Studying Democracy and Teaching Classics: What Is Happening in the Field of Comparative Politics?

Abstract

n this essay, I assess how comparative politics is taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels and what our approach to teaching says about the state of the subfield. What do practitioners emphasize in a comparative politics course in light of the enormous global changes of the past decade? Which topics are included and which ignored? What should be included that is now missing, even at the cost of excluding something else? I found that many undergraduate syllabi take as their starting point the triumph of the third wave of democratization. Instructors use democracy and democratization as their organizing principle; this is reflected in the case studies covered in the courses. This choice comes at the cost of not studying countries or regions where democracy is underdeveloped or stunted. Many courses thus highlight a limited range of countries and conceptual themes while ignoring critical issues that dominate the headlines, such as the politics of nondemocracies and current U.S. national security preoccupations with rebuilding demolished states, containing Islamic fundamentalism, and disarming rogue states. In the not so distant past, national security concerns heavily influenced the structure and content of lower-level comparative politics courses, since instructors felt compelled to familiarize students with totalitarian, or Soviet-style, regimes. Perhaps our excitement with the spread of democratic ideals and institutions has obscured the fact that numerous parts of the world are still governed by autocracies. Graduate courses also emphasize institutional developments and democratic structures at the expense of new topics (such as ideas, culture, norms, and values), as well as older themes (such as welfare state policy, social and political mobilization, gender, the impact of international trade, and state capacity). Field seminars have become more narrowly focused than they used to be, aiming primarily to summarize the endeavors of earlier generations of scholars, assess knowledge, and advance theory related to state-society relations first laid out by the founders of the social sciences: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels.