Comparative Politics: Introduction

Comparison is a basic reasoning process in order to make sense of and even understand politics. For example, we are often familiar with the political structures and institutions that exist in our country. We learn their names and even purposes for existence from elementary school years on, and learn how they emerged originally in our history and civics courses, their evolution and basic information about their content. However, when we go to the internet and do a small search, the institution called the National Assembly in Turkey is Assemblée Nationale in France. We see that in Britain it is called the House of Commons. Even in this small comparison, we detect that the legislature may have different structures, that it has a unicameral structure in Turkey while it has a bicameral one in both France and Britain. 

In research conducted using the method of comparison, just like in a laboratory environment, the researcher(s) try to obtain or observe conditions that enable them to conclude that changes in the categories of an independent variable produce some effects in the categories of a dependent variable.

According to Mill’s method of agreement, when a political event, development or phenomenon occurs in different political systems (dependent variable), if an independent variable is observed to change at the same time or just before it, then there is an agreement of that phenomenon (dependent variable) with the identified independent variable in question. The point to be noted here is that every time a political event occurs while all other conditions are different or constant, if there is an independent variable that mutates, then that independent variable is identified as the cause of that political phenomenon.

The method of difference proposed by Mill is a bit more complicated. Here, it is both the occurrence and lack thereof of a political event, phenomenon or development are observed and assessed. The independent variable, which is present whenever this phenomenon occurs, does not exist when the same phenomenon (dependent variable) does not exist, is still identified as the cause of that dependent variable.

By comparison, we aim to determine how separate or different political systems and regimes are. How then can we test the proposition that a political system is not like any other political system that it is completely unique, and that it cannot be compared with other systems in general?

The aim in MDSD is not to determine the effect of a single independent variable on a single dependent variable only, but to reach propositions that can be valid generally, almost for all observable political systems by ascertaining a certain regular relationship between a cause and its effect in very different societies across the globe.

The first examples of research on comparative politics consisted of studies combining partly normative and partly positive propositions to find the formula to reach the state structure that will ensure people's happiness. Aristotle’s famous work, Politics, is one of the first products of this search and has a more positive side.

The first serious deviation from this idea is Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous book the Prince, which consists mostly of propositions in the art of public administration. Still, it is compiled from careful and rigorous observations made in different political systems and cultures up to his time in the sixteenth century. Machiavelli dropped the search for the perfect state to provide happiness to the people and turned to the question of how a state could maintain its existence and increase its prosperity, stability, and power.

The institutional–structuralism describes the working principles of the political institutions owned by the great colonial states, analyses their historical evolution, and describes what kinds of constitutions were formed with these structures.

Structural functionalism emerged as a reaction to the institutional–structural approaches. Although its initial application emerged in the 1950s, we know that the first research on this subject was done by sociologists at the end of the nineteenth century. The most influential of these was the German sociologist Max Weber.

Weber’s contribution to comparative studies was that cultural factors can no longer be ignored as constituting independent variables in explaining the occurrence and sustenance of political phenomena.

In this theoretical approach, the individual and his thoughts and behaviors are not the basic units of analysis and observation. Here a system of thought that we will call historical structuralism, whose origin goes back to the historical materialism proposed by Karl Marx, is employed. The relations formed by the roles played by individuals in political life constitute political structures.

Many behaviors such as taxation, political party membership, association activities, voting, and forming coalitions are explained through the interactions of rational individuals with other such individuals. The aim pursued here is to reach propositions and hypotheses that are universally valid, and by submitting them to empirical testing to eventually reach scientific laws, that is, to reach explanations of political phenomena with certainty that can no longer be falsified.

Neo-institutionalism approaches institutional values and unwritten rules (norms) as units of observation or variables. For example, there are unwritten rules for legislatures to work. Behaving with civility and politely, showing courtesy, respect for order and time (punctuality) are some of the main examples of these. The effects of not following these unwritten rules may be to ostracize those who disregard them.

A Totalitarian regime can be described as a regime in which every structure and institution in society (from family to school, from school to workplace) is controlled by the government and its agents, where there are no civil liberties, which in turn may even be considered as constituting threats to the regime.

If there is an environment in which the governed can be influential in the election of the political authorities, the authorities periodically give account to those who elect them, seek support for their re-election, and candidates representing more than one and different political views, ideas or interests for each political decision-making position, compete without fear and fairly, then it is a democracy or a democratic regime.

The majoritarian type of democracy is based on the principle that the majority of the governed is effective during the election and running of government institutions (majority rules). It is often called Westminster Democracy because its first implementation emerged in Britain.

Federal state systems stand somewhere between a confederation, known for its weak central governments, and a unitary state with very powerful central governments. In federal states, what is essential is that the units that make up the state govern themselves.