Good Essay About Comparative Politics

Comparative politics is a subset of politics and the study of the struggle for power across different countries and institutions. The study of comparative politics helps theoreticians, academics, politicians and students in drawing conclusions about the different political structures and make generalizations and theories that could be used in studying other cases or making sense of the differences. Research in comparative politics in based on concepts- assumptions and theories that are culled from extensive study or analysis. Concepts, together with methods to test theories enable the researcher to question the cause and effects of a phenomenon, reveal gaps in the study and prove or disprove assumptions. The method chosen to do a comparative study is important as without a clear guide information collected would be just a random collection of facts and events. A comparative method thus is a method that is used to make comparisons across different cases and events and draw conclusions based on the results. Comparative politics uses methods, theories and studies such as behavioralism, modernization theory, rational choice theory, game theory, qualitative, quantitative methods and many more to understand how countries work and why they have the political institutions that they do.
These approaches especially behavioralism and the qualitative, quantitative approaches view politics as a science and deal with numbers, statistics and use mathematical models to explain concepts and political behavior in different countries. This lead to questions of how much comparative politics could be called as science. Science rests on testable explanations and predictions but in politics there are numerous variables that cannot be controlled. Humans are also not rational beings and decision making could be attributed to idiosyncrasies and historical complexities, something that cannot be explained by mere numbers or a mathematical formula. Comparative politics is not an exact science and has its limitations such as unpredictable human behavior and many more reasons. Another limitation of a comparative method is that there are too many unexpected, uncontrollable variables with too little subjects. There are independent variables such as political history, interest groups, culture, regime type and socio-economic background and dependent variables such as public policy variation, democracy and revolution/Civil wars. A study of even one country can yield unexpected variables which cannot be controlled. If there was to be a study on the totalitarian regime on North Korea, there would be too many variables that causes it. Forming a hypothesis and then proving it (inductive reasoning) or starting with a result and then forming hypotheses (deductive reasoning) would prove to be inadequate as there are too many variables and too little to compare with. A study of the country itself throws up different variables and there are no similar countries in the world with which North Korea could be compared with. Also there is no way a researcher of comparative politics can control the variables for an effective result. Mills’ comparative method of non-concomitant variations where quantitative variations of operative variables are observed and measured was claimed to be the first systematized formulaic comparative method. But Mills himself did not recommend it for social sciences as he felt that there were very few similar cases.
Comparative politics and the methodologies used to study different political systems and countries is not a science. However a scientific study is possible if the similar variables can be grouped together and if focus is applied to the key variables. The success of comparative politics and methodology lies in capitalizing the methods’ strengths.

Works Cited

O’Neil. H. Patrick. Essentials of Comparative Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2010.