous regions: Flanders, Wallonia, and the Brussels capital region. The European Union is an interesting case of a supra-national political union of 28 states with a standardized system of laws and an internal single economic market. An outgrowth of economic agreements among Western European countries in the 1950s, the EU is today one of the largest single markets in the world and accounts for roughly a quarter of the global economic output. In addition to a parliament, the EU government, located in Brussels, Belgium, has a commission to execute laws, a courts system, and two councils, one for national ministers of the member states and the other for heads of state or government of the member states. The EU’s complicated political system allows for varying and overlapping levels of legal and political authority. Some member states have anti-EU movements in their countries that broadly share a concern over a loss of political and cultural autonomy in their country. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU, known as “Brexit,” has been a complex and controversial process.

As this brief overview suggests, the concept of a nation-state is central to global politics. Crucial questions on what constitutes a nation-state underpin many of the most significant political conflicts in the world. Autonomous movements that seek greater sovereignty for a particular nation are found in every region of the world. At the heart of the relationship between nations and states is the idea of self-determination—that distinct cultural groups should be able to define their own political and economic destiny. Self-determination as a conception of justice suggests that freedom is not just individual but also communal—the freedom of defined groups to autonomy and self-direction.

Self-determination as a conception of justice suggests that freedom is not just individual but also communal—the freedom of defined groups to autonomy and self-direction.

The push and pull of power that brings nations together or tears them apart is everywhere in global politics. Moreover, states may appear stronger than they actually are, as the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union suggests. The legitimacy of the state and the cohesiveness of a nation go a long way toward understanding stability in the global world.

Comparing Constitutional Structures and Institutions

In Chapter Four we provided an overview of constitutions as a blueprints for political systems and in Chapter Three’s focus on political institutions we discussed legislative, executive, and judicial units and powers such as unicameral or bicameral legislatures, presidential systems, judicial review, and so on. The relationship between similar and different institutional forms make up the nuts and bolts of comparative political inquiry. In comparing constitutions across countries, each constitution speaks to the unique characteristics of a political community but there are also similarities. Constitutions typically outline the nature of political leadership, structure a form of political representation, provide for some form of executive authority, define a legal system for adjudicating law, and authorize and limit the reach of government power. On the other hand, there are several unique factors that determine a constitution an government. Geography, for example, often has a profound impact on the constitutional structure and form of government.

Large countries with scattered populations, for example, must be more sensitive to the legitimacy of the state in regions far removed from the center of government power. Some governments have moved their seat of power to more centralized and less populous cities in response to this concern—Abuja, Nigeria, Canberra, Australia, Dodoma, Tanzania, Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, Brasilia, Brazil and Washington DC in the United States are examples of capital cities founded as a more central location in order to better balance power among competing regions.

Another factor is social stratification—differentiation in society based on wealth and status. What is typically regarded as lower, middle, and upper classes in most developed societies, social stratification can be complex, overlapping, and influenced by a variety of group characteristics such as race or ethnicity and gender. Social stratification can lead to political stratification—differing levels of access, representation, influence, and control of political power in government. This derived power can in turn reinforce social stratification in various ways. For example, the wealthy and privileged of a country may have derived political power from their wealth and in turn shape and influence government in such a way as to protect and increase their wealth, influence, and privilege. With the comparative method of political inquiry, political scientists can study the degrees to which social stratification effects political processes across countries. This kind of comparative inquiry can yield important insights such as whether wealth derived from group characteristics leads to greater political stratification than wealth derived across more diverse groups, or whether reforms directed at lessening political stratification have any effect on social stratification.

Lastly, global stratification suggests when looking at the global system, there is an unequal distribution of capital and resources such that countries with less powerful economies are dependent on countries with more powerful economies. Three broad classes define this global stratification: core countries, semi-peripheral countries, and peripheral countries. Core countries are highly industrialized and both control and benefit from the global economic market. Their relationship to peripheral countries is typically predicated on resource extraction—core countries may trade or may seek to outright control natural resources in the peripheral countries. Take as an example two open pit uranium mines located near Arlit in the African country of Niger. Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, was a former colony of France. These mines were developed by French corporations, with substantial backing from the French government, in the early 1970s. French corporations continue to own, process, and transport uranium from the Arlit mines. The vast majority of the uranium needed for French nuclear power reactors and the French nuclear weapons program comes from Arlit. The mines have completely transformed Niger in a number of ways. 90% of the value of Niger’s exports come from uranium extraction and processing, leading to what some economists call a “resource curse”—a situation in which an economy is dominated by a single natural resource, hampering the diversification of the economy, industrialization, and the development of a highly skilled workforce.

Semi-periphery countries have intermediate levels of industrialization and development with a particular focus on manufacturing and service industries. Core countries rely on semi-peripheral countries to provide low cost services, making the economies of core and semi-peripheral countries well integrated with one another, but also creating an economic situation in which semi-peripheral countries become increasingly dependent on consumption in core countries and the global economy generally, sometimes at the expense of more economic self-sufficient and sustainable development. As an example, let’s consider Malaysia, a newly industrialized Asian country of over 40 million people. Malaysia has had a GDP growth rate of over 5% for 50 years. Previously a resource extraction economy, Malaysia went through rapid industrialization and is currently a major manufacturing economy, and is one of the world’s largest exporters of semi-conductors, IT and communication equipment, and electrical devices. It is also the home country of the Karex corporation, the world’s biggest producer of condoms.

Included among core countries are the United States and Canada, Western Europe and the Nordic countries, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Semi-peripheral countries include China, India, Russia, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa. Periphery countries include most of Africa, the Middle East, Central America, Eastern Europe, and several Asian countries. Reflect on the relationship between core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries. Do you think this relationship is predicated more on exploitation and control or mutually beneficial economic partnerships in a global environment? Choose three countries—one core, one semi-peripheral, and one peripheral—that have political and economic ties to one another. Evaluate and analyze relations between these countries. What are the prominent economic interactions? What best characterizes the diplomacy and political relations between these countries? Are the forms of government similar or different?

The Value of Languages and Comprehensive Knowledge

Comparative politics arguably requires more comprehensive knowledge of countries, political systems, cultures, and languages than the other sub-disciplines in political science. Language skill, in particular, is often essential for the comparativist to conduct good research. Having some facility with languages spoken in the countries or regions central to the research project gives researcher access to information and opens up avenues of communication and knowledge that is needed for in-depth understanding.  

In conducting field research, knowledge of local languages is critically important. Conducting interviews and doing observations in the field require familiarity with common languages spoken in the area. Grants are available from the US State Department and academic institutions for graduate students (and in some cases promising undergraduates) for language programs. The best environment for learning a foreign language is immersive—ideally, students should spend time in areas they have research interests in to gain familiarity with the language(s) and cultural practices. For example, if one wanted to conduct a comparative research project on political development in Kosovo and Abkhazia—two breakaway autonomous republics of similar size and population that are key sites of the geopolitical struggle between the West and Russia—it would be necessary to have some familiarity with Albanian (the dominant language of Kosovo) and Abkhaz, but it may also be helpful to have some exposure to Serbian, Russian, and Georgian as well.

Comparativists should ideally have broad but deep knowledge of the world—understanding regional issues, environmental resources, demographics, and relations between countries provides a pool of general knowledge that can help comparativists avoid obstacles while conducting their research. For example, if one were conducting a study on the relationship between women’s access to contraceptives and the percent of women in the workforce with a data set of some 150 countries, it is useful to know that in the non-Magreb countries of Africa women make up a disproportionately large percentage of agricultural labor. Despite low access to contraceptives, sub-Saharan African countries have relatively high percentages of women in the work force due to the cross-cultural norm of women farmers.

Field Research in Comparative Politics

A crucial component of doing comparative politics is field research—the collection of data or information in the relevant areas of your research focus. Where political theory is akin to the discipline of philosophy, comparative politics is akin to anthropology in this field research component. Comparativists are encouraged to “leave the office” and bring their research out into the relevant areas in the world. Being on the ground affords the researcher a firsthand perspective and access to the sources that underpin good comparative analysis. Conducting surveys with local respondents, doing interviews with key actors in and out of government, and making participant observations are some common methods of gathering evidence for the field researcher. To continue with the above example of Kosovo and Abkhazia, suppose a researcher was interested in comparing constitutional development and reform in the two republics. Interviews with key actors in developing those respective constitutions would provide a firsthand account of the process, while surveys conducted with local responses could measure the degree of support for key reforms. A researcher could also conduct participant observations of the legislative process, media events, or council meetings.

Being in the field always comes with surprises that may alter the research project in numerous ways. Poor infrastructure may hamper travel. Corruption may create obstacles in survey work or interviews. Locals may be unwilling to work with a foreign researcher whose intentions are in doubt. It is always important to balance your ideal research project with the practical realities you find on the ground. Deciding whether to take a short or long trip abroad is also an important consideration—shorter trips may bring more focus and efficiency to your work and also afford more opportunity to identify points of comparison and contrast, whereas longer trips can be more open-ended and immersive, giving the researcher the opportunity to develop contacts and and have a more in-depth cultural experience. Lastly, case selection and sampling are important considerations—macro-level case selection involves identifying a country to conduct field work; meso-level selection involves locating relevant regions or towns; micro-level selection involves identifying individuals to interview or specific documents for content analysis.

Comparative politics is more about a method of political inquiry than a subject matter in politics. The comparative method seeks insight through the evaluation and analysis of two or more cases. There are two main strategies in the comparative method: most similar systems design, in which the cases are similar but the outcome (or dependent variable) is different, and most different systems design, in which the cases are different but the outcome is the same. Both strategies can yield valuable comparative insights. A key unit of comparison is the nation-state, which gives a researcher relatively cohesive cultural and political entities as the basis of comparison. A nation-state is the overlap of a definable cultural identity (a nation) with a political system that reflects and affirms characteristics of that identity (a state).

In comparing constitutions and political institutions across countries, it is important to analyze the factors that shape unique constitutional and institutional designs. Geography and basic demographics play a role, but also social stratification, or difference among individuals in terms of wealth or prestige. Social stratification is often reflected, and subsequently reinforced, in political stratification (differentiation in political power, access, and representation). Lastly, global stratification suggests an imbalance of power in the global world, in which core countries are able to control or influence economic and political processes in semi-periphery and periphery countries.

In the next chapter, we will consider a very different set of sub-disciplines—American politics and public policy and administration.

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Comparative Politics: Method and Research

In the early 1950s, the nascent political science subfield of comparative politics wrestled with questions of method and whether to approach comparing nation-states via abstract concepts or a problem-oriented focus. To begin addressing these concerns, the SSRC convened an interuniversity research seminar in which political scientists began to create a framework for the field that ultimately led to the formation of the Committee on Comparative Politics. Roy Macridis , in this report, summarizes the seminar’s discussion, which included the relative merits of area studies approaches to more abstract theorizing. The conversation clearly tilted toward starting with conceptual schemes independent of context, and so exemplifies the impact of behavioralism that Michael Desch illustrates in his Items essay .

The study of comparative politics has been primarily concerned thus far with the formal institutions of foreign governments, particularly of Western Europe. In this sense it has been not only limited but also primarily descriptive and formalistic. Its place in the field of political science has been ill-defined. Is the student of comparative politics properly concerned primarily with description of the formal institutions of various polities, or with undertaking comparisons? If with the latter, what is the meaning of comparison? Is it confined to the description of differences in various institutional arrangements? If comparison is to be something more than description of formal institutional differences, what are its aims, scope, and methods? Should the student of comparative politics attempt to compare total configurations? If not, then he has to develop a precise notion of what can be isolated from the total configuration of a system or systems and compared.

The above questions illustrate the difficulties and the challenge confronting the student of comparative politics. The problem of comparative method revolves around the discovery of uniformities, and the examination of variables in the context of uniformities between various systems. But even so, what are the particular clusters of states that have a degree of uniformity that makes the comparison and understanding of variations possible? Does the concept of “area,” as used, provide us with such a hunting ground for the study of “difference,” against a background of “uniformity”? Is the concept of culture a more acceptable one? Or does the similarity of social and economic contextual elements provide a better opportunity to compare and understand variations? What degree of homogeneity is required for comparison, and are comparisons between systems not showing the desired degree of homogeneity impossible?

The members of the seminar agreed that it would be extremely ambitious to attempt to answer these methodological questions in detail and at the same time indulge in empirical investigation. It was thought that if we could do some spadework on the methodological issues, we would invite comments and suggestions from the members of the profession and increase awareness of the need for making one’s methodological position explicit prior to undertaking comparative empirical investigation.

Comparability and uniqueness

Questions of the purpose and nature of comparison arose repeatedly, and the members of the seminar devoted considerable time to discussing them. It was agreed that the general problem of comparison is extraordinarily difficult for political science since it is unlikely that we will ever find two or more societies that are identical in all respects except for a single, variable factor. Consequently, the possibility of comparing one variable or even a set of variables against identical conditions is illusory. The alternative would seem to be comparison—at different levels of abstraction and complexity—of wider or narrower segments of the political process.

The following tentative classification of levels of comparative analysis was suggested: (1) comparison of a single problem limited to political systems that are homogeneous in character and operation; (2) comparison of several elements or clusters of elements in relation to political systems that are fairly homogeneous; (3) comparison of institutions or segments of the political process irrespective of “homogeneity”; (4) comparison of political systems as such. These four levels of comparison require increasingly higher levels of abstraction. At the fourth level, some such approach as that of “ideal types” would seem to be called for.

In general, two points of view were expressed throughout the seminar discussions. The first saw the need of a conceptual scheme that not only precisely defines the categories under which data may be collected, but also indicates the criteria of relevance to be adopted and the variables that are to be related hypothetically for the purpose of comparative study. According to the other view, given the present state of comparative studies, comparability ought to be derived primarily from the formulation of problems with limited and manageable proportions. This disagreement should not obscure the area of agreement reached by the members of the seminar.

For example, it was agreed: (1) Comparison involves abstraction, and concrete situations or processes can never be compared as such. To compare means to select certain types of concepts, and in selection we have to “distort” the unique and the concrete. (2) Prior to any comparison it is necessary not only to establish categories and concepts, but also to determine criteria of relevance of the particular components of a social and political situation to the problem under analysis, e.g., relevance of social stratification to family system, or of sun spots to political instability. (3) It is necessary to establish criteria for the adequate representation of the particular components that enter into a general analysis of a problem. (4) The formulation of hypothetical relations and their investigation with empirical data can never lead to proof. A hypothesis or a series of hypothetical relations would be considered verified only as long as not falsified. (5) Hypothetical relations rather than single hypotheses should be formulated. The connecting link between general hypothetical series and particular social relations should be provided by specifying the conditions under which any or all the possibilities enumerated in the series are expected to take place. (6) Finally, one of the greatest dangers in hypothesizing is the projection of possible relationships ad infinitum . This can be avoided by the orderly collection of data prior to hypothesizing. Such collection may in itself lead us to recognize irrelevant relations (climate and the electoral system, language and industrial technology, etc.).

The members of the seminar, therefore, substantially rejected the arguments in favor of uniqueness, and argued that comparison between institutions not only is possible but may eventually provide, through a multiple approach, a general theory of politics and a general theory of political change. Before this development can be realized, the following research approaches should be emphasized and undertaken in as orderly a way as possible: (1) elaboration of a tentative and even rough classificatory scheme or schemes; (2) conceptualization at various levels of abstraction, preferably at the manageable level of the problem-oriented approach; (3) formulation of single hypotheses or hypothetical series that may be suggested by the formulation of either a classificatory scheme or sets of problems; (4) constant reference of hypotheses to empirical data for the purpose of falsification and the formulation of new hypotheses.

Approaches to the comparative study of political systems

Conceptual schemes . The seminar members believed that formulation of a conceptual scheme for the comparative study of politics would help provide a classificatory table and permit the elaboration of hypotheses. Comparison, it was agreed, must proceed from a definition of politics as a universally discoverable social activity. The function of politics is to provide society with social decisions having the force and status of legitimacy. A social decision has the “force of legitimacy” if the collective regularized power of the society is brought to bear against deviations, and if there is a predominant disposition among those subject to the decision to comply. As for the means of enforcing decisions, every society, generally speaking, has a determinate organization that enjoys a monopoly of legitimate authority (or political ultimacy). Moreover, the characteristic distinguishing between political relationships and other relationships is the existence of this framework of legitimacy. Conceptions of legitimacy or “legitimacy myths” are highly varied ways in which people justify coercion and conformity, as well as the ways by which a society rationalizes its ascription of political ultimacy, and the beliefs that account for a predisposition to compliance with social decisions.

But the legitimacy myth only defines the conditions of obedience. Within its framework there is the political process itself, through which numerous groups having political aspirations (policy-aspiration groups and power-aspiration groups) strive for recognition and elevation to the position of legitimacy. The factors that determine which power-aspiration group is to be invested with legitimacy, to the exclusion of all others, are the effective power factors in the system.

It was suggested, then, that the general modes of politics, for the purpose of analysis, would be as follows: Political processes are the struggle among power-aspiration and policy-aspiration groups competing for the status of legitimacy; the outcome is determined by the society’s structure of effective power, and the end state, legitimacy, is the political reflection of its general value system.

The major components of the political process, which should provide a fairly coherent classification scheme as well as the possibility of formulating hypothetical relations, are the following: the “elective” process of the system, its “formal” deliberative process, its “informal” deliberative process, its structure of “influence,” and its structure of “power.” The major tasks, envisioned under this scheme, in the analysis of political systems are: (1) to analyze the legitimacy myth of the society in terms of specific content and relationship to the society’s general myth structure; (2) to inquire into the system’s political aspirations, political processes, and effective power factors; (3) to analyze both the complexity and ultimacy of decision-making systems in the society, specifically the conditions under which political ultimacy is either diffused or concentrated, and the relationships between subsidiary and ultimate decision-making systems; (4) to provide for a theory of change through the study of “formal” and “informal” processes.

Alternative approaches . The general agreement on the usefulness of a conceptual scheme was coupled with an equally strong emphasis on the need for alternative approaches. It was thought that the present state of comparative politics calls for a “pluralistic” rather than a unitary approach, and that for each of the alternative approaches suggested, the same degree of methodological rigor should be followed as in the development of a conceptual scheme. The alternative approaches agreed upon were: the problem approach, the elaboration of a classificatory scheme or checklist to aid in more coherent and more systematic compilation of data, and the area approach.

The problem approach

The study of comparative politics cannot wait for the development of a comprehensive conceptual scheme. Instead of aiming toward universality it may be advisable to adopt a more modest approach. The members of the seminar agreed that the “problem approach” is a step in this direction. It was pointed out that the formulation of a problem in itself has some of the characteristics of a conceptual scheme. It directs research toward various aspects of the political process and at the same time calls for an ordering of empirical data and the formulation of hypotheses or series of hypothetical relations. Furthermore, this approach is flexible enough so that it can lead the research worker to examination of questions that have a varying degree of comprehensiveness in terms of both theory and empirical orientation and investigation.

Three types of problem approaches were suggested and discussed: (1) Narrow-range theory, which involves a relatively low degree of abstraction; i.e., it applies to homogeneous cultural contexts and deals with a limited number of variables. (2) Middle-range theory, which is conceived to include problems of fairly general importance, involving a relatively high degree of generalization, but remaining below the level of a truly general theory of politics. (3) Policy-oriented theory, which deals with the immediate practical solution of important problems and is consequently focused on problems originating in pressing conflict situations or in an overwhelming need for policy action.

Four criteria by which to select problems were suggested: the intrinsic interest of the problem to political scientists; its ability to eliminate certain key difficulties in the comparative method and the analytical utility of comparison; its capacity for advancing research beyond the current level of inquiry in the field; its probable and eventual significance for the formation of a general theory of comparative politics.

It was agreed that the formulation of the problem should be as clear and logically coherent as possible, and that it should be presented in the following form:

a. The problem must be stated precisely; it must be stated in such a form as to lead immediately to hypotheses; it must be analyzed into its component elements; its variables and the relations between them must be spelled out; and all this must be done in operationally meaningful terms. b. Its relations to a possible general theory of politics must be described. How would the problem fit into a more general theoretical orientation and what more general questions can its solution illuminate? c. The manner in which the problem calls for the use of comparative method must be demonstrated, and the level of abstraction that comparison would involve must be analyzed. d. Outline a recommended research technique for dealing with the problem and justify the recommendation. e. Enumerate possible alternative research techniques.

It was not considered the function of the seminar to state exhaustively narrow-range, middle-range, and policy-oriented problems, but a few typical ones were suggested for the purpose of illustration: An analysis of the relations between the power of dissolution and ministerial stability in parliamentary systems would fall in the realm of narrow-range theory. A study of the political consequences of rapid industrialization in underdeveloped areas of the world would be in the realm of middle-range theory. The following are policy-oriented problems: the development of constitutional government in colonial areas; how to deal with political instability in France; how to dissociate colonial nationalism from Soviet-inspired leadership and ideology; determination of policies of constitutional regimes toward totalitarian parties, e.g., the Communist Party.

A classificatory scheme

The seminar concluded that a checklist might facilitate assembling data in an orderly fashion under commonly formulated concepts. It decided to develop such a checklist for purposes of illustration. The following broad categories and subdivisions were specified:

(1) The setting of politics: an enumeration of the most significant contextual factors of all political systems, i.e., geographic patterning, economic structure, transportation and communication patterns, sociological structure and minorities, cultural patterns, values and value systems, and the record of social change.

(2) The sphere of politics: the actual and potential sphere of political decisions: conditions determining the sphere of decision making, limits on political decisions, major types of decision making, and potential changes in the sphere of decision making.

(3) Who makes decisions: Who are the “elite” supposed to be? To whom does the community impute prestige and what are the prevalent prestige images and symbols? Who actually makes the effective political decisions if they are not made by those who are supposed to make them?

(4) How decisions are made: formulation of problems, agencies and channels of decision making, some major characteristics of decision-making procedure.

(5) Why are decisions obeyed: the enforcement of decisions, compliance, consent, types of consent, ecology of compliance, measurement of compliance.

(6) Practical politics: types, purpose, organization, and techniques of policy-aspiration groups; types, goals, organization, techniques, and influence and effectiveness of power-aspiration groups.

(7) The performance of the system: stability, adjustment, and change, and their conditions, relationship between formal and informal processes, manifestations of instability and stability.

Area study and comparative politics

The third alternative approach to the study of comparative politics is the more systematic use of the area concept. However, neither geographic, historical, economic, nor cultural similarities constitute prima facie evidence of the existence of similar political characteristics. If the concept of an area is to be operationally meaningful for purposes of comparison, it should correspond to some uniform political patterns against which differences may be studied comparatively and explained.

The definition of an area on the basis of culture was considered to be worth detailed discussion. It was suggested that although primarily used by the anthropologists it might be adapted to the needs of political scientists.

To make the concept operationally more meaningful for political science, it was suggested that an attempt be made to define the area concept with reference to “political traits” or “trait complexes” or “problem configuration patterns,” in terms analogous to those used by anthropologists when they analyze the concept of culture in terms of “traits” or “trait complexes.” Such an approach to the definition of an area has not yet been undertaken despite its promise for comparative study. The very search for common political traits and patterns will call for classification and conceptualization. Once similar traits or patterns have been distinguished and have been related to geographically delimited units, the area concept will be of great value since certain political processes can be compared within the area against a common background of similar trait configuration. In this sense it was thought that future research should be directed toward developing in great detail classificatory schemes within areas.

International relations

The last topic considered was the relationship between comparative politics and international politics. It was pointed out that contemporary study of international politics has entered a new stage. Since the national interest is now a central concept of international politics, what tests or criteria are to be used in identifying the interests that shape the foreign policy of any state? Is the student of international politics to accept, at face value, the definition of national interests given by statesmen? Or does the examination of power factors, geography, historical development, etc. offer the student of international politics certain rough tests for defining the “objective” interests of the state?

Assuming that the concept of national interest provides a focal point for investigation, two approaches seem possible, either separately or in combination: (1) To determine analytically what the national interest “ought to be” under certain conditions. One could then compare this evaluation of the national interest with its “actual” definition as provided by the actions and pronouncements of the particular nation. (2) To describe, in terms of the following categories, the reasons why nations define their national interest in certain terms and not in others: survival prerequisites; objective physical conditions—geography, natural resources, tradition, past decisions, value systems, etc.; institutional channels through which the national interest is defined and set—i.e., interest programs and images and how they are defined in the political process; policy interplay between independent political units and their respective interests, including the pattern of reaction within each; the subjective pluralism of the society, by which the content of the interest images is set. The first four categories are in the nature of factors that set limits on the definition of the national interest. The last category defines the possibilities in substantive terms. On the basis of this scheme, it was suggested, there might be a useful “division of labor” or cooperation between students of international politics and of comparative politics. The second and fourth categories could best be handled by students of international politics, the others by specialists in comparative government.

More generally, however, a cooperative effort between students of international politics and comparative politics should be centered in the following areas of mutual interest: (1) The process of decision making has become a function in international politics through existing organizations. How does this decision-making take place? Is it accompanied by any broad legitimacy ideas or myths that transcend the national states? (2) The concept of national interest provides for meaningful concepts for the study of foreign policy. The concept will have to be broken down into component parts, some of which would be studied by students of comparative politics, while others remain within the domain of international politics. Given analogous conditions, generally speaking, the definition of national interest varies by individual states. Determination of what accounts for this variation seems to be the proper task of the specialist in comparative politics. (3) Study of the focal point at which the states meet—diplomacy and negotiations through which conflicts are resolved or common objectives realized—is a cooperative task that admits no arbitrary allocation of duties, for the action of each state depends upon domestic conditions, internal images, and traditional forces. Relations between states, on the other hand, have repercussions on domestic myths, images, authority symbols, and institutions. Domestic and international politics are in this sense complementary factors. (4) The student of international politics may also join with the student of comparative politics in attempting to define and study an area. Certain uniform outlooks and behavior patterns may be due to similar experiences shared by a number of states that can be geographically identified. The study of such uniformities and differences is primarily a joint task. (5) Finally, goals of foreign policy may be jointly studied. In the context of national interest, foreign policy is to be conceived as a dynamic interplay of the given or chosen goals, the organic elements that set limiting conditions on the selection of goals, and the selection of strategy or means for the achievement of the given or chosen goals.

This article is a summary of a longer report on the proceedings of the interuniversity summer research seminar on comparative politics held at Northwestern University during July and August 1952. Plans for the seminar were described briefly in the March 1952 issue of Items , p. 7. While the author is responsible for the statements appearing here, they summarize a collective product and at times reproduce lines of thought expressed originally by the participants both during the meetings and in their respective essays. Members of the seminar were: Samuel H. Beer and Harry Eckstein, Harvard University; George I. Blanksten and Roy C. Macridis, Northwestern University; Karl W. Deutsch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Kenneth W. Thompson, University of Chicago; and Robert E. Ward, University of Michigan. Richard Cox of the University of Chicago acted as rapporteur.

Roy C. Macridis (1918–1991) taught political science at Brandeis University since 1965. During the Second World War, Macridis served with the Office of Strategic Services and migrated to the United States in 1944. He was a member of the Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics from 1954 to 1958.

This essay originally appeared in Items Vol. 6, No. 4 in December of 1952. Visit our archives to view the original as it first appeared in the print editions of Items .

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Research Topics & Ideas: Politics

100+ Politics-Related Research Ideas To Fast-Track Your Project

Finding and choosing a strong research topic is the critical first step when it comes to crafting a high-quality dissertation or thesis. If you’ve landed on this post, chances are you’re looking for a politics-related research topic , but aren’t sure where to start. Here, we’ll explore a variety of politically-related research ideas across a range of disciplines, including political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, public administration and policy.

NB – This is just the start…

The topic ideation and evaluation process has multiple steps . In this post, we’ll kickstart the process by sharing some research topic ideas. This is the starting point, but to develop a well-defined research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , along with a well-justified plan of action to fill that gap.

If you’re new to the oftentimes perplexing world of research, or if this is your first time undertaking a formal academic research project, be sure to check out our free dissertation mini-course. Also, be sure to sign up for our free webinar that explores how to find a high-quality research topic from scratch.

Overview: Politics-Related Topics

• Political theory and philosophy
• Comparative politics
• International relations
• Public administration
• Public policy
• Examples of politics-related dissertations

Topics & Ideas: Political Theory

• An analysis of the impact of feminism on political theory and the concept of citizenship in Saudi Arabia in the context of Vision 2030
• A comparative study of the political philosophies of Marxism and liberalism and their influence on modern politics
• An examination of how the Covid-19 pandemic affected the relationship between individual freedom and collective responsibility in political philosophy
• A study of the impact of race and ethnicity on French political philosophy and the concept of justice
• An exploration of the role of religion in political theory and its impact on secular democracy in the Middle East
• A Review of Social contract theory, comparative analysis of the political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
• A study of the concept of the common good in political philosophy and its relevance to the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe
• An examination of the relationship between political power and the rule of law in developing African countries
• A study of the impact of postmodernism on political theory and the concept of truth, a case study of the US
• An exploration of the role of virtue in political philosophy and its impact on the assessment of moral character in political leaders

Topics & Ideas: Comparative Politics

• A comparative study of different models of federalism and their impact on democratic governance: A case Study of South American federalist states
• The impact of ethnic and religious diversity on political stability and democracy in developing countries, a review of literature from Africa
• An analysis of the role of civil society in promoting democratic change in autocratic regimes: A case study in Sweden
• A comparative examination of the impact of globalization on political institutions and processes in South America and Africa.
• A study of the factors that contribute to successful democratization in authoritarian regimes, a review of the role of Elite-driven democratization
• A comparison of the political and economic systems of China and India and their impact on social development
• The impact of corruption on political institutions and democracy in South East Asia, a critical review
• A comparative examination of the impact of majoritarian representation (winner-take-all) vs proportional representation on political representation and governance
• An exploration of Multi-party systems in democratic countries and their impact on minority representation and policy-making.
• A study of the factors that contribute to successful decentralization and regional autonomy, a case study of Spain

Topics & Ideas: International Relations

• A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of diplomacy and military force in resolving international conflicts in Central Africa.
• The impact of globalization on the sovereignty of nation-states and the changing nature of international politics, a review of the role of Multinational Corporations
• An examination of the role of international aid organizations in promoting peace, security, and development in the Middle East.
• A study of the impact of economic interdependence on the likelihood of conflict in international relations: A critical review of weaponized interdependence
• A comparative analysis of the foreign policies of the EU and the US and their impact on international stability in Africa
• An exploration of the relationship between international human rights and national sovereignty during the Covid 19 pandemic
• A study of the role of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)s in international politics and their impact on state behaviour
• A comparative analysis of the effectiveness of international regimes in addressing global challenges such as climate change, arms control, and terrorism in Brazil
• An examination of the impact of the rise of BRICS on the international system and global governance
• A study of the role of ideology in shaping the foreign policies of states and the dynamics of international relations in the US

Tops & Ideas: Public Administration

• An analysis of the impact of digital technology on public administration and the delivery of public services in Estonia
• A review of models of public-private partnerships and their impact on the delivery of public services in Ghana
• An examination of the role of civil society organizations in monitoring and accountability of public administration in Papua New Guinea
• A study of the impact of environmentalism as a political ideology on public administration and policy implementation in Germany
• An exploration of the relationship between public administration and citizen engagement in the policy-making process, an exploration of gender identity concerns in schools
• A comparative analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of public administration, decentralisation and pay and employment reform in developing countries
• A study of the role of collaborative leadership in public administration and its impact on organizational performance
• A systematic review of the challenges and opportunities related to diversity and inclusion in police services
• A study of the impact of corrupt public administration on economic development and regional growth in Eastern Europe
• An exploration of the relationship between public administration and civil rights and liberties, including issues related to privacy and surveillance, a case study in South Korea

Topics & Ideas: Public Policy

• An analysis of the impacts of public policy on income inequality and poverty reduction in South Sudan
• A comparative study of the effectiveness of legal and regulatory, economic and financial, and social and cultural instruments for addressing climate change in South Korea
• An examination of the role of interest groups in shaping public policy and the policy-making process regarding land-use claims
• A study of the impact of globalization on the development of public policies and programs for mitigating climate change in Singapore
• An exploration of the relationship between public policy and social justice in tertiary education in the UAE
• A comparative analysis of the impact of health policies for the management of diabetes on access to healthcare and health outcomes in developing countries
• Exploring the role of evidence-based policymaking in the design and implementation of public policies for the management of invasive invertebrates in Australia
• An examination of the challenges and opportunities of implementing educational dietary public policies in developing multicultural countries
• A study of the impact of public policies on urbanization and urban development in rural Indonesia
• An exploration of the role of media and public opinion in shaping public policy and the policy-making process in the transport industry of Malaysia

Examples: Politics Dissertations & Theses

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a politics-related research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses to see how this all comes together.

Below, we’ve included a selection of research projects from various politics-related degree programs to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• We, the Righteous Few: Immoral Actions of Fellow Partisans are Judged as Less Possible (Varnam, 2020)
• Civilizing the State: Civil Society and the Politics of Primary Public Health Care Provision in Urban Brazil (Gibson, 2012)
• Political regimes and minority language policies: evidence from Taiwan and southeast Asia (Wu, 2021)
• The Feminist Third Wave: Social Reproduction, Feminism as Class Struggle, and Contemporary Women’s Movements (Angulo, 2019)
• The Politics of Immigration under Authoritarianism (Joo, 2019)
• The politics of digital platforms: Sour Dictionary, activist subjectivities, and contemporary cultures of resistance (Okten, 2019)
• Vote choice and support for diverse candidates on the Boston City Council At-Large (Dolcimascolo, 2022)
• The city agenda: local governance and national influence in the policy agenda, 1900-2020 (Shannon, 2022)
• Turf wars: who supported measures to criminalize homelessness in Austin, Texas? (Bompiedi, 2021)
• Do BITs Cause Opposition Between Investor Rights and Environmental Protection? (Xiong, 2022)
• Revealed corruption and electoral accountability in Brazil: How politicians anticipate voting behavior (Diaz, 2021)
• Intersectional Solidarity: The Political Consequences of a Consciousness of Race, Gender and Sexuality (Crowder, 2020)
• The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Coalitional Representation of Latinxs in the U.S. House of Representatives (Munoz, 2019)

Looking at these titles, you can probably pick up that the research topics here are quite specific and narrowly-focused , compared to the generic ones presented earlier. In other words, to create a top-notch research topic, you must be precise and target a specific context with specific variables of interest . In other words, you need to identify a clear, well-justified research gap.

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If you’re still feeling a bit unsure about how to find a research topic for your dissertation or research project, check out our Topic Kickstarter service below.

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Interesting thesis.

I really appreciate your work which will greatly help me rethink on my topic

Please how can I get the full thesis?

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