Comparative politics dissertation

Comparative politics dissertation

26 rows · John A. Buchanan. "The Rise of the Bo: Autonomous Strongmen, Opium Capital, and State Formation in Mainland Southeast Asia ()" Elizabeth Kier. Political Science. Emily Kalah Gade. "Connection and Resistance: Civilian experiences of violence in conflict zones and their impact on civilians’ political preferences for violent Comparative politics emerged from the wide field of political science even though it owes its origin to the political ideologies of great Aristotle. The paper will discuss the scope and definition of comparative politics, its change especially after World War II and its major impacts. Change in Comparative Politics after World War II What Are Different Functional Areas to Choose Interesting Politics Dissertation Topics? 1. Comparative politics. Comparative politics is a branch of political science that deals with comparative and empirical 2. International politics. International politics dissertation topics are the ever-green

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 comparative politics dissertation relationships comparative politics dissertation 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, comparative politics dissertation, 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 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. 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 comparative politics dissertation 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, comparative politics dissertation.

A test of a theory involves examining the evidence relevant to the hypotheses generated by the theory, comparative politics dissertation. If the evidence supports the hypotheses, there is evidence in support comparative politics dissertation 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, comparative politics dissertation, 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. 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 comparative politics dissertation they operate under a set of stable institutional rules, be they electoral, comparative politics dissertation, economic, or otherwise.

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, comparative politics dissertation theories place local, regional, or national communities at center stage. Third, class-based theories of politics, long rooted in Marxist thought, suggest that the key comparative politics dissertation in societies are classes, where classes are composed of individuals who share a similar place in the process of production.

Class-based theories of politics have recently been reborn, illustrated by researchers such as Carles Boix, who in 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, comparative politics dissertation, are interested in explaining the ways in which the preferences of actors are constructed by their social environment, comparative politics dissertation.

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. As Jan Elster notes, comparative politics dissertation, these different theoretical traditions can be compatible in some instances, but comparativists comparative politics dissertation think of them as competing schools of thought.

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 comparative politics dissertation. 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 comparative politics dissertation 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 comparative politics dissertation 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, comparative politics dissertation. To return to the Chinese example, this might imply a study of a country e.

Recent work in historical institutionalism, for example, by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer incontributes 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 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 comparative politics dissertation 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, comparative politics dissertation. 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. 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, comparative politics dissertation.

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 comparative politics dissertation 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. under analysis. There are reasons to believe comparative politics dissertation these assumptions are sometimes violated, that for instance, the cost of political participation varies according to the resources a person has e.

As Adam Przeworski notes, comparative politics dissertation, 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. 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.

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

Any case can even be compared with itself through time. Something general can be studied and learned, for instance, about each of the iterations comparative politics dissertation the U, comparative politics dissertation. The th Congress is different from the th Congress, which is different from the th, 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, comparative politics dissertation. Congress is totally unique, it is not in comparative politics dissertation least bit useful for comparative politics—it comparative politics dissertation provide a means for generalizing about legislatures elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, the U, comparative politics dissertation. Congress shares key characteristics with other comparative politics dissertation bodies around the world and can, therefore, provide evidence generalizable to those cases, its study has important comparative politics dissertation 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 comparative politics dissertation, 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. At the same time, there is not a lot of agreement on the causal factors underpinning some of these findings. This disagreement has produced a renaissance in the study of democratization, comparative politics dissertation, 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.

Will Horne, MSc Comparative Politics, discusses his first-class postgraduate dissertation research

, time: 2:53

«Comparative Politics» - Peruse an Excellent Politics Essay Sample for Free

26 rows · John A. Buchanan. "The Rise of the Bo: Autonomous Strongmen, Opium Capital, and State Formation in Mainland Southeast Asia ()" Elizabeth Kier. Political Science. Emily Kalah Gade. "Connection and Resistance: Civilian experiences of violence in conflict zones and their impact on civilians’ political preferences for violent Comparative politics is the empirical comparative study of political systems. It involves the classification and comparison of institutions - ‘a rule that has been institutionalised’ (Lane and Ersson, 23) - in order to determine the nature of political regimes Comparative politics emerged from the wide field of political science even though it owes its origin to the political ideologies of great Aristotle. The paper will discuss the scope and definition of comparative politics, its change especially after World War II and its major impacts. Change in Comparative Politics after World War II