Comparative Politics (SoR)

This course will equip students with the most important tools, concepts and a survey of the methods in the area of comparative politics. Basic knowledge of central concepts is assumed. If you feel that you lack basic knowledge, you ought to catch up with some general reference or handbooks. A list of general readings is provided in the last section.

The course is based on case-studies, as well as large-n studies. It will illustrate advances in the conceptual frameworks underlying comparative political analysis. It will then review all the different dimensions of comparative politics successively, starting with the central institutions of political systems: governments, legislatures and the judiciary. While not all political systems are democratic of course, all that we know of maintain some appearance of division of powers. We will also look at territorial structures and the relative importance of delegation. The second half of the course will focus on patterns of political participation and political actors. These are of course constrained by political structures and institutions, but they may also change those structures. In particular, we will focus on voters, parties, interest groups and social movements.

The course will attempt to cover the greatest possible variety of situations and geographic zones. It will not, however, aim at exhaustiveness. Fundamentally, we believe that the central concepts are useful to understand a great variety of situations, even if historical trajectories or cultural elements seem to make to particular episodes impossible to compare. Comparative politics assumes that comparison is always possible, as long as conceptual parameters are sufficiently specified. At times, we may look for most similar, crucial or most different cases or resort to large-n comparisons. Looking for differences or for similarities are research strategies that are part of the same endeavor to disentangle complex social and political processes. Case-study research and more quantitative approaches, not to speak about experimental protocols, complement each other. Students need to get acquainted with all of those strategies.

Assignments and grading:

Every student will read weekly compulsory readings and participate in class discussions. Take a look here to understand how to read a paper quickly and efficiently. Every student has to hand in 3 critical discussions of a course topic of her or his choice based on the course readings. Those are to be handed in before classes 5 ,9 and one week after class 12. The idea is to focus on one of the compulsory readings of the 4 preceding classes (week 5: 1 to 4, week 9: 5 to 8 and and week 12: 9 to 12), discuss the text critically and confront it with other works on the same issue (+/- 10 articles). It’s 1000 words, everything included, except references! To be sure, we focus on concepts, not on cases. If you take a paper on state-building in Ethiopia, you will not look for other papers on state-building in Ethiopia, but other papers on state-building. The weight of the assignments will be as follows: the 3 reviews (20 % each) and in-class participation (40%).

1. What is comparative politics? (03/09/25)

What is political science? – What is comparison? – How to design a comparative research project – Counterfactual reasoning – Which methods?

Required readings:

Gerring, J. (2005). Causation: A unified framework for the social sciences. Journal of theoretical politics, 17(2), 163-198.

Morgan, S. & Winship, C. (2007), Counterfactuals and causal inference, Cambridge, CUP, chapters 1 & 2, pp. 3-50.

Additional readings:

Ebbinghaus, Bernhard (2005). “When Less is More: Selection Problems in Large- N and Small- N Cross-National Comparisons”, International Sociology 20:2, 133-152.

John Gerring, Social Science Methodology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012.