Comparative Politics (Research Paper Sample)

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Comparative Politics
Described as one of the subsidiaries of political science, comparative politics focuses more on the empirical questions in political science s opposed to the other sub-branches of political science that include political theory and international relations. According to Caramamai(2008 2), comparative politics is based not on whether there was participation in the larger field of political science but rather; what type of participation was there and the criteria used to choose the kind of participation that individuals undertake. However, the use of normative questions in comparative politics cannot be ruled out completely. Comparative political scientists sometimes use normative questions despite the fact that the analysis is mostly empirical and value-neutral. International relations which is the other sub-group of political science mainly focuses on war, trade and the balance of power between nations.
In comparison to international relations, "comparative politics creates or rather is more specific based on what is being analyzed be it war, trade or balance of power between countries" (3). A practical example of such a scenario is whereby instead of analyzing supremacy battles within and across different countries, comparative politics investigate parties that are within government and those in the opposition and the hard-line positions taken by either of the opposing groups regarding the use of diplomacy or military intervention during crisis. From this explanation, comparative politics is seen to focus more on internal structures within a system of governance. Despite this, the comparison is not limited to inter-relationship between two opposite side but also recognizes the effects of external influences on power shifts within system of governance. In overall, comparative politics is seen as a discipline necessitated by scholars such as Aristotle and Machiavelli in their quest to find out how politics work.
Various types of comparative politics that are distinct try to answer the empirical question ‘how does science work?
1 The first tradition in relation to the scientific study of politics has the orientation of single country analysis. This in general implies that comparative analysis within a system of governance is done in isolation and with little comparison involved with alternate system.
2 The other tradition of comparative politics takes a methodological approach where the standard procedure for comparative analysis are analyzed. This tradition is more concerned with how comparative politics should be carried out, the standard procedures to be followed as well as the key variables to be used.
3 The third tradition of comparative politics is both methodological and empirical. This tradition is mainly concerned with similarities, differences, and systemic processes between governments, institutions and individuals in an attempt to identify and explain any differences or similarities.
For political science to be considered as part of science, there are several conditions that have to be satisfied owing to the fact that the traditional construct of political science has a lot of generalization. Science too has its own generalization but the scientific aspect of bias and generalization is genuine law generalization. How then does one distinguish this form of generalization to the common de-facto generalization common in life sciences and history? There is a law in natural science that dictates that any generalization does not become genuine law generalization simply because of the inexistence of a counter-argument. In addition to this, a body of theory coming along with any generalization is more inclined to strengthen any argument present even in the inexistence of a counter-argument.
Most scholars are of the view that comparative politics has a lot of generalization that may weigh down on comparative politics becoming a natural science. A practical example of this is the assumption that in a two party electoral process, neither of the party is ever interested in winning the support of the other party’s extremist voters. This is simply because each of the party will try and rally support from individuals who share similar ideologies as those generated by the party of support. The area of interest would therefore be to rally support from an opposing side but specifically target the undecided and somehow sympathizers from an opposing side.
For comparative politics to be considered as a natural science there must be a well defined discipline of comparative history going by the background of comparative politics that is based on history. However, there are arguments that comparative history has not been able to yield much over the years thus the fundamental question remains; how do we get comparative history to yield.
In research design, "case selection process is one of the most fundamental processes that one has to undertake" (52). This is not different in comparative politics. However, there is always a range of options that one can choose to undertake depending on the number of variables and the cases involved. Case selection is very central when it comes to research design and the level of inquiry is predominantly dependent on the empirical question being analyzed. More importantly, the difference in the number of variables and the number of cases is a fundamental option when selecting cases as well as organizing data sets. There are times when the numbers of cases are few a situations that greatly affects the research design chosen. There are five options that are considered during case selections. These key factors include
1 Case study
2 Time series
3 Closed universe
4 Cross section
5 Pooled analysis
The case study method is particularly pivotal in the anal...