Students Of Comparative Politics Research Articles

Inflation, Unemployment, and Government Collapse

As democracies enter an era of economic retrenchment, the political costs associated with economic decline have come under close scrutiny by students of comparative politics and public policy. Of particular concern is the linkage between inflation, unemployment, and the collapse of incumbent governments. The present study provides an initial application of an alternative approach to measuring this linkage across 8 European democracies, and offers significant evidence linking political costs for cabinet governments with rising prices and the growing unemployment. By utilizing the Poisson method of determining probabilities of discrete events, increasing probabilities of government collapse are significantly associated with rising inflation and unemployment in European democracies between January 1958 and December 1979. Subsequent use of the Sanders and Herman's (1977) and Warwick (1979) analyses of cabinet stability provides a useful means to disaggregate the nation sample of the study into four discrete subsets of nations. After applying the model developed in the current study to these separate subsets, it is concluded that the more significant the change in rates of inflation and unemployment, the more likely the pattern of government collapse will be interrupted by the unexpected termination of an incumbent regime.

Dirasat in Economics and Business ABSTRACT NEW APPROACHES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS

The comparative method is one of the main methods utili zed by most social scientists. It is also used in the sub-fields of political science. However, “.... among the several fields or subdisciplines into which the discipline of political science is usually divided, comparative politics is the only one that carries a methodological instead of a substantive label. The term 'com parative politics' indicates the how but does not specify the what of the analysis. The label is somewhat misleading because both explicit methodological concern and implicit methodologi cal awareness among students of comparative politics have gene rally not been very high.” (1) 
 The objective of this study is to introduce the Arab reader, in some depth, to some of the new approaches in comparative politics which attempt to be more comparative in the real sense of the word. Two approaches ( Systems Approach and the Functional Approach ) are selected because of their great im pact on the development of comaparative politics.

Politics without Parties: Reflections on the Union Government Proposals in Ghana

Ghana, first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence after World War II, has experienced several diverse forms of government, including a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, a socialist single-party republic, and two military regimes following coups d'etat in 1966 and 1972. Like most of developing states of West Africa, Ghana has been plagued by post-independence political instability. In fact, search for a permanent and viable solution to what appears almost as a persistent governmental crisis-a crisis of political legitimacy, of credibility, confidence and trust in existing political institutions-seems to be dominant public preoccupation in most West African nations today. In a recent, perceptive review of three major works on contemporary Ghanaian politics, Paul Ladouceur concludes that the 'political kingdom' has come to mean, not to govern, or to govern wisely, but rather to win by election or by a coup. Ghana has entered a period of political stagnation parallel to economic stagnation of last decade or two. Hopefully it will nonetheless find its way to a representative and a stable form of government, perhaps different from what it might be expected (1977: 348) [emphasis added]. Toward end of 1976 ruling Supreme Military Council (SMC) headed by General I. K. Acheampong initiated an historic proposal for a Union Government, a plan designed to provide a real solution to Ghana's quest for a stable and representative government. The idea of a Union Government addresses need for a constitutional third way, for a representative democracy based neither on Westminster-style twoparty system nor on military rule, but on tradition, values, and indigenous political beliefs, ideals and practices of Ghanaians. It is almost a truism that a constitution ought to accord with political culture in which it operates (see WolfPhillips, 1972). This proposal, insofar as it represents a novel constitutional experiment in that direction, demands close scrutiny by students of comparative politics, especially political and legal anthropologists. This paper proceeds along five paths. In first section, some theoretical and substantive implications of current public constitutional debate in Ghana-the debate on Union Government-are reviewed and critically analyzed. Basic to

City Councillors and the Dilemma of Representation: The Case of Isfahan

A decade ago, amidst general enthusiasm for nation-building activities, Samuel Huntington raised the question of whether political institutions might not decay as well as grow. Although he provided but a few guidelines to symptoms of institutional decay, he did introduce a healthy measure of skepticism into the literature on political development. This skepticism is particularly warranted in the case of representative institutions.Throughout much of the Middle East, the life of both political parties and legislatures at the national level have tended to be more formal than real. Institutionbuilding has been attempted at the local level, too, although local politics has received far less attention from students of comparative politics. This essay discusses the roles of political representatives at the local level and the impact of the political milieu upon the way in which these roles are shaped and interpreted by their occupants.

South West Africa: A Study in the "Sacred Trust" Thesis

The mandate system may be toothless but it is not bootless. --Parker T. Moon (Imperialism and World Politics) Students of comparative politics and international relations generally admit that one of the more outstanding political developments of the post-World War II era has been what Hans J. Morgenthau calls “the Colonial Revolution”--the granting of independence to colonial territories and dependencies in Asia and Africa. “What seemed to be almost inconceivable at the end of the Second World War,” Morgenthau comments, “has become an accomplished fact only twenty years later” (1967, p. 344). To Morgenthau this colonial revolution “is in its essence a triumph of the moral ideas of the West…carried forward under under the banner of two moral principles: national self-determination and social justice.” Organski (1968), on the other hand, sees the attainment of independence by these colonies as part of an inevitable historical movement, not necessarily owing to ideas as such: “…colonialism sows the seeds of its own destruction. No sooner is a colony conquered than its population begins to move, slowly and imperceptibly at first, then quickly and noticeably, toward political independence” (p. 234). F. H. Hinsley (1967) sees the declining strategic importance of these colonies as a partial reason for the colonial revolution. Arguing in this vein, he contends that the “withdrawal [of an imperial power] from territory since the second World War has been due…to the growing recognition that it is not vital to hold it from the strategical point of view and not feasible to hold it in the face of metropolitan opinion” (p. 359).

Methodology, Technology, and the Study of African Elites

Even a casual survey of the literature on African politics reveals that it has only occasionally been influenced by contemporary social science methodology and technology. Alvin Magid is certainly correct in asserting that Africanist political scientists...have tended to ignore or treat lightly various methodological problems which confront the social sciences in general and their own discipline in particular (1969, p. 1). This is not, of course, a new charge. In 1955, for instance, Roy Macridis asserted that the vast majority of so-called comparative studies were noncomparative, descriptive, parochial, and static. He argued, The general dissatisfaction experienced by students of comparative politics with the nature of their discipline and more particularly with its methodological orientation, indicates the need for a more thorough conceptualization for the purpose of comparative analysis and the development of theories at the various levels of generalization for the purpose of organizing and studying empirical data (1955, p. 23). Indeed, similar changes have been made at one time or another in almost every discipline from anthropology to zoology. So what I have to say should give all of us a sense of deja vu.

Toward a Comparative Theory of the Policy-Process

Students of comparative politics on the whole have shown little concern with the policy-process.1 And more often than not, those scholars who have given this problem some attention have tended to conceptualize the process as a linear one of interest groups simply impinging upon the more powerful governmental institutions. As a result, they have tended to ignore the nature of the conflict itself as a factor in structuring the battle and its consequent resolution. In building upon some recent theoretical work done in the American field-notably by Theodore J. Lowi and E. E. Schattschneider-I will make an effort to contribute to the development of a comparative theory of the policy-process.2 It should be noted, however, that in its present form this theory is applicable only to Western democratic systems; hence, whereas the theory is at a relatively high level of abstraction, it nevertheless remains limited to more open societies having rather highly differentiated structures.

The Two Faces of Compromise

important political concepts. The sum total of these prevalent attitudes may be seen as the national character of politics in these systems. One such fundamental concept is compromise. It could be argued that every political system can be classified by students of comparative politics on the basis of its prevalent attitude towards compromise.' In these remarks dealing with what can be called the two faces of compromise, attention will be centered on the widely divergent attitudes toward compromise prevalent in British and German politics. Like all use of ideal types in the social sciences, this discussion aims at clarifying reality rather than merely simplifying it. It is hoped, however, that the contrast of British and German attitudes toward compromise will help to explain and evaluate significant differences in the behavior of these nations in both domestic and international politics. The distinguished British political theorist, Sir Ernest Barker, argued2 that in a compromise all ideas are reconciled. The compromise can be accepted by all because it bears the imprint of all. Discussion has as its purpose compromise, and therefore the achievement of compromise is the justification for discussion in a democracy. If there has been no compromise, discussion has been useless. Barker, furthermore, sees law-making as the process of the grand dialectic of public debate, in which thought clashes with thought until a reconciling compromise is found. If a majority engages in discussion with a minority, and if that discussion is conducted in a spirit of give-and-take the result will be that the ideas of the majority are widened to include some of the ideas of the minority which have established their truth in the give-and-take of debate. Edmund Burke formulated it: All government ... is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others. It is in this sense that discussion produces, if not unanimity, at any rate something so close to unanimity that we may speak of common consent. This common consent, if it is broad and fundamental enough, becomes consensus about both the form of the decision-making process and the content of the decisions that actually are made. Barker's conception of compromise is typically British, representing a wide variety of political views. Harold Laski, for instance, argued in his classic study of Parliamentary Government in England that successful representative government presupposes a nation fundamentally at one upon all the major objects of governmental activity so fundamentally at one that the thought of violence as an instrument of political change is incapable of entering the minds of more than an insignificant portion of the nation. Along the same lines, Earl Balfour stressed that

The Structuring of Mass Politics in the Smaller European Democracies: A Developmental Typology

There is a curious awkwardness about discussions of “types” in comparative politics. Aristotle and Montesquieu taught us to proceed by classifications of regimes, and the current generation of computer enthusiasts have offered us more and more powerful tools for the handling of wide ranges of attributes of political entities and for the establishment of complex multi-dimensional typologies. Yet as soon as we are confronted with a concrete table of alternative types and look over the lists of cases assigned to each cell, our first reaction is almost immediately to add further distinctions, to reject the imposition of similarities across historically distinct units. The student of politics is torn between two sets of super-ego demands: he feels an obligation to reduce the welter of empirical facts to a body of parsimoniously organized general propositions but he also feels under pressure to treat each case sui generis, as a unique configuration worthy of an effort of understanding all on its own. This is of course a dilemma common to all social sciences but is particularly difficult to handle in the study of such highly visible, amply documented macro-units as historical polities. Students of census records, elections and survey data have an enormous analytical advantage: they deal with large numbers of anonymous units and can therefore proceed with the analysis of their data with a minimum of interference from exogenous “noise”. The student of comparative politics is roughly in the position of a social scientist asked to analyze the census records or the survey responses of a set of close friends: he cannot prevent himself from bringing into his analysis of the coded data on the punched cards a wide range of uncoded “surplus” information acquired through years of acquaintance with the subjects. The standardized sample survey derives great methodological strength from its programmatic insistence on equality, anonymity and distance in the treatment of the information collected: the data are given once and for all in the protocols or on the IBM cards and there is no allowance for fuzzy interaction with the subjects outside that framework.

Church and State in England: the Price of Establishment

N THE DEBATE on Church and State relations in the United States, arguments are sometimes advanced that ignore or misinterpret the experience of other countries. If it is assumed that the American situation is totally unique, then no harm can come from disregarding the variety of ways in which Church-State problems have been resolved by other political systems. But when American solutions are advanced and are buttressed by propositions making a claim of universal validity, then the student of comparative politics has an obligation to examine that claim. A proposition that asserts such a general truth appears in the recent opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, Engel v. Vitale. In delivering the opinion of the Court, Justice Black argues as follows: When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain.' And a little further on: Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. 2 The invocation of historic fact is hardly enough to convince us that governmental support for one religion plainly leads to indirect coercive pressure on other religions. To the full history of persecutions on the part of established religions must be added the experience of today's constitutional democracies. Some of these democracies possess established religions and seemingly neither persecute nor coerce religious minorities. If what seems to be true can be demonstrated and the object of this paper is to do so in the case of England then Justice Black's fears cannot be justified on the grounds of results that stem inexorably from any and all systems of church establishment.

The Non-Western Political Process

T HE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE is to outline some of the dominant and distinctive characteristics of the non-Western political process. In recent years, both the student of comparative politics and the field worker in the newly emergent and economically underdeveloped countries have found it helpful to think in terms of a general category of non-Western politics.1 There are, of course, great differences among the non-Western societies. Indeed, in the past, comparative analysis was impeded by an appreciation of the rich diversity in the cultural traditions and the historical circumstances of the Western impact; students and researchers found it necessary to concentrate on particular cultures, and as a consequence attention was generally directed to the unique features of each society. Recently, however, attempts to set forth some of the characteristics-eommon to the political life of countries experiencing profound social change have stimulated fruitful discussions among specialists on the different non-Western regions as well as among general students of comparative politics. For this discussion to continue, it is necessary for specialists on the different areas to advance, in the form of rather bold and unqualified statements, generalized models of the political process common in non-Western societies.2 Then, by examining the ways in which particular non-Western countries differ from the generalized models, it becomes possible to engage in significant comparative analysis.

The Planning of Foreign Policy in Canada

In the past fifteen years Canada has emerged from the position of a somewhat obstreperous exponent of isolationism and Canadian nationalism to become a leading middle power. This rapid rise to international importance has brought in its train many significant developments in Canada. Few are more interesting than the process by which Canadian foreign policy is presently being made, for its examination throws some light on the substance of Canadian foreign policy and provides the student of comparative politics with an important example of the planning of foreign policy under a Cabinet form of government. It also shows some of the problems and possibilities of a rapidly developed governmental organization.