Comparative politics
CLASS 1 (10/02): Introduction:
- Ook vragen over boek dat je niet gelezen hebt!
- Reading before class
- Carry home assignment on book (4/20) tegen 22 MEI!
* Introduction (Caramani)
What is comparative politics? (1/6)
Political science:
- political theory = how it should be; what makes something a democracy (normative) comparative normative approach to society
- comparative politics: empirical questions and interactions within political systems (comparing countries and institutions)
a way of looking at things and try to understand them by comparing, other approach; very good approach to understand political phenomena, but it’s not that much of a field as such
- international relations: interactions between systems
Where do we place other courses (political sociology, Europe, political communication …)? Political science = container term, you fit everything under this BUT prof says: comparative politics is way more than a subfield of political science, it’s an APPROACH.
What is comparative politics? (2/6) HOW?
Three traditions:
- country focus: descriptive, describes political systems
- methodological focus (research methods): purely methodological (does no more than to establish rules and standards for comparative analysis)
- analytical focus: combination of substance and method: describing + explain similarities and differences
Book: Country Focus: Every week you get a profile on a country, this is comparative in the sense that you have to make the comparison yourself. Every week you get a new profile and you can compare them yourself. The book describes countries in a comparable way. But you don’t know how political systems matter. No causality, maybe a correlation. The goal of this course is to not only describe, but also explain and by being able to explain, prescribe.
What is comparative politics? (3/6)
Describe similarities and differences:
- Classification: organize things
- Typology
(ex. Parties by number of parties there are in a system or are of importance in a system: example: when you have more than 3 parties, it doesn’t matter anymore how many there are: you create a typology: 1 party system, 2 party system, multi party system)
Explain similarities and differences:
- test hypotheses (it matters because there’s a reason for the number of parties à political system)
(ex. Why are there few/many political parties? Why is there a female head of state? Why is voter turnout higher in Switzerland than in Belgium?)
What is comparative politics? (4/6)
Example: Blais & Dobrzynska
Turnout in electoral democracies:
Question: When and where is turnout highest and lowest and why?
Why does this matter? You’ll be able to do something about low turnout, because you know under what conditions turnout is higher.
Low voter turnout: legitimacy for government is lower (ex. 50% of 10% of population going to vote…)
High voter turnout (=independent variable) is a very important factor in making a political system stable (=dependent variable). Is a normative question, BUT goal is scientific: you want to get high voter turnout (direct implications).
Voter turnout depends on:
- socioeconomic environment
- institutions
- party systems
Turnout highest:
Small, industrialized, densely populated, voting compulsory, lower house election decisive, PR, few parties
What is comparative politics? (5/6) WHAT?
Explaining = aim & comparison = method
Experimental science: there’s a limit to experimental setting (ex. You can’t say: we will eliminate the political parties and see how the system works).
Quasi-experimental: study cases who differ from the variables that we wanted to study (principe van test- en controlegroep) (ex. No government: experimental setting is a country that is in the process of making a new one)
What is comparative politics? (6/6)
Systematic, explicit comparison:
- It should not be implicit with an absent case
(ex. Compare American system to French system(=absent case), France is not described)
- Not normative (ex. Machiavelli: how the system functions en what we would need to make a better function down to facts and figures, not normative)
The substance of comparative politics (1/6)
What is compared? National political systems, sub-national political systems (regions, constitutive entities in federations), supra-national units
! Seldom entire systems:
- less work
- not necessarily interested in the entire political system
The substance of comparative politics (2/6)
Important to look beyond institutions and also look at actors
Traditional: analysis of formal institutions
After WWII: behavioural: Easton: definition of political system: input output
The substance of comparative politics (3/6)
Zie 2
The substance of comparative politics (4/6)
Issues we looked at were different
Good summary
The substance of comparative politics (5/6)
High level of abstraction of systematic approach leads to counter-reactions: we kept the good things (we still study institutions and actors, because they do matter)
- new institutionalism: new focus on states and their institutions, there was too much focus on behaviour
- grounded theory: mainly focus on western democracies; middle-range
- case-oriented analysis: small-end, more in detail
- rational choice theory: behavioural was very psychologically inspired, very difficult if you want to model something or build a theory
The substance of comparative politics (5/6)
Cyclical process (back to institutions), but:
- Broader focus on institutions
- Easton’s work integrated
- More attention to output-side (what are the consequences of these institutions, what does it generate?)
New challenges:
- Quid interdependence between national political systems?
Can we still compare? Danger to comparing in a globalizing society?
We’ll start to look alike, so it doesn’t make sense to compare them BUT prof says: it’s not the fact that they are similar, it’s the fact that this resemblance is due to the fact that traditional states are way less closed to external influences than before (migration, economic flows, finance, culture values, …). You can’t say that they are different cases. You can’t analytically onderscheiden dependent from interdependent variables.
The method of comparative politics (1/4)
Methods differ with respect to:
- Numbers: intensive (small N, many variables)/extensive (large N, few variables) the larger the number of cases, the more superficial it gets
- Dimensions:
o spatial (cross-sectional)
o functional (cross-organizational) ex. Different parliaments
o longitudinal (cross-temporal)
depend on what you want to get to know
- Unit of analysis: single actors, institutions
- Focus on similarities or differences
The method of comparative politics (2/4)
1. Aggregate or ecological data: you don’t have it at the level of the individual (ex. Election results: how many people voted for a certain party, but we don’t know WHO, we can’t trace them back to the individual)
2. Individual data
The method of comparative politics (3/4)
Behavioural revolution: from institutions to focus on actors and later we moved back to institutions again.
- there was data available to study behaviour
- shift from aggregate to individual data (60-70s studies relied on individual data): you can say more, because you have more precise information (norms, values, thinking). Why do people vote? Who votes?
- Informatization
- “Ecological fallacy” = if you have data at aggregate level, you cannot translate it to the individual level by definition. If you say something about a country, you can’t automatically assume it also gelden for individuals in that country.
The method of comparative politics (4/4)
Recovery of ecological data: very difficult and long process to get individual data + difficult to get them across different places and time
CONCLUSION (1/1)
No comparing without difference: you need some divergence in order to be able to compare
BUT: be aware of problem of interdependence (the fact that countries are interdependent makes them similar) how much divergence is left? Galton Problem
Difference is meaningful to study, make sure the cases you compare are ‘clean’ cases
Indicators
Approaches (1/1)
Uses of theory (1/1)
Alternative perspectives (1-7/7)
The five I’s = main approaches
1. Institutions: traditional, initial approach. Structures; institutions shape behaviour
2. Interests (related to institutions):
a. Rational choice: rational behaviour maximizing utility
b. Corporatism: group interests (trade unions, employers federations)
Ex: consociationalism (Lijphart)
3. Ideas (related to behavioural): ideas and ideology matter for output how should society look like? Norms and values
Ex. Laïcité (secularisering)
Ex. Almond & Verba (1963) en Putnam (1993)
4. Individuals: elite level and mass level
Ex. LTA (Leader Trade Assessment): profiling leaders based on their word use
Herman Van Rompuy: low ‘need for power’/’locus of control’/’self-confidence’, complex thinking
5. International environment
What more? (1/1)
6. Interactions: important to get ‘the bigger picture’, we moved from meta to mid-range theories
* Chapter 2: approaches in comparative politics (Guy Peters)
* Chapter 3: comparative research methods (Hans Keman)
CLASS 2 (24/02): Democracies and authoritarian regimes
* Chapter 4: Democracies (Peter Mair)
Why not put this in 1 chapter?
- It would be a very long chapter
- Nobody is specialized in both regimes (democratic and non-democratic ones)
- Broad distinction between both because the degree in democracy can be important to look at certain variables (ex. Level of education), in many cases we don’t make broad distinctions, but we just compare two or more countries, we look in detail at sub-systems (ex. Level of constitutional rights). If you only compare democratic and non-democratic, it would be a superficial analysis.
- Ex. Question: How are the different types more or less inclusive? (degree of inclusiveness = independent and see: how does the degree of inclusiveness influence the degree of stability over time?)
Democracies: introduction (1/1)
Many countries call themselves democratic, but not all of them are democratic. Evolution of nation-states into democratical regimes is something from the last decade. In the 1970s: small group (27,5% in ‘74) and pretty much homogeneous, although differences between ex. N-AM and W-EUR: presidential/parliamentary regime vs monarchy; type of welfare state; party systems; unitary vs federal state structure; electoral system
Sub-system = part of the entire political system
This group gets bigger, but also more heterogeneous:
- welfare state regimes, not that easy to fit this model in the new democratic countries (ex. Member states former Soviet Union; former colonies in Africa, Asia etc: not as developed as West-European countries)
- the order in which different types of rights were created (liberal, political, civil, constitutional) influences the stability of the country and the way it functions (?)
Comparing democracies (1/1)
Aim:
1. Describe
2. Describe differences and similarities and find out which ones matter
1. Comparison of democracies: ex. Lijphart (comparing majoritarian vs consensus models)
2. The “third wave” of democratization, Huntington (starting 1974, peaking after 1989) historical approach; difficulty: when is a wave over?
3. Institutional engineering (the challenge of building democracies from scratch)
Ex. Who makes a democracy? Not a one-step thing Example: what the US does in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Implement a constitution in these countries.
DEF = Trying to intervene in political/institutional system, often externally (ex. US, EU, IMF, World Bank, …) to change the political dynamic of the country (most intervened: electoral system and party system)
4. Neo-institutionalism (institutions as independent variables)
Defining democracy (1/3)
* Procedural definitions:
It only looks at procedural features, no normative component.
Schumpeter: “free competition for a free vote” he sees a democracy like this
What could be the outcome of this? Risk: what is the common good? Political system may become something of the majority, turn or more to non-democratic system (!) If any extremist, non-democratic party gets a majority of the votes, they can change the rules/rights (ex. Women are not allowed to work) in a very democratic way, but not with a democratic outcome… Can we speak of democracy if the rules of the system are in such democratic, but allow for a non-democratic outcome of the system? Ex. Germany forbid certain non-democratic parties (after WWII), in Belgium it’s not forbidden but there’s a political rule that we don’t want them to govern. Other countries (ex. France) DO allow them to govern.
* Substantive definitions:
Stresses the goals of a democratic regime. It looks into how society should and has to look like (normative component).
Procedural are more common, easier to compare on procedural aspect than on substantive aspect
Basic norms France: egalité, fraternité, liberté abstract universal citizen, strict separation of … and state
Belgium is composed of different groups, not universal. We do recognize: there are differences in our citizens, completely opposite to French system.
Defining democracy (2/3)
Dahl: polyarchy (expanding procedural definition)
Citizen rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property, …
Constitutional rights: basic rights described in the constitution
As long as you don’t have civil liberties, the political rights won’t get you far. Dahl says: Schumpeter has a good definition, but it would be better if we make it ‘thicker’.
Defining democracy (3/3)
Illiberal democracy: very populist, the elections are kind of a ritual, you take part in this, but for the rest there are no, too little or few civil liberties. In practice there are limits on individual freedom, you can’t say the elections are very meaningful. There’s a decrease of them again, not a stable country either you have the whole package (elections, but also civil liberties, constitutional rights etc) OR you have nothing at all. Only having elections as a ritual doesn’t work in the long term.
Developing democracy (1/1)
Incorporation:
When rights come in a certain order, it makes them stable. First of al political rights, then you make them participate, then you build up other rights and this is done regularly. Gradual incorporation of the masses: gradual broadening of the group that is entitled to vote. Not everybody got the same rights to vote at the same time. Systems absorb new groups gradually.
Representation:
Organization of political system in such a way that they can become meaningful; a new party ‘break’ into the system: at the moment when the parties were establishes, there was already a parliament with parties, so they came in when the parliament was already formed. They had to compete to gain enough votes to become members of parliament.
Organized opposition: