Comparative Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The field of comparative politics addresses a large number of questions. A small fraction of these include: Why are some countries democracies and others dictatorships? Why do some governments tax and spend more than others? How do electoral institutions shape the outputs of government? Why does ethnic conflict happen in some places but not others, and why is ethnic identity salient in some places but not others? Why do some political parties make programmatic pitches to the electorate, while others rely on clientelistic relations with voters? Why is there so much variation across countries and regions in the extent to which religion plays a role in politics? Why are women better represented in elected office in some countries than others? Why are governments corrupt in some cities but not others?

While fascinating, neither these particular questions nor the countless others of importance in the discipline today are the essence of comparative politics. The precise questions that motivate comparative political scientists vary tremendously in response to events of the day, the desire to impact public policy, and intellectual fads. Instead, it is the approach to understanding and explaining causal relationships in the social, political, and economic worlds that defines comparative politics. Two aspects of the approach distinguish the practice of comparative politics from other academic disciplines: first, the use of social scientific methods to assess causal relationships, and second, what it is that comparativists compare. On one hand, the emphasis on causal relationships distinguishes comparative politics from conventional history, journalism, and some portions of other social sciences that aim primarily to describe particular countries, communities, people, or events. On the other hand, using the comparison of countries, regions, communities, and such as a means to understand causal relationships in the political world distinguishes comparative politics from the hard sciences and some social sciences.

Comparative Politics, Social Science, And Causal Inference

Comparative politics is thus a branch of political science that attempts to draw descriptive and causal inferences about the political world on the basis of evidence from more than one setting. A descriptive inference uses evidence on one case or set of cases (e.g., countries or ethnic groups) to learn about other cases not directly observed. Therefore, a comparativist might study Iraq and Afghanistan, both religiously and ethnically heterogeneous societies, in order to learn something descriptive about other societies that resemble them—how ethnic groups are likely to get along, the difficulties of developing state capacity in divided societies, and the like. Causal inference, on the other hand, involves using information about a set of cases to make claims about causal relationships in the political world. Thus, analysis on Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps a host of other cases may be a means to test a causal proposition about the conditions under which foreign intervention by a great power produces civil war. Causal inference is the holy grail of comparative politics.

Drawing causal inferences requires two things: first, a theory about what causes what in politics, and second, a method for testing the theory. Simply stated, a theory involves a causal argument from which one can draw testable hypotheses. A test of a theory involves examining the evidence relevant to the hypotheses generated by the theory. If the evidence supports the hypotheses, there is evidence in support of the theory; if it does not, there is evidence contrary to the theory. These features of comparative politics are consistent with the method of scientific inquiry applied in the hard sciences, such as physics, and in other social sciences, such as economics. It is the application of these social scientific principles to comparisons in the political world that defines comparative politics.

Research in comparative politics begins with theory just as it does in other social sciences and the hard sciences. Historically, there was a stark divide between comparativists who valued deductive theorizing—or beginning with very abstract theoretical principles, deriving empirical implications, and then seeing how the real world matched theoretical expectations—and comparativists who emphasized the worth of working inductively—or beginning with observations of the world and trying to work backward to develop theoretical explanations for what is observed. Over the last decade, this debate has subsided as many researchers in comparative politics have come to recognize the value of both deductive and inductive approaches to theory development. Most now acknowledge that a sharp distinction between the two is oftentimes difficult to sustain.

Alternative Theoretical Approaches To Comparative Politics

If most researchers in comparative politics value both deductive and inductive approaches to theory development, the actual content of the theories tends to be the subject of more contention. Though the discipline has seen theoretical schools of thought come and go, four are particularly prominent today. Rational choice theories, which draw strongly from economics, begin with the assumption that individuals, for example, voters or politicians, are utility maximizers. Such theories then define what it is that the relevant actor seeks to maximize and examines how this actor behaves under different constraints. Such theories have been particularly useful for providing insight into the behavior of political actors when they operate under a set of stable institutional rules, be they electoral, economic, or otherwise. One prominent example is Douglas North’s 1990 text, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance.

Cultural theories, on the other hand, seek to explain how community-level norms develop and shape political outcomes, such as the prospects for democracy or development. While in rational choice theories of politics the individual is always the building block of causal accounts, cultural theories place local, regional, or national communities at center stage. A particularly noteworthy example of such work is Robert Putnam’s 1993 study of social capital in Italy, which emphasizes the importance of rich social networks for explaining variation in the robustness of democracy across Italy’s regions.

Third, class-based theories of politics, long rooted in Marxist thought, suggest that the key actors in societies are classes, where classes are composed of individuals who share a similar place in the process of production. Such theories assume that class relations are inherently conflictual, as in Gösta Esping Anderson’s influential account in 1990 of the rise of the welfare state in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Class-based theories of politics have recently been reborn, illustrated by researchers such as Carles Boix, who in 2003 aimed to link the behavior of classes to the underlying interests of their individual members.

Fourth, there has recently been an explosion of interest in constructivist theories of politics. Such theories, rather than assuming the preferences of actors, are interested in explaining the ways in which the preferences of actors are constructed by their social environment. In some cases, such theories build on work in psychology and behavioral economics, both of which emphasize the diverse ways in which people understand and pursue their interests. Constructivist theories are particularly prevalent in the booming literature on comparative ethnic politics, which, like Hale’s work in 2008, is interested in explaining why individuals define themselves as members of groups with some ascriptive characteristics but not others, and how group membership affects political behavior. As Jan Elster notes, these different theoretical traditions can be compatible in some instances, but comparativists typically think of them as competing schools of thought.

Methodological Approaches To Comparative Politics

If considerable theoretical diversity characterizes comparative politics, practitioners also employ a diverse array of methods to test the hypotheses that emerge from theory. Establishing a causal inference requires that identifying the precise causal mechanisms through which one variable affects another. As James Fearon explains, testing such causal mechanisms is, in essence, an exercise in comparing one or several counterfactuals. Suppose, for instance, one is interested in testing the causal claim that authoritarianism contributes to economic growth in China. Testing such a claim requires considering whether China would have grown as quickly in recent decades if it were a democracy. Since China was not a democracy, this is a counterfactual, and comparativists must figure out means of entertaining such a counterfactual. As a practical matter, practitioners of comparative politics live in a world of counterfactuals.

The most venerable approach to counterfactuals and empirical testing in comparative politics involves the use of qualitative, or small-n, methods whereby a single or small set of countries (or whatever the unit of comparison might be) are analyzed in detail with an eye toward testing the implications of a theory. Such tests, particularly in the context of a single case study, are based on the notion of a crucial case—one that either has all of the characteristics that theory says should produce an outcome or, contrarily, one that has none of the characteristics that theory posits ought to produce an outcome. To return to the Chinese example, this might imply a study of a country (e.g., post–World War II Russia) that has all of the characteristics of authoritarianism that seem to contribute to growth in China to see if those features also contributed to economic growth in that country. Recent work in historical institutionalism, for example, by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer in 2003, contributes to the use of such methods; this work emphasizes the value of close attention to the precise historical processes that connect causes with outcomes.

A more tenuous approach to using small-n cases to test hypotheses in comparative politics relies on the notion that one can “control” for important alternative causes by carefully selecting cases. A control variable is one that might cause the outcome of interest but that is not the subject of theorizing. Small-n research designs can try to control for alternative explanations by carefully selecting cases that are very similar with regard to alternative explanations. With such an approach, the carefully selected case or cases are meant to serve as counterfactuals to each other. Controlling for alternative causes, however, is exceedingly difficult with a small number of cases. It is very hard to know, for instance, if Sweden developed a large welfare state because it had a powerful labor movement opposed to some other feature of Sweden, if the research design only includes Sweden and, for instance, the United Kingdom. With such a research design, the number of potential causes exceeds the number of countries under analysis.

A more promising approach to the challenge of controlling for alternative causal factors is the statistical analysis of data on a large number of observations. In this large-n approach, the unit of analysis can vary from individuals (e.g., the use of survey data) to states within countries to countries themselves, and the comparative political scientist gathers data not just on the variable of theoretical interest, but also for other factors that might impact the outcome of interest. When properly conducted, such large-n studies have the advantage of providing more robust tests of the correlations between the causes and outcomes of interest, exactly because it is possible to come closer to controlling for alternative explanatory factors.

Large-n studies have two costs, however. First, data shortcomings often limit the extent to which comparativists can examine the precise causal mechanisms of interest. Second, using large-n studies to make causal inferences requires strong assumptions. Some of the more important assumptions include that the sample available for analysis is representative of the population as a whole, that the observations are independent of each other, and that causal effects are the same across the units (i.e., individuals, countries, etc.) under analysis. There are reasons to believe that these assumptions are sometimes violated, that for instance, the cost of political participation varies according to the resources a person has (e.g., it is harder to vote if one has a boss who will not allow time off or if one does not have a car to drive to the polling place), and that a financial crisis in the United States has implications for financial markets and politics in other countries (i.e., these countries are not independent of each other). As Adam Przeworski notes, there are ways to correct these problems, but the corrections can themselves be problematic, and oftentimes researchers simply do not know if the assumptions underpinning statistical analysis are violated or not.

To address the concerns associated with reliance on either large-n or small-n research designs, many researchers employ both. While statistical analysis is oftentimes used to establish the plausibility of a correlation among variables, qualitative analysis is used to examine whether the causal processes at work are actually those the theory has proposed. Methodological concerns with the traditional approaches to research in comparative politics have also fueled the growth of experimental work. Researchers conduct such experiments in labs or in the “field,” or setting in which they are interested.

One excellent example of such work is James Habyarimana and colleagues’ 2007 study of ethnic identity and public goods provision. In an attempt to uncover why ethnically heterogeneous societies seem to provide fewer public goods, the authors conducted a series of experimental games in Kampala, Uganda, that provide evidence that while members of ethnic groups cooperate thanks to dense social networks, the absence of such networks between groups reduces such cooperation. In the absence of cooperation, public goods suffer.

Such experimental studies offer comparativists a new means of analyzing the individual-level dynamics of decision making, but they too suffer shortcomings. Most importantly, it is difficult to know if experimental settings sufficiently approximate the real world to reveal much about how politics actually work.

The Substantive Focus Of Comparative Politics

Many of these scientific methods are also used in other hard and social sciences, but it is what researchers aim to draw causal inferences about, and the settings for their comparisons, that distinguish comparative politics from the hard sciences and other social sciences. The settings for comparisons in comparative politics are almost as varied as the field’s research questions. Comparisons range from individuals to neighborhoods, to cities to states or provinces within countries, to countries themselves to regions of the world.

Any case can even be compared with itself through time. Something general can be studied and learned, for instance, about each of the iterations of the U.S. Congress. The 110th Congress is different from the 109th Congress, which is different from the 108th, and so on. Because the overarching institutions of Congress are stable but the rules governing committee decisions and citizen preferences change through time, the Congresses can be compared with each other through time, and each Congress becomes the unit of comparison. If the goal of such an investigation is simply to describe how Congress evolved through time, practitioners of comparative politics would not be interested. Such a study only becomes comparative politics when the goal is to make inferences about the functioning of legislatures around the world. Thus, if the U.S. Congress is totally unique, it is not in the least bit useful for comparative politics—it cannot provide a means for generalizing about legislatures elsewhere. If, on the other hand, the U.S. Congress shares key characteristics with other legislative bodies around the world and can, therefore, provide evidence generalizable to those cases, its study has important implications for comparative politics.

Even with these diverse types of comparisons and the wide array of methodologies, comparative political scientists have a great deal of difficulty being confident in the inferences drawn from the countries, regions, cities, and other places that are compared. This results primarily from the fact that researchers are left to analyze the world as it is. Experiments cannot be conducted to see what would happen to the level of democracy in a society, if a researcher were to change its underlying social structure in the same way that a scientist can conduct experiments to measure, for instance, the precise temperature at which water boils. As such, comparative political scientists can never be sure that the causes inferred from their conduct of comparison are the result of the theoretical mechanisms they have proposed, or something idiosyncratic to the particular countries, citizens, or whatever can be observed. Indeed, so many theories in comparative politics underscore both the complexity of the political world they study and the difficulty of falsifying their theories.

Comparative politics has nevertheless produced some important findings in recent decades. A couple of noteworthy examples include findings that: majoritarian electoral systems link with the prevalence of two-partyism, political participation increases with a citizen’s resources, democracy is associated with wealthy societies, revolutions are more likely when societies are poorer and governments are weaker, strong ethnic and religious identities are associated with smaller governments and stronger distributive conflicts, and that parties of the left are associated with more fiscal redistribution in the OECD. At the same time, there is not a lot of agreement on the causal factors underpinning some of these findings. It is not certain, for instance, whether societal wealth causes democracy by increasing the size of the middle class, as discussed in Carles Boix’s Democracy and Redistribution (2003), or alternatively, if democracies emerge for random reasons but simply are more likely to survive at higher levels of income, as Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi discuss in their article “Modernization: Theory and Facts” (1997). This disagreement has produced a renaissance in the study of democratization, and it is common that new findings spur new debates and produce new research frontiers in comparative politics.

Currently, there are a number of major research frontiers. There is an ongoing attempt to assess the causal impact of political institutions on outcomes ranging from electoral competition to economic growth at the same time that researchers recognize that institutions themselves are the outcomes of political struggles. A related, emerging body of work focuses on the political underpinnings of authoritarianism and asks why some authoritarian regimes build robust institutions, such as political parties like the Communist Party of China, while others systematically destroy institutions. This research ultimately aims to explain the varying stability and longevity of authoritarian regimes. Quite different is an ongoing attempt to understand the underlying processes that drive group-based identification, be they religious, ethnic, or regional, and the political implications of group-based identities. Societies with heterogeneous group identities seem to be associated with preferences for less redistribution and smaller government, for instance, but it is not yet understood why this is the case. A similar concern drives a reborn interest in examining the link between citizen interests and collective action, and between collective action and government action via the political process. This angle is particularly robust in recent attempts to understand when and why political parties have programmatic, opposed to clientelistic, links to citizens and the implications of these different kinds of links for how politicians behave and the prospects for democratic accountability.

Finally, there is an emerging interest in political geography. Geography seems to shape processes as diverse as economic development, ethnic conflict, distributive conflicts, the design of constitutions, the mobilizational incentives of political parties, the dynamics of social protest, and the preferences of voters. The territorial distribution of political preferences and key political institutions, such as electoral systems, also seem to strongly condition the impact of geography. Untangling these complex relations will require the best of comparative politics—precise theorizing, many different types of empirical evidence, and a rich array of methodological approaches.

Clearly, comparison is fundamental to any scientific attempt to uncover causal relationships. Without carefully designed comparisons between, for instance, smokers and nonsmokers, one cannot know if smoking tobacco causes cancer. Contemporary comparative politics is the social scientific design of comparisons aiming to uncover causal relationships in the political world. To the extent other areas of political science, such as international relations or American politics, are interested in making causal claims, they too engage in comparisons. In international relations, great powers might be compared with each other or the systemic characteristics of the international system are compared through time. In American politics, the U.S. political system is compared with itself through time in a quest for general insights into the factors that cause policy in democracies. In the absence of such comparisons, these other areas of political science cease to be social scientific, and contemporary political science, therefore, really is comparative politics.

Bibliography:

Boix, Carles. Democracy and Redistribution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Elster, Jan. Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Esping-Andersen, Gösta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Fearon, James. “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science.” World Politics 43 (1991): 169–195.
Habyarimana, James, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein. “Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” American Political Science Review 101 (2007): 709–725.
Hale, Henry. The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
King, Gary, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba. Designing Social Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
North, Douglas. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Przeworski, Adam. “Is the Science of Comparative Politics Possible?” In Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, edited by Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, 147–171. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Przeworski, Adam, and Fernando Limongi. “Modernization: Theory and Facts.” World Politics 49 (1997): 155–183.
Putnam, Robert. Making Democracy Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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