Subfield Of Comparative Politics Research Articles

Green Political Science

Each year we have the honor to publish an article version of the APSA Presidential Address. In the six years we have done this John Ishiyama is the first comparativist whose work we have featured in this capacity. He presently holds an appointment as University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. John has long been a fixture in the subfield of comparative politics for his contributions on democratization, political parties, and ethnic politics in both the post-Soviet region and Africa. He has also written extensively on teaching, publishing, and assessment in political science. He has published over 150 articles. And while the outlets and subject matter are too diverse to summarize succinctly, we do want to mention that “The Politics of Intercountry Adoption: Explaining Variation in the Legal Requirements of Sub-Saharan African Countries,” coauthored with Marijke Breuning, won the 2010 APSA Heinz Eulau Award for Best Journal Article published in Perspectives on Politics during the previous year (2009).

Studying states and regimes in Central Asia: contributions to comparative politics and future challenges

ABSTRACT This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarity. It then addresses the challenges confronting scholars of the region, including uneven theoretical contributions to comparative politics and impediments in the feasibility of field research. It identifies several lively debates in comparative politics to which Central Asianists have the potential to contribute important insights. It concludes that the study of states and regimes in Central Asia has greatly enriched some debates in comparative politics (and vice versa), but declining pools of funding, the politicization of academic research, and unequal access to institutional resources among local and Western scholars threaten to diminish the field’s contributions in the coming years.

Institutions, Ideologies, and Comparative Political Theory

The growing prominence of comparative political theory has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists should apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods used in the subfield of comparative politics, because they argue that applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that political thinkers occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.

Racial regimes, comparative politics, and the problem of judgment

ABSTRACTThis review essay examines the practice of judgment that characterized the subfield of comparative politics from its origins in openly racist ideas of the capacity for self-rule through to its twentieth-century behavioralist and positivist iterations. Though continually faced with new political phenomena that called into question its inherited criteria of judgment, comparative politics tended to practice determinative rather than reflective judgment, that is, to subsume the particulars of other cultures under known rules. Further, the essay examines the racialized conception of self-rule described by Michael Hanchard as embedded in a larger problem of Western political thinking: the flight from action into rule and tendency to think of politics wholly in terms of ruling and being ruled.

From Pork to Policy: The Rise of Programmatic Campaigning in Japanese Elections

We examine two related propositions central to the subfield of comparative politics: that candidates for office adopt different electoral strategies under different electoral systems and rely more on particularism when faced with intraparty competition. We apply an innovative methodological approach that combines probabilistic topic modeling with in-depth qualitative interpretations of each topic to an original collection of 7,497 Japanese-language candidate election manifestos used in elections on either side of Japan’s 1994 electoral reform. We find that the reform, which eliminated intraparty competition, was associated with a decline in particularism and an increase in promises of programmatic goods such as national security among candidates affiliated with Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. This is not explained by the entry of new candidates or other variables that could plausibly increase discussion of national security. Consistent with the theory, we find that opposition candidates relied on progra...

Comparative Politics and the Arab Uprisings

How have scholars working in the political science subfield of comparative politics approached the Arab uprisings in their analyses? Two dominant trends have been to explore the uprisings through the literatures on robust authoritarianism and on social movements. While each of these has produced rich and lively debates, scholars of Middle East politics have mostly drawn comparisons at the national level: for example, explaining variation between those state that experienced uprisings and those that did not, or between those uprisings that turned violent and those that did not. I suggest that adopting “states” and “movements” as objects of analysis can obscure some of the more unique dynamics of the uprisings—dynamics that might be leveraged in contributing new ideas to broader theoretical debates. I illustrate the ways in which research designs that focus on identifying and explaining variation between and across cases tend to assume discrete objects of study (i.e., regimes and movements) in ways that obscure other fascinating processes and practices at both the micro-level and in terms of the complex interconnections across states and regions. This focus has in turn led to a deficit in studies of in-case variation: how mobilization and state repression varied, for example, between Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez, rural regions, and other locations outside of Tahrir Square. Finally, I applaud and encourage the continuation of the lively and open debates within the field about the strengths and weaknesses of our earlier scholarship and the potential of various future research agendas.

Context, Behavior, Outcomes, and Tradeoffs: The Intellectual Contributions of G. Bingham Powell, Jr. to the Study of Comparative Democratic Processes

G Bingham Powell's core intellectual contribution to the study of politics has been to help us understand fundamental normative tradeoffs that are inherent to institutional choice in democratic political systems. The tradeoffs involve dimensions of political performance of central concern in the discipline, including political violence, political participation, political representation, political accountability, and political stability. In offering innovative insights about these substantive topics, Powell's research has played a crucial role in shaping the subfield of comparative politics by offering important lessons about how to advance the study of democratic systems.

Unifying the field of comparative judicial politics: towards a general theory of judicial behaviour

The field of judicial politics had long been neglected by political scientists outside the United States. But the past 20 years have witnessed considerable change. There is now a large body of scholarship on European courts and judges. In addition, judicial politics is on its way to become a sub-field of comparative politics in its own right. Examining the models used in the literature, this article suggests that this geographical convergence is also bringing about theoretical convergence. One manifestation of theoretical convergence is that models of judicial decision-making once deemed inapplicable in Europe are now used in studies of European courts too. But the convergence trend goes further. What we already know about judges and the contexts in which they operate suggests a way of reconciling the various attitudinal and institutionalist approaches used by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic within a general, unifying theory of judicial behaviour. The emerging theory provides a framework to assess the weight and interactions of a wide range of determinants of judicial decision-making across countries and legal systems.

Comparison and Integration: A Path toward a Comparative Politics of Gender

Moving from a “gender and comparative politics” to a “comparative politics of gender” is a challenging proposition. In this essay, I offer two mechanisms for doing this—emphasizing the comparative nature of gender politics research and encouraging greater integration of gender research into the subfield of comparative politics. I illustrate how current research generally uses a “gender and comparative politics” approach that is insufficient for advancing the field and then describe how scholars can work to emphasize greater comparison and integration in the literature. This will help to move the gender and politics literature toward a comparative politics of gender.

Unifying the Field of Comparative Judicial Politics: Towards a General Theory of Judicial Behaviour

The field of judicial politics had long been neglected by political scientists outside the United States. But the past twenty years have witnessed considerable change. There is now a large body of scholarship on European courts and judges. And judicial politics is on its way to become a sub-field of comparative politics in its own right. Examining the models used in the literature, this article suggests that the geographical convergence is also bringing about theoretical convergence. One manifestation of theoretical convergence is that models of judicial decision-making once deemed inapplicable in Europe are now used in studies of European courts too. But the convergence trend goes further. What we already know about judges and the contexts in which they operate suggests a way of reconciling the various attitudinal and institutionalist approaches used by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic within a general, unifying theory of judicial behaviour. The emerging theory provides a framework to assess the weight and interactions of a wide range of determinants of judicial decision-making across countries and legal systems.

What You Use Matters: Coding Protest Data

Data matter. Protest data are no exception. Not all datasets are equal, nor do all have equal validity and reliability. Thus far, there has been no serious debate regarding the quality of protest datasets. Increasing attention to protest studies suggests that now is the time to talk about the sine qua non for growing knowledge in this sub-field of comparative politics. In this paper I emphasize the importance of the underlying data sources. In particular, I argue that protest datasets should be drawn from many sources, particularly as many local sources as possible, in order to provide accurate and meaningful data. To support this contention, I first discuss traditional protest datasets and their limitations and provide suggestions about how to overcome these limitations. Second, I explain an alternative type of dataset coding and its characteristics. And finally, I use statistical tests to illustrate the importance of local sources. I give my sincere and deep thanks to Erik S. Herron and Ronald A. Francisco for reviewing drafts of this paper and giving me indispensable comments and continuous encouragements. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Collins and Omur Yilmaz who edited drafts of this manuscript. My appreciation also goes to anonymous reviews of this paper and the editors of PS: Political Science and Politics. I would like to thank my late farther, Ki-Dae whose love and support were simply endless. I'll share any compliment with them, but only I will take responsibility for any error.

Three Worlds of Welfare State Research

This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there are increasing opportunities for intellectual exchange across these clusters. Research in this important empirical sub field of comparative politics has been pluralistic and eclectic, both methodologically and theoretically. Overall, this stance has yielded substantial benefits.

Even Paranoids Have Real Enemies

Buffeted from all sides because it is not sufficiently generalizing and scientific, because it sticks to outdated notion of field research, and because it is not “relevant” to the career concerns of the average American Student, the subfield of comparative politics seems to have fallen on evil days. Peter Sackman (PS Summer 1975 vol. VIII, no. 3, 262–263) singles out the subfield for adverse comment in his report on dissertations completed and in progress. One would not quarrel with his treatment if it were justified by even the simplest tests of statistical honesty. One doubts that Mr. Sackman is out to “get” comparative politics, but if he should claim to be a friend, then the subdiscipline has not need for enemies.In the last paragraph of his essay he notes the “marked decline of additions in category VII” (comparative politics). No quarrel with that, for it showed the largest numerical decline of any subdiscipline. But Figure I, showing dissertation increases and decreases for the subdisciplines, indicates that category IV (U.S. State and Local Government) suffered a greater percentage decline, 28% vs. 24% for comparative politics. Six of the eight subdisciplines suffered some decline. Only one, Public Administration, showed a marked increase, viz. 65%. So why single out comparative politics for special mention?

Even Paranoids Have Real Enemies

Buffeted from all sides because it is not sufficiently generalizing and scientific, because it sticks to outdated notion of field research, and because it is not “relevant” to the career concerns of the average American Student, the subfield of comparative politics seems to have fallen on evil days. Peter Sackman (PSSummer 1975 vol. VIII, no. 3, 262–263) singles out the subfield for adverse comment in his report on dissertations completed and in progress. One would not quarrel with his treatment if it were justified by even the simplest tests of statistical honesty. One doubts that Mr. Sackman is out to “get” comparative politics, but if he should claim to be a friend, then the subdiscipline has not need for enemies.In the last paragraph of his essay he notes the “marked decline of additions in category VII” (comparative politics). No quarrel with that, for it showed the largest numerical decline of any subdiscipline. But Figure I, showing dissertation increases and decreases for the subdisciplines, indicates that category IV (U.S. State and Local Government) suffered a greater percentage decline, 28% vs. 24% for comparative politics. Six of the eight subdisciplines suffered some decline. Only one, Public Administration, showed a marked increase, viz. 65%. So why single out comparative politics for special mention?