- Comparative politics compares the pursuit of power across countries by examining domestic politics within nations. It looks at factors like elections, political parties, and revolutions. - Scholars use inductive and deductive reasoning to draw conclusions by comparing multiple countries, but face challenges like difficulty controlling variables, interactions between variables, and limits on available information. - Selecting the right cases to study can also be challenging due to biases in what regions or outcomes researchers focus on. Distinguishing causes from effects is another issue faced in comparative politics analysis.

1. WHAT IS
COMPARATIVE
POLITICS?

2. • During the past 25 years, the world has seen an astonishing number of
changes:
- The rise of new economic powers in Asia
- Collapse of communism
- Revolutions across the middle east
- Return of religion to politics
- The spread of information technology and social media

3. • Traditional assumptions and beliefs have been overturned
• New centers of wealth may reduce poverty but also lead to domestic inequality
• Democracy considered as an inexorable force can also founder on obstacles
such as religious and economic conflicts
• Technological change may be a source of cooperation, but it can destabilize and
fragment communities

4. • For instance, why do the civil war in Syria and Iraq occur?
• Is it a response to inequality or political disenfranchisement?
• Is it a function of cultural differences, “ a clash of civilizations”?
• Is it fostered by globalization?
• The explanation lies somewhere else entirely, beyond our understanding

5. • How do we know what is correct? How do we scrutinize a range of explanations
and evaluate their merits?
• Competing assumptions and explanations are at the heart of political debates
and policy decisions, yet we are often asked to choose in the absence of reliable
evidence or a good understanding of cause and effect.

6. WHAT IS COMPARATIVE POLITICS?
• Politics is the struggle in any group for power that will give one or more persons
the ability to make decisions for the larger group.
• Political scientists concentrate on the struggle for leadership and power in a
political community, a political party, an elected office, a city, a region, or a
country.

7. • It is hard to dissociate the idea of politics with the idea of power, which is the
ability to influence others or impose one’s will on them.
• Politics is the competition for public power, and power is the ability to extend
one’s will.
• In Political science, comparative politics is a subfield that compares this
pursuit of power across countries.

8. • The method of comparing countries can help us make arguments about cause and effect
by drawing evidence from across space and time.
• E.g: one important puzzle we will return to frequently is:
- why some countries are democratic, while others are not.
- Why have politics in some countries resulted in power being dispersed among people,
while in others power is concentrated in the hands of a few?
- Why is South Korea democratic, why North Korea is not?

9. COMPARATIVE POLITICS VS INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
• Comparative politics: study and comparison of domestic politics across
countries
• Looks at the politics inside countries (elections, political parties, revolutions and
judicial system)
• International relations: concentrates on relation between countries, such as
foreign policy, war, trade, and foreign aid
• The two overlap in many places such as:
• ethnic or religious conflicts, which often spills over borders,
• Political change, shaped by international organizations or military force.

10. THE
COMPARATI
VE METHOD
• A way to compare cases a draw conclusions. By
comparing countries scholars seek out
conclusions and generalizations that could be
valid in other cases
• A mean by which social scientists make
comparisons across cases.
• By comparing countries and subsets within,
scholars seek out conclusions and generalizations
that could be valid in other cases.

11. INDUCTIVE REASONING
The means by which
we go from studying
a case to generating
a hypothetis
Closely examining a
case in order to
form hypothetis
about the case

12. • E.G : We can ask ourselves why democracy has failed to develop in some
countries? We might look at north Korea as an example. Why has the north
Korean government remained communist and highly repressive even as similar
regimes around the world have collapsed? A convincing answer could tell
scholars and policy makers a great deal and even guide countries tense
relations with North Korea in the future.

13. • By studying N.K we could conclude that the use of nationalism by those in
power has been central to the persistence of nondemocratic rule.
• After concluding we might then suggest that future studies look at the
relationship between nationalism and authoritarianism in other countries.
• Inductive reasoning can be a foundation on which we build greater theories in
comparative politics

14. DEDUCTIVE REASONING
• Starts with a puzzle and from there generate some hypothesis about cause and
effect to test against a number of cases.
• Inductive reasoning starts with the evidence as a way to uncover a hypothesis
while deductive reasoning starts with the hypothesis and then seeks out
evidence.
• E.g: In example on inductive studies we started with a case study of N.K and
ended with some testable generalization about nationalism; in deductive
reasoning we would start with our hypothesis about nationalism and then test
that hypothesis by looking at a number of countries.

15. CORRELATION
• Apparent association between certain factors or variables.
• Causal relationship : cause and effect ( if we are particularly ambitious)
• Inductive and deductive reasoning can help us better understand, explain and
predict political outcomes .
• Inductive and deductive reasoning and finding correlation is not easy-
comparativists face challenges in their explanation of political features across
countries

16. CHALLENGES FACED BY COMPARATIVISTS
• A. Difficulty in controlling the variables in cases they study.
- Unable to make true comparison because each case is different
E.g: suppose a researcher wants to determine whether increased exercise by
college students leads to higher grades. In studying the students who are her
subjects, the researcher can control for a number of variables that might also
affect grades such as the students’ diet, the amount of sleep they get, etc. By
controlling for these differences and making certain that many of these variables
are constant (remain the same across the subject), the researcher can carry out
her study with confidence.
- The variables in Political sciences are difficult to be controlled because
they are a function of real-world politics

17. • Economics, cultures, resources, and political structures are diverse, and its
difficult to control for these differences.
• Even in a single study variables change over time
• At best we can control as much as possible for variables that might distort our
conclusions.

18. • E.G : if we want to know what gun ownership laws are so much less restrictive in
the USA than in most other industrialized countries, we are well served to
compare the USA with countries that have similar historical, economic, political,
and social experiences, such as Canada and Australia, rather than Japan or
South Africa. This approach allows us to control our variables more effectively,
but it still leaves many variables uncontrolled and unaccounted for.

19. CHALLENGES FACED BY COMPARATIVISTS
• B. Interactions between the variables themselves
• - Even if we can control our variables in making our comparisons, there is the
problem that many of these variables are interconnected and interact.
• Many variables interact to produce particular outcomes, in what is known as
multicausality.
• A single variable like a country’s electoral system or the strength its judicial
system is unlikely to explain the variation in countries’ gun control laws.
• The problem of multicausality reminds us that in the real world there are often
no single, easy answers to political problems.

20. • C. Limits to our information and information gathering
- Few cases to work with as opposed with the huge number of cases in natural
sciences (hundred of stars, thousands of individuals studied across time)
- This breadth allows researches to select their cases in such as way to control
their variables,
- The large number of cases prevent any single unusual case from distorting the
findings
- In comparative Politics we are limited by the number of countries in the world
(fewer than 200)

21. • Even if we study some subsets of comparative politics (political parties, acts of
terrorism) our cases will still remain small.
• If we attempt to control for differences by trying to find a number of similar
cases (wealthy democracies) our body of cases will shrink even further

22. • D. How we access the few cases we have
- Research is hindered by the very factors that make countries interesting to
study.
- Information is not easy to acquire
- Field work required : conducting interviews or studying government archives
abroad
- International travel requires time and money and sometimes researchers
spend months or even years in the field.

23. - Interviewees unwilling to speak on sensitive issues or may distort information
- Libraries and archives incomplete or access to them restricted
- language barriers

24. • E. Focus limited to a single geographic region
- The specialist on communist Cuba is more likely to study other Latin American
countries than to consider china or north Korea.
-This regional focus (area studies) in unevenly distributed around the world
- For decade, the largest share of research tended to focus on western Europe
despite the increasing role of Asia in the international system.

25. • F. The problem of selection bias
- Harder to control for variables and to select the right cases
- Not political bias but bias in how we select our cases
- In natural sciences, researchers randomize case selection to avoid cases that
support one hypothesis or another
• - Randomization is not possible in political science

26. - Single case studies are influenced by the fact that comparativists study a
country because they know its language or find it interesting
- Relying on deductive reasoning (beginning with an hypothesis and seeking out
our cases) may easily leads us fall into to the trap of selection bias
E.g: for instance we want to understand revolutions, and we hypothesize that the
main cause is a rapid growth in inequality. How should we select our cases? Most
of us would respond by saying that we should find as many cases of revolution as
possible and then see whether an increase in inequality preceded the revolutions.
We might focus on France, Russia, China, and Iran. But isn’t this a mistake? By
looking only at cases of revolutions, we missed all the cases where inequality was
present but revolution did not take place (Brazil, South Africa, India, Nigeria, four
of the world’s more unequal countries that never experienced a revolution)

27. - So, as scholars we must concentrate on what we think is the cause (growth in
inequality) rather than what we think is the effect.
- A frequent mistake among scholars who are so often drawn to particular
outcomes that they start there and then work backward

28. • G. Variables may either be cause or effect (endogeneity)
- Countries with a low rate of female literacy are less likely to be democratic than
countries with where female literacy is high.
- Even if there is a causal relationship between female literacy and democracy,
which variable is cause and which is effect?
- Do low rates of female literacy limit public participation, empowering
nondemocratic actors, or do authoritarian leaders (largely men) take little interest
in promoting gender equality?

29. • This problem of distinguishing cause and effect is called endogeneity
• Even if we are confident that we have found the cause and effect, we cannot
easily ascertain which is which.