30:240: Comparative
Politics, Spring 2007
1:30 – 4:20 Mondays, 143 SH
William
Reisinger
344
Schaeffer or 1111 UCC, 335-0373
Office
Hours: by appointment
In this course, we examine trends in the comparative
study of politics as well as the methodological underpinnings of such
study. We analyze others’ research and
familiarize ourselves with arguments about how one ought to carry out
comparative research. We will read in their entirety five recently published
research monographs, devoting a class session to discussing each. These books provide a sample of what
comparative political scientists do.
Each has citations to other works in its research tradition. Other class sessions will cover issues in the
development of the field and in comparative methodology.
The following books are on sale at Iowa Book (and on
reserve in the library):
Fish, Democracy
Derailed in
Jacoby, Imitation
and Politics (Cornell 2000)
Katznelson
and Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (2002)
Lichbach and
Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure
(1997)
Lindberg, Democracy and Elections in Africa (Johns
The following book will be purchased as an on-line group
order from the press:
McGillivray, Privileging Industry (
The following books are available for
purchase and on reserve but we will not read them in class. They are optional resources for your paper
assignment:
Williams,
Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9th ed. (2007)
Your grade for the course will be based on your
performance in the four areas below. For
each component of the course grade, I assign a numerical score, then find the
weighted average of those scores to determine the course grade. Scores of 98-100 correspond to A+, 93-97 to
A, 90-92 to A-, 88-89 to B+, etc. The
department considers course grades below B- to be unsatisfactory for doctoral
candidates.
Be sure to turn in all the required writings on time. I will deduct the equivalent of one half letter grade from any short book review that is not completed by the beginning of the class for which it is assigned and from the first version of the long paper if I don’t receive it by 4:30 p.m. on March 30. I will deduct a full letter grade from the content for the long paper if the final version is not turned in by May 9th. There can be no exceptions for these deadlines, even a death in the family or your own illness. This means you are taking a big risk if you put off either version of the paper until the last minute.
Incompletes for the course will not be given except when extreme
and unavoidable circumstances cause you to be unable to turn in the final
version of your major paper on time.
1)
Class attendance and in-class
performance, primarily discussion of readings [worth 25% of the course grade].
2)
A one-page list of questions about an
assigned reading and your leading class discussion about that reading [10%].
In the list of readings below, the assigned readings you can choose from
are in brown font. Your questions should
be designed to provoke useful discussion of the reading. They should call for a critical judgment by
the other students and should be capable of eliciting different answers. (My lists below of “Questions to consider as
you read” are supposed to be of this type as well, so they can serve as
examples.)
3)
Five 2-page reviews of the research
monographs [together worth 25%]. Each 2-page book review is due to me by 8:00
am of the day of the class session. I
prefer that you send them to me via e-mail as attachments in Word format. (The equivalent of 2 pages of single-spaced,
12-point, 1-inch-margin text is 1,500 words.
Please don’t exceed this word count.)
The reviews should be critical
reviews, that is, they should assess the pros and cons of each book. You should not waste your limited space
recounting what the book is about, since I’ve also read it. Rather, I want to know whether you found the
author’s arguments clear, the evidence persuasive, the conclusions logically
drawn and so forth. Criticism can be
positive; you can praise a book as well as complain about it. In either case, your criticism should be
concrete not vague, with references to [but rarely quotations from] relevant
passages from the book.
4)
A 10-page proposal for an SSRC International
Dissertation Research Fellowship [40%]. I will distribute more information on the
requirements for this proposal. Writing
an effective proposal for this fellowship will require you to understand and
have opinions about the issues raised in course readings, as well as to use
that understanding to depict a research project. A complete version of this paper will be due
on Friday, March 30th.
As with the 2-page reviews, I would prefer to receive the essays as e‑mail
attached files. Although I will not
grade this version, I will read and comment on it so that you can make
improvements. The revised, final version
is due by 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 9th.
I would like to hear from anyone who has a disability
which may require seating modifications or testing accommodations or
accommodations of other class requirements, so that appropriate arrangements
may be made. Please make an appointment
to meet with me outside of class to discuss this.
History
and Debates in The Field of Comparative Politics: Part 1 (January 22)
Loewenberg, “The Influence of
European Émigré Scholars on Comparative Politics, 1925–1965,” American Political
Science Review 100 #4 (November 2006), 597-604. Downloadable from JSTOR.
Finer, The History of Government I: Ancient Monarchies
and Empires (1997), 1-94.
Lichbach and
Zuckerman, “Research Traditions and Theory in Comparative Politics,” in
Lichbach and Zuckerman, 3‑16.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>If it is true that there is no
knowledge without comparison, what is being compared by those who study American
politics (or politics in any other single country)?
Ø
>What do Lichbach and Zuckerman
mean when, on p. 8, they use the
term “ontological and epistemological symmetry”?
Approaches to Comparative
Research: Part 1 (January 29)
Skocpol and
Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 22 #2 (April 1980), 174-197. Downloadable from JSTOR.
Pierson and Skocpol, “Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary
Political Science,” in Katznelson and Milner, 693‑721.
Migdal,
“Studying the State,” in Lichbach and Zuckerman, 208‑235.
Levi, “The State of the Study of the State,” in Katznelson
and Milner, 33‑55.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>What, if anything, makes the study
of politics different from the study of history?
Ø
>What standards would one employ to
determine that a given historical institutional analysis is rigorous?
Ø
>“States” are fictions. To what extent are they useful fictions?
Ø
>On pp. 219-20, Migdal describes
Polyani as arguing that capitalism and democracy are in conflict. Could that be right?
Comparative Politics Research
Monograph #1 (February 5)
Jacoby
Approaches to Comparative
Research: Part 2 (February 12)
Lane, The
Art of Comparative Politics (1997), ch. 2
Przeworski and Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social
Inquiry (1970), 8-11, 26-39 & 74-87.
Barnes,
“Electoral Behavior and Comparative Politics,” in Lichbach and Zuckerman, 115‑141.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>Is it possible to establish
general causal statements holding context constant?
Ø
>Did MDS or MSS fit Jacoby’s approach, or neither or both?
Ø
>How acceptable to you are the
tenets of what Lane calls the “Behavioralist’s creed”?
Ø
>Do these tenets apply primarily to
the particular approach to the study of politics that is known as behavioralism
(as distinct from rational choice or historical institutionalism) or do they
describe beliefs common to scholars from all three schools? (Remember, Lane thinks behavioralism was
short-lived.)
Comparative Politics Research
Monograph #2 (February 19)
Lindberg
The Choice of Countries and
approaches (February 26)
Collier “The
Comparative Method,” in Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the
Discipline II (1993), 105‑120.
Ross, “Culture and Identity in Comparative Political Analysis,”
in Lichbach and Zuckerman, 42‑80.
Gerring,
“What is a Case Study and What is it good for? American Political Science Review 98 #2 (2004),
341-354. Downloadable from JSTOR.
Lieberman,
“Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy in Comparative Research,” American Political Science Review
99 #3 (August 2005), 435-452. Downloadable from
JSTOR.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>How many countries are best for
which type of questions?
Ø
>Can a study within a single
country be “comparative”?
Ø
>Does the logic Gerring uses in assessing the value of case studies
apply to Skocpol and
Somer’s three types of comparative historical analysis?
Comparative Politics Research
Monograph #3 (March 5)
Fish
Equivalence and Measurement
(March 19)
Przeworski and Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social
Inquiry (1970), 106-131.
Collier and
Locke and Thelen, “Problems of Equivalence in Comparative Politics: Apples
and
King, et al.,
“Enhancing the Validity and Cross-Cultural Comparability of Measurement in
Survey Research,” American Political Science Review 98 #1 (February
2004), 191-207. Downloadable from
JSTOR.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>Does either reliability or
validity as a criterion pose special problems for those doing comparative
research? What are those problems?
Ø
>Do the issues of equivalence and
measurement discussed in these readings cause you any concern about the full
books you have read so far?
Approaches to Comparative
Research: Part 3 (March 26)
Eckstein, “Congruence Theory Explained,” in Eckstein et al., Can
Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet
Geddes, “The
Great Transformation in the Study of Politics in Developing Countries,” in
Katznelson and Milner, 342‑370.
Laitin, “Comparative
Politics: The State of the Subdiscipline,” in Katznelson and Milner, 630‑659.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>How attractive to you is Lichbach’s call to pay attention to “the
socially embedded unit act”? (See pp.
261-2.)
Ø
>How should “development” be
defined?
Ø
>Is “development” a phenomenon of
interest to political scientists?
Correspondingly, is it useful to define the non-Western countries as
“developing”? What does it mean when we do
that?
Ø
>Is it useful to include
postcommunist countries in the category of developing? If any, some or all?
First
version of paper due on FRIDAY, March 30
Approaches to Comparative
Research: Part 4 (April 2)
Levi, “A
Model, A Method and a Map,” in Lichbach and Zuckerman, 19‑41.
Munck, “Game Theory and Comparative Politics: New Perspectives and Old
Concerns,” World Politics 53 #2 (January 2001), 173-204. Downloadable from Project Muse.
Weingast, “Rational-Choice Institutionalism,” in Katznelson and Milner,
660‑692.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø >Levi (p. 20) wants to stress that rational choice theory is scientific
(falsifiable, general, etc.). But, what
makes it distinct from other scientific theoretical frameworks, such as
behavioral approaches?
Ø >If Levi puts so much stress on institutions as key to the
rational-choice approach, why distinguish between structuralists and
rationalists (in the volume and in the list of authors I passed out in class)?
Ø >Given the pros and cons about rational-choice modeling in comparative
politics that these three authors propose, how valuable to you as a scholar
would it be to master the techniques of r-c modeling?
Comparative
Politics Research Monograph #4 (April 9)
Approaches to Comparative
Research: Part 5 (April 16)
Alt, “Comparative Political Economy,” in Katznelson and Milner, 147‑171.
Thelen, “The Political Economy of Business and Labor in the Developed
Democracies,” in Katznelson and Milner, 371‑403.
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>What is comparative political
economy?
Ø
>How do CPE approaches relate to
state-oriented approaches? To
class-oriented approaches?
Comparative
Politics Research Monograph #5 (April 23)
McGillivray
History and Debates in The Field of Comparative
Politics: Part 2 (April 30)
Zuckerman,
“Reformulating Explanatory Standards and Advancing Theory in Comparative
Politics,” in Lichbach and Zuckerman, 277‑310.
Eckstein,
“Unfinished Business: Reflections on the Scope of Comparative Politics,” Comparative
Political Studies 31 #4 (August 1998), 503-534. Downloadable from JSTOR.
“Symposium on Area Studies and the
Discipline,” PS: Political Science and Politics (2001), 787-811. Downloadable from JSTOR.
Rogowski, “How Inference in the Social (But Not the
Physical) Sciences Neglects Theoretical Anomaly,” in Brady and
Questions to consider
as you read:
Ø
>How successfully have the course’s various readings allowed you to fill in the timeline I
passed out at the beginning of the course?
Ø
>Given the many debates among
comparativists about theory and method that we have read, what holds this
subfield of political science together?
Is comparative politics largely, somewhat or not at all coherent?
Final version of paper due WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 3:00 PMç