Test Your Knowledge on Comparative Politics

An Overview of Comparative Politics

• Comparative politics involves evaluating and comparing politics (struggle for power, use of power, maintenance of power, authoritative allocation of values, who gets what) across political systems.
• Politics is about acquiring power, using it to make collective decisions, and involves conflict and cooperation.
• Comparative politics helps examine major questions of political science, such as why some countries have democratic regimes while others experience authoritarianism, why and how regimes change, and why some countries experience affluence and growth while others endure poverty and decline.
• Comparative politics entails the study of political, administrative institutions, processes, and behaviors across organizational, national, and cultural boundaries.
• Comparative politics mainly concerns internal political structures, individual and collective actors, and processes.
• Guy Peters discusses five alternative perspectives (a sixth one) that comparative analysis focuses on: Institutions, Interests, Ideas, Individuals, International environment, and Interactions.
• Comparative politics is one of three main sub-fields of Political Science, alongside Political Theory and International Relations.
• Political theory is more concerned with normative and critical questions about equality, democracy, justice, while Comparative Politics deals with empirical questions.
• Comparative Politics is empirical and value-neutral.
• International Relations is concerned with interactions between political systems, while Comparative Politics deals with interactions within political systems.
• The main goal of Comparative Politics is empirical and seeks to describe, explain, and predict similarities and differences across political systems.
• Comparative analysis is the most reliable process of generating knowledge and developing principles to underpin a good theory of public management.