1. COMPARATIVE POLITICS
What is it? Why study it?

2. • Governments are central to the many
other developments that shape the world
we live in.
• Governments make war and peace,
promote scientific research and take
responsibility for the environment.

3. • Governments set the ground rules for
international trade while managing public
expenditures and influencing private
enterprise at home.

4. • Governments decide what extent the
people under their jurisdiction will be
granted basic human rights.

5. Any clear understanding of the
contemporary world therefore requires a
concentrated focus on Governments and
Politics.

6. Comparative Politics
It examines political realities in countries all
over the world.
It looks at the many ways government
operate and the ways people behave in
political life.

7. More specifically...
it examines how governments are structured
and how they function, including different
forms of democracy and various forms of
non-democratic government. This area of
inquiry focuses maninly on:
“governmental institutions”

8. • The process through which governments
interact with their populations in pursuing
community goals. The emphasis here is
on Public Policy such as health, economic
and such policies

9. How political leaders and the population
behave in politics, inducing the ideas they
have about politics, and the ways they
participate in politics through such
mechanisms as elections, political parties,
interest groups, and other modes of
political activity. The focus here is on elite
and mass political behavior andinclude
such things as political ideologies and
political participation.

10. How political leaders and mass public think
and feel about politics, and how these
attitudes affect theor behavior. This is
known as Political Culture.

11. Comparative Politics and IR
• What is the difference?
• How are they connected?

12. • Comaparative Politics examines political
activities within countries. The focus is on
each country and its internal politics
• International Politics, by contrast
concerns relations between countries. The
focus is on external relationships of
individual countries.

13. The Purpose of Comparison
• To understand political life
comprehensively, we must compare
• We can learn a great deal about any one
particular case ( country X).
• It is like traveling abroad. It awakens us to
a variety of human experience and shows
us that there are different ways of doing
things.

14. More specifically (principal
purposes)...
• To widen understanding of politics in other
countries
• To increase our appreciation of the
advantages and disadvantages of our
political system and to enable us to learn
from other countries

15. • To develop a more sophisticated
understanding of politics in general,
including the nature of democracy and
non-democratic gvernments, the
interdependencies connecting individual
countries with the rest of the world.

16. • To help us see the relationship between
politics around the world and such field as
science and technology, environment,
public health, law, business, religion,
ethnicity, culture and the like

17. • To enable us to become more informed
citizens so we can develop our own
political opinions
• To sharpen our critical thinking skills
applying scientific logic and coherent
argumentation to our understanding of
political phenomena