Understanding Comparative Politics and Its Importance

Hi, I'm Patrick and welcome to Comparative Politics in a Globalized World. New year, first lecture, this is exciting stuff, maybe for me more so than for you because you've already seen me a bunch of times. What we'll do today in this lecture is... we will have a very gentle kind of ramp up to the course itself, in that we ask mostly, why do we even compare? You know, why are we teaching this entire course on this seemingly one method in political... science. Because after all, you know, comparative politics isn't everything that you do. In fact, if you study IR, you might be asking, why do you do comparative politics in the first place? And hopefully, I'm going to provide you with a couple of good reasons today that could answer that question for you. So this is really your introduction. And in the next lecture, we will look more at the how and what of comparative politics. So what are we actually analyzing and how we're doing this? Today is very much about the why. Why should you care about this particular lecture series. So let's start with a couple of definitions. And I will point out in a second what the core operative clauses are in these definitions. So what actually is comparative politics, we have two main definitions here from Viarda and from Lane, they're a couple of years old, but I think they're still applicable to this course and to what we're doing in comparative politics more broadly. So Viarda says comparative politics involves the systematic comparison of the world's political systems and we want to explain differences as well as similarities. But we're not the journalists, of course. We're not just reporting or describing one specific country, but we want to explain and explore patterns, processes, and irregularities across countries. Pretty much hits the same spot here when they ask what is comparative politics. It's two things. First, a world and second, a discipline. So first off, it's a world in that we open up our view. of the world. Comparative politics can look at all political systems across the entire globe and across all time. The discipline then that is related to this is a field of study that tries to explain again the patterns and regularities that we find across these. So just pointing out here in bold a couple of the main operative phrases and core concepts. So comparative politics is very much about a systematic comparison. That means we look at differences and similarities and we want to explain patterns. A little bit of this I've already talked to you about in ISEP actually last semester. And then I said that much of what IR theory was doing was pattern recognition and essentially we're doing the same thing here in comparative politics. And then in the Lane definition maybe the most important part here is that we look at political behavior and political institutions and we want to to explain and understand them. And maybe, and this is what's interesting about the lane definition here, maybe we even want to influence it. Because once we understand where a country is relative to all others, maybe then we can also develop an understanding of where we want that country to go. Do we want it to go up? or down in whatever ranking or comparison we're making, for example. So comparative politics is important, and that goes for both of you that are studying politics and those that are studying IR, because it is one of the main sub-disciplines of political science. Obviously, we have other disciplines. You've learned about international relations while you were on ISEB last semester. You already know about political theory, because again, you'll have a course on it. Public policy is another one. So comparative politics is a sub-field. there are people out there that just consider themselves to be comparative political scientists or comparativists if you want. And the things that are really important in comparative politics compared to other sub-disciplines is that spatiality and temporality are important in defining the unit of analysis. So variation across space, that's spatiality, and variation across time. that's temporality, those are the things that interest us. Changes across or differences across space or across time. What separates comparative politics say from something like IR is that we are mostly focused on interactions that happen within political systems. So let's say we explain British politics with things that happen inside Britain and then we can compare that with French politics and we explain that with politics inside France, or factors inside France, we're not really in comparison to ...comparative politics worried about the interactions between these two systems. So when we compare, say, Britain and Tuvalu in the Pacific, that doesn't mean that we're comparing how these states are actually interacting in the real world. That has very little to do with what we do in comparative politics. We make that comparison as the sort of observer of the situation. So comparative politics between Britain and Tuvalu is not about how much are they interacting, how much are they trading, how are they exchanging political statements and so on. It is about taking the political system of Britain and then comparing that to the political system of Tuvalu. So it's both a field of inquiry and the method of inquiry. Field of inquiry because there's people that look at the entire world through the lens of comparative politics. They think that the best way to answer political questions is to look at them comparatively. And it's also a method of inquiry because you can be interested in all kinds of empirical political questions and then you can use comparison as your method. And much of this first part of the course is going to be about that. How do you actually employ and use the comparative method? What's nice about comparative politics that I always feel is that it broadens our horizons. You know one of the things that we hear occasionally in Edinburgh or maybe even we hear in the western world, is that we don't pay enough attention to things that happen outside of our little bubble. Well, with comparative politics, we can burst that bubble, we can open up our horizons, and we can compare all kinds of things from all over the world. One of the things that I like bringing up here is, you see the map here, on the right-hand side, there is this bit of a meme, you know, Africa is a country. Whenever you hear someone say, you know, in Africa, politics works like that, or in Africa, people are doing that, that's, of course, complete baloney. Because Africa is a continent of over a billion people, has a ton of countries, many of which are very different in their politics, in their developmental status, in the political culture, and so on. So with the lens of comparative politics, we can break that up. We can have a more fine-grained view of the world that goes beyond just our own immediate horizons. Now, the comparative method itself, well, comparativists really just do politics using the comparative method. And what that means is that it's an effort to use similarities and differences between political units, that's at least how Schmitter defines it, as a basis for developing theory, for testing hypotheses, inferring causality, and producing reliable generalizations. So most of the things that we do as political scientists, you know, coming up with stories about the world, that's the theory, testing hypotheses, um, figuring out whether our expectations are true, affirming causality, whether one thing causes another, and producing generalizations. So finding larger patterns about the world, that is everything that we do with the comparative method on this particular course. So other sub-disciplines of political science might be doing this too, but they're not doing it through the use of comparison, which is what this course is going to teach you. So there's different ways of applying the comparative method. obviously, and most of the differences between the application of the method come from what you're trying to do with it. So the rest of this first lecture is very much going to consist of what are the purposes of comparison and how can the comparative method help us for each of these purposes. So we could compare to describe things better, we could compare things to explain them, to simplify them, to evaluate them, or maybe even to govern them, so to come up with policy solutions to whatever we find, or to the questions we have. So we can apply the comparative method differently for different purposes, and keep these things in mind whenever you hear something in the rest of the course about how the comparative method is used, and ask yourself just really briefly what are we trying to do here? Is this study trying to describe the world? Is it trying to explain it, simplify it, evaluate it, or maybe even govern it? The last one is kind of rare but we'll come to that on the last slide. So the first thing we can do with comparison is description. Describing the characteristics of an object is the first thing that we tend to use comparison for. And this starts from the very simple observation and that is that the characteristics of any object, of any phenomenon, or any concept, are always defined and evaluated in relation to others of the same class. Now the sounds a little bit abstract. So let's break that down a little bit in more common commonplace language. So you can actually evaluate ...or say anything at all about the characteristics of an object if you don't also at the same time put it into context with other similar objects. So, is this a fast car? Well, you can't answer that really. Is this a stylish outfit? Well, you know, compared to a potato sack it might be, but compared to other things it might not be. So, you can play a little game with your friends and family that is called, well, compared to what? So, whenever... someone asks you a political question, for example, you know, oh my god, taxes are so high, oh dear, Britain has too much immigration, you know, Brexit is the worst policy ever, it's so hard to find a job nowadays, or this pandemic is terrible, you can always ask yourself, quietly or out loud, your friends, well, compared to what? So yes, of course, the pandemic is bad, but is it bad when we compare it to previous pandemics? By the way, this is not to say that the current pandemic is bad, but that if we want to say something about the characteristics, how deadly is it, for example, how much of a public policy problem is it, then we can only find a good answer if we compare it to previous episodes. And then, of course, we can discuss how comparable those previous episodes are. But, you know, if you're one of those people that opens Twitter every morning and thinks, oh dear, this is the darkest timeline, surely we're living in the worst worst ever time, then you should ask yourself again, well, compare to what? You know, if you compare yourself to, let's say, the blissful days of early 2016, that might be true. If you compare it to the 30 years war, probably not. So comparison is a key in understanding the characteristics of what you're actually looking at. And you can compare across space and across time. And over time, that's already what I talked about in one of the previous slides. So Because we can really only ascribe characteristics to an object when we compare it to others, explicitly or implicitly, the same is really true for political analysis. So when we look at political institutions, at regime types, at public opinion, at policymaking, that is all often defined in relation to other things in the same class. So is a particular public policy popular? Well, you know what, if you just look at one case and you see you know, 60% of the citizens like this public policy, that's actually not enough. That doesn't really tell you if that's a popular policy. You either have to compare it to other policies. Is this the most popular policy of all the ones that you've polled? Or are you comparing it to policies in other countries, for example, and you see that in this particular country, this public policy has a very low approval rating compared to others. So that's the idea of using comparison as a descriptive tool, essentially. You are putting things into context, you're comparing an object with other objects in the same class. So here's one little graph that shows how this can work, for example. So if you analyze things across space, you can, for example, analyze the electoral systems of countries across the world. which is called a cross sectional analysis. So do you have for example a proportional system or a majoritarian system as it is for example in the UK? And we'll come to these in greater detail. But so that can be one axis that you compare things on across space and then you have over time that's the vertical axis that's this axis here that basically goes from the 19th century and the formation of what we consider modern states down here. all the way to the 21st century where we are now, and we can compare things over time. And we can, for example, say, you know, are parties today the same as parties were when parties first appeared on the political stage in the 19th century? And we can both describe what parties are better through this, but maybe we can also... perform some of the other functions of comparison such as the explanatory function. So what explains for example the way that parties have changed over time if indeed they have? Another example here, this question I brought up, you know, does Britain have a lot of immigration? Does Britain maybe even have too much immigration? Probably sounds a little bit weird coming from an immigrant myself, but that's certainly a question that undoubtedly you've dealt with in your own lives, at least thinking about that or hearing about that in the papers or from people that you know. Now, if we just look at absolute numbers here, if we just look at the graph for the UK, we see very. clearly, even though this ends in 2015, that there has been a net influx of people into the UK. 1990s there have been more people that have migrated into the UK than people that have migrated out of the UK and You could look at this graph and you could say well look clearly You know Britain has tons of migration because the red line is clearly above the blue line and it's been above the blue line for a long time so, you know clearly Pretty clearly from this graph, we must conclude that Britain has a lot of migration. Maybe it even has too much migration because, you know, shouldn't those two lines be the same really? We should only let as many people in as people are going out. And it's really only when you put things in context, when you compare Britain to other states, that you see where Britain ends up on the overall scale. So if you put Britain into context with all the other OECD member states, so basically kind of the Western world, you see that Britain actually lands smack dab in the middle when you express immigration as a percentage of population. So Britain actually doesn't have, compared to its population, an above average level of migration. In fact, it's significantly below the EU average and the OECD average in terms of how many people are flowing in. into the country. Now granted, there are other countries that have less net migration, even EU countries, even neighboring EU countries, you know, the US actually has less migration as a percentage of population. It's partially because it's a very big country, but also places like Italy, the Czech Republic. Israel or France actually have less migration than the UK. Then you see at the other end of the scale here you see a huge number of countries that actually have far more migration than the UK when it's expressed at the percentage of the population. Countries like Austria, Germany and then a very big outlier here Luxembourg because it's such a small country have a lot more migrants per coming into the country. as a percentage of population. So now has your opinion then changed? If your opinion before was, you know, Britain has a lot of migration, would you correct, could you correct this view if you looked at this graph? At the very least, it teaches you that Britain is by no means exceptional in terms of how many people it attracts coming into its country. So that's the first thing that we can do with comparison, is describe these sort of differences better. We can, of course, also have a broader view of the world, and we can look at, for example, things like electoral systems, which is a lecture that I will hold. And I know this sounds... not terribly exciting right now, but we're going to make this exciting when we get to it, because electoral systems are actually super interesting, and they have far more electoral and political ramifications than you might think. And you see here, if you just basically open a map of the world, I stole this shamelessly from Reddit here, if you just open a map of the world and you just graph which electoral systems are used where, you see that there is a lot of variation across the world. It's also not the case that there's just proportional and majoritarian systems on either side. You can actually see that there's a lot of variations of these systems. So if we think about, you know, the state of electoral systems around the world, if we don't use comparison we don't get this kind of full picture. What you see, for example, is interestingly, maybe, is that there seems to be a world that is mostly first past the post. That's the red world here, which also tends to overlap pretty significantly with the former British Empire. And then you have a blue world that uses some form of proportional representation that seems to be a little more widely distributed around the world. In the lecture that we have on this, we'll look a little more in greater detail at this. We'll figure out why that is the case, why certain countries... have chosen certain electoral systems, and we'll look at a few of them in detail, and we'll work out their advantages and disadvantages. My personal favorite here is the board account system, which is really only used by one state. I'm not going to tell you what, you're going to have to wait for the lecture for that. But the board account system tends to elect not the people that are liked by the most, but the people that are hated by the least. which I think is a would be a good way to conduct things in the in the rest of your life too. So this type of description of the world really shows the amount of variation in a specific category or phenomenon. In this case systems and we learn already that there's a lot more variation than you might have expected even within the same world region. So the overall idea in using comparison to describe things is to identify specific characteristics. So what's distinct about a particular policy, a society, or a political system and what does it have in common with others? And sometimes we simply don't know the answer to this. For not every political questions have we had a good systematic comparative analysis that encompasses the whole globe. for example, and that would allow us to come up with specific types. So one thing that we could look at, this is just a random map that I stole from somewhere. is the phenomenon of who delivers the kind of end-of-the-year wrap-up speech for the country. Now, some countries do this as a Christmas speech, and you see those in blue here. And some countries in light blue here. And some countries do this as a New Year's speech. You see those countries as a dark blue. We also see that in some countries the president delivers the speech. And in some countries... countries the monarch delivers the speech, but even in a fairly homogeneous continent like Europe, we see that there's a good bit of variation. And now we could think about, well, does this tell us something maybe about the political system? Does this tell us something about which actors are key to the political system, or maybe which actors are tasked with the representative functions of political systems and why do these differ? For example, why do, of all countries, Germany and the Czech Republic have a Christmas speech while all the other countries around it, even the other German-speaking countries such as Switzerland or Austria or Slovakia here, why do those have New Year's speeches rather than Christmas speeches? Does this have something to do, for example, with the importance of religion in the political system and how religion is tied to specific... political rituals? We don't know. But until we make such a systematic comparison, we have no chance of really coming up with any explanations because we can't even describe the variation in the world properly. So we have to measure things, we measure things through comparison, and we can identify trends using comparison with this too. So that's all the first part of what we use comparison for. Description, getting a better map of the world. essentially. And map can be both spatial or temporal. by the way, right? Mapping a variation across time is also perfectly fine as a method. Now, we can also use comparison as an explanation. So the question that we're asking here is, why do things vary? So in the descriptive part, we've established that there is variation, for example, or maybe that there's no variation, and that's maybe even more surprising. And then the next logical question that we're asking is, well, why does this variation exist? So why do society's systems... institutions or policies vary, and which factors can explain the patterns or trends. So in the previous example, in the slightly frivolous example, which factors could explain why countries have Christmas speeches versus New Year speeches, and which what factors could explain who holds those. It also allows us for a better way of controlling other confounding factors. So comparison allows us to test certain claims of assumptions by controlling for similarities or differences. So in other words, we can, for example, pick very similar countries that have different outcomes. So are there, for example, a lot of countries that are poor, but only some of them have a problem with corruption? Then we can control for poverty as a cause of corruption, if we pick all poor countries basically, and we can find out well what are the differences between those countries that might explain why some have a problem with corruption and some of them don't. And we're controlling for poverty in this case because we've chosen all poor countries. for our comparative case study. So we can also find out of course which factors cause what. So does poverty imply corruption? So does poverty breed corruption or does corruption make people poor? And that kind of stuff we can explain if we do temporal comparisons. So if we look at poverty and corruption at time t and then at time t plus one essentially, and we do this over a number of years, we can see which factor tracks which other? So, you know, does poverty go up and then corruption goes up? That would probably mean that poverty breeds corruption. Or does corruption go up and then poverty goes up? This is highly simplified, obviously, and that would imply that corruption breeds poverty. One classic example of this is revolutions are breaking out when people are poor or when people are deprived. We can establish that through a comparative case study too, if we control for lots of other things. So if we pick countries, for example, that are very, very different in their political system, different than the political parties, different in the political cultures, but they all are experiencing deprivation, like that's the only thing that connects them. And then we get revolutions in all of those countries that we look at. That is a pretty strong indicator that... It is the deprivation that makes the revolutions happen rather than any of the other factors that are sometimes present, and sometimes they're not. We also can build theory, of course, through this explanatory function, because once we've done a systematic comparison, we've come up with a few factors that can explain certain outcomes, then we want to come up with a general explanation of why those things are connected. So once we assess more than one case, we can then build theoretical frameworks that help us understand the connections between phenomena. Simplification is often a good thing that comparison can give us in that once we are forced to step away with just one case, maybe it's our pet case, maybe it's the case that we know most about, once we step away from that we actually compare it to many other things, we find it easier to abstract from complexity and nuance. So because we don't have to dig into any one case in specific, maybe if we compare, you know, 20 countries, 50 countries, and so on, we really take a bird's eye view of the situation, and we maybe gain a better understanding of what the broad strokes outline of the problem or the question is if we compare. So the risk of getting too tied up into the minutiae of any specific case is reduced when we use comparison. We can also narrow down our focus because we are not worried about, say, all aspects of a political system, but we're only comparing the upper house of several countries and, you know, we want to find out what it does or why it does the things that it does. So we can conduct analyses of specific elements of political systems and that allows us to keep a narrower focus rather than us just looking at one specific case. We can codify concepts, categories, and classifications. So the simplification factor comes into play when we sort countries into certain categories. So the idea of categorizing things through comparison is one that is quite strong. One way that we'll encounter this later on in the course is, for example, that the social scientist S. Bing Anderson found out that there are specific types of welfare states. So how states are taking care of their citizens, that's not randomly distributed around the world, there is very specific models that correspond with specific countries and world regions. And these kind of categorizations can help us understand better why they came about and why they vary. And then lastly, of course, the simplification helps us with quantification and measurement. So comparison, means that we can quantify things better and we can measure things better. And we'll come back to that in a few slides. What are you doing back there? Are you bothering the cat? No, no cat bothering. Okay. Now, evaluation is another thing that is tied in to comparison as a tool. I've technically already talked about this a little bit when I told you that we'll always evaluate the characteristics of an object in the descriptive function when it is compared to other objects in the same category. So if you want to find out which countries, systems or institutions are poor, which ones are dangerous, and undemocratic, authoritarian, unequal, or ineffective. Or if you want to see on the other side of the medal, which countries are successful, peaceful, democratic, liberal, equal, fair, and effective, we can really only establish that through the comparative method. So evaluating where countries rank on all of these factors is a key element of what the comparative method can give us. So in this case, we are generating data and statistics using comparisons. So we do rankings, we do league tables. I think there's a good chance that you actually are studying where you're studying now because you looked at a league table somewhere and you found out that Edinburgh ranks quite highly. Maybe not so much on the student satisfaction. We're still trying to figure that out, but it ranks pretty highly on other factors. So undoubtedly that has influenced even your individual decision making. So it's a pretty powerful tool ranking countries, building indices and indicators, and benchmarking countries in terms of their relative characteristics to others. Now, not always are such comparisons meaningful. So, of course, we have to understand the limitations of them, because not every time we rank something does that necessarily mean that, A, we've understood what's behind it, and B, that that implies necessarily a specific course of action that comes out of this comparison. So how much analytical understanding can these comparisons really offer? So we'll always have to stay critical. Just because something's in a league table, just because something's been ranked, doesn't mean that we should just uncritically accept this as gospel. I'm going to give you two examples of how this evaluation function can be performed by the comparative method. The one you'll probably have seen this at some point, this is the fragile state index. The FSI, until a couple years ago, this was still called the failed state index, but they realized that that wasn't, you know... such good marketing. No one wants to be ranked on the failed state index. And also some countries rank really low on the failed state index. So that means they're only failing a little bit. It's just not a very good concept. So they've now pivoted and called it the fragile state index. So the fragile state index looks at countries around the world and it evaluates how resilient their political systems are, how stable their political systems and their societies are. And you see that this is a map that you often see in political context. You see that most of Europe, Northern America, and certain other parts of the world such as South America, Oceania, and parts of Asia are really stable. They're really not very fragile, but you already see that there's a lot of differences even within Europe. Not all European states are equally stable and there's also a lot of variation in regions that you tend to associate with fragility of states. So let's take Africa here or the Middle East, for example. But we, of course, have to first understand how we've arrived at this index. This is clearly based on essentially one number. You see the scale here on the right-hand side. It goes from 0 to 120. So how have we arrived at this number? And then what does this number actually tell us? The fact that we've ranked these countries? Well, that doesn't really tell us much about what we're supposed to do with it. Because just knowing that something is fragile doesn't necessarily imply a specific policy that's related to that. How do we stabilize these states? How do we help states that are currently in a fragile position? Because, for example, the index tells us nothing about how they've arrived there. Are they unstable due to economic concerns, political concerns? Are there military conflicts? Could be a combination of all of those, and so on. So that's maybe one evaluative function. performed by the comparative method. Another one that you actually were a part of, whether you knew that or not, is the PISA test scores. So you know that these test scores are collected all over the world and they are supposed to measure how well students in schools are doing relatively speaking. So again, this can only be evaluated relatively speaking if I just ask you how good are British students at reading, how good are British students at math. You can't actually say anything about that because you have no comparative object. Now, you could say, for example, that people in London might be better than people in Oxford at math. But then again, you've already introduced an element of comparison. In the PISA test scores, we want to know how well whole countries are doing on these scales. And we can see that the UK tends to do OK on the science scale. I know, by the way, these numbers are a couple of years old. I couldn't find nice graphs for the last ones. The UK is doing quite well on the science side, the UK is not doing all that well on the reading and on the math side, where certain Asian countries are all the way at the top of the league table. And again, we have to first understand where these numbers are coming from, and then that might imply what kind of policy actions we can take. And just to illustrate that there is a lot of variation both across cases, so across countries, but also there's variation. within cases, I've given you the inner UK scores for the past couple of years. So you see the constituent nations of the UK here, Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and you see that in fact they're not all scoring equally well. So yes, England has the highest overall scores, but then there's a good bit of variation in the other countries. So Wales, for example, consistently scores worse in these subjects that are being evaluated. than the other nations, and there's also quite a bit of movement. Northern Ireland, for example, has recently overtaken Scotland, although that is mostly due to Scotland just seeing a steeper decline here. But so what does that imply? What kind of policy actions should we then take? So if you were to advise the Prime Minister, God forbid, if you were to advise the Prime Minister on, you know, how do we improve our PISA scores, A, you have to look at this comparatively, you have to know where you are compared to others, and then you have to know essentially who you have to steal from. So which methods can you adopt to improve your own scores? And we also see that maybe the methods that we adopt have to be different. depending on which part of the UK we're in. Now the last aspect of comparison that I want to cover is governance. And this is again this is quite quick because I've already related to it, because I've already talked about it in the on the previous couple of slides. So governance really in this case means influencing behavior through both regulation and through resource allocation. So you might make certain things illegal for example that might be regulating. Or you might encourage certain other things. You might give tax breaks for specific behaviors. You might give money to specific industries to help them thrive. And so, in other words, you're trying to influence society and the economy around you to go in a certain way. And now, there's an important aspect to this type of comparison, for example, in that it is performative. So performativity comes mostly from critical studies, and it relates to the idea that the way that we think, and especially the way that we talk about the world, can influence our courses of action, and will influence how we see certain problems, and which solutions seem obvious to us, and which other solutions we're not seeing. So, you know, considering climate change to be a problem for the whole world is true. But once we imply comparison, we also see that certain states are much more responsible for this, of course, than others. You know this, but if you look at this graph, which is 10 years old, so I should really find a better one, you see that the United States and the European Union are still responsible for over half of the CO2 emissions. So once we bring comparison into this, it suddenly implies a different course of action maybe than, say, us thinking that the whole world has to come together because really the rest of the world is a relatively small fry compared to the influence that the US and the European Union have over climate change and CO2 emissions. So the way we think about this, the way we compare ourselves to others, the way we compare our countries to others can have an effect on governance. For example, countries hate being named and shamed. Countries hate coming last in league tables. It looks bad for the government. It's always bad when you can express your failure into just one number. Every one of us that's done poorly on an essay knows this. And it will influence how you attack a certain problem, how pressing certain things seem to be. So these rankings, this benchmarking, these league tables that have really proliferated over the past couple of decades, as the availability of data has gone up, and as our... methods of analyzing data have become more sophisticated, they've often been now used as the basis for justifying international action. You know, how dramatic a problem climate change is, is very much dependent on us comparing our current timeline to previous times and estimating how severe a problem it is, but also having a better understanding of who contributes how much to climate change and what policy actions that should imply. So Comparison can also of course then become a source of pressure at the national level. I already said, if it's really evident and can be expressed in numbers that your country is doing poorly, then your domestic actors will have a much easier time exerting pressure on you. If it's clear that in the PISA test your country is doing much worse than others, even your immediate neighbors, that will generate huge public pressure, and it has. empirically speaking, in the past. It will generate huge public pressure for you to change policies and divert resources to where they're supposedly needed to improve these scores. So the simple fact of creating these PSAS scores has changed the entire priorities of whole educational systems in the past. Now obviously we could ask, you know, are all these numbers justified? How are they generated? Should they really be our only basis for evaluating our approaches? And should they especially be our only basis for coming up with specific policy actions, or is this all comparison gone crazy? as you see in the bottom right corner there you know just because you have numbers and you can add them up doesn't necessarily mean that what you come up with is the best possible solution so this was a quick sort of ride through why we're actually doing comparison you know we could describe things we could explain things we could evaluate things we could govern things we could simplify things so we can do a lot of things with a comparative method you On all of these jobs that the comparative method can perform for us, we can always generate really interesting insights, but we have to stay critical. We have to understand what we're comparing, whether we can actually compare those things. So how comparable are these cases? And are the insights that we generate really reliable? Or can they be generalized to other cases that we haven't necessarily looked at? And these and other issues we'll look at in the in the coming few lectures. So thanks for sticking with me so far, I will see you in the next lecture.

science. Because after all, you know, comparative politics isn't everything that you do. In fact, if you study IR, you might be asking, why do you do comparative politics in the first place?

And hopefully, I'm going to provide you with a couple of good reasons today that could answer that question for you. So this is really your introduction. And in the next lecture, we will look more at the how and what of comparative politics. So what are we actually analyzing and how we're doing this? Today is very much about the why.

Why should you care about this particular lecture series. So let's start with a couple of definitions. And I will point out in a second what the core operative clauses are in these definitions. So what actually is comparative politics, we have two main definitions here from Viarda and from Lane, they're a couple of years old, but I think they're still applicable to this course and to what we're doing in comparative politics more broadly.

So Viarda says comparative politics involves the systematic comparison of the world's political systems and we want to explain differences as well as similarities. But we're not the journalists, of course. We're not just reporting or describing one specific country, but we want to explain and explore patterns, processes, and irregularities across countries.

Pretty much hits the same spot here when they ask what is comparative politics. It's two things. First, a world and second, a discipline.

So first off, it's a world in that we open up our view. of the world. Comparative politics can look at all political systems across the entire globe and across all time.

The discipline then that is related to this is a field of study that tries to explain again the patterns and regularities that we find across these. So just pointing out here in bold a couple of the main operative phrases and core concepts. So comparative politics is very much about a systematic comparison. That means we look at differences and similarities and we want to explain patterns. A little bit of this I've already talked to you about in ISEP actually last semester.

And then I said that much of what IR theory was doing was pattern recognition and essentially we're doing the same thing here in comparative politics. And then in the Lane definition maybe the most important part here is that we look at political behavior and political institutions and we want to to explain and understand them. And maybe, and this is what's interesting about the lane definition here, maybe we even want to influence it. Because once we understand where a country is relative to all others, maybe then we can also develop an understanding of where we want that country to go. Do we want it to go up?

or down in whatever ranking or comparison we're making, for example. So comparative politics is important, and that goes for both of you that are studying politics and those that are studying IR, because it is one of the main sub-disciplines of political science. Obviously, we have other disciplines.

You've learned about international relations while you were on ISEB last semester. You already know about political theory, because again, you'll have a course on it. Public policy is another one.

So comparative politics is a sub-field. there are people out there that just consider themselves to be comparative political scientists or comparativists if you want. And the things that are really important in comparative politics compared to other sub-disciplines is that spatiality and temporality are important in defining the unit of analysis.

So variation across space, that's spatiality, and variation across time. that's temporality, those are the things that interest us. Changes across or differences across space or across time.

What separates comparative politics say from something like IR is that we are mostly focused on interactions that happen within political systems. So let's say we explain British politics with things that happen inside Britain and then we can compare that with French politics and we explain that with politics inside France, or factors inside France, we're not really in comparison to ...comparative politics worried about the interactions between these two systems. So when we compare, say, Britain and Tuvalu in the Pacific, that doesn't mean that we're comparing how these states are actually interacting in the real world.

That has very little to do with what we do in comparative politics. We make that comparison as the sort of observer of the situation. So comparative politics between Britain and Tuvalu is not about how much are they interacting, how much are they trading, how are they exchanging political statements and so on. It is about taking the political system of Britain and then comparing that to the political system of Tuvalu. So it's both a field of inquiry and the method of inquiry.

Field of inquiry because there's people that look at the entire world through the lens of comparative politics. They think that the best way to answer political questions is to look at them comparatively. And it's also a method of inquiry because you can be interested in all kinds of empirical political questions and then you can use comparison as your method.

And much of this first part of the course is going to be about that. How do you actually employ and use the comparative method? What's nice about comparative politics that I always feel is that it broadens our horizons.

You know one of the things that we hear occasionally in Edinburgh or maybe even we hear in the western world, is that we don't pay enough attention to things that happen outside of our little bubble. Well, with comparative politics, we can burst that bubble, we can open up our horizons, and we can compare all kinds of things from all over the world. One of the things that I like bringing up here is, you see the map here, on the right-hand side, there is this bit of a meme, you know, Africa is a country.

Whenever you hear someone say, you know, in Africa, politics works like that, or in Africa, people are doing that, that's, of course, complete baloney. Because Africa is a continent of over a billion people, has a ton of countries, many of which are very different in their politics, in their developmental status, in the political culture, and so on. So with the lens of comparative politics, we can break that up.

We can have a more fine-grained view of the world that goes beyond just our own immediate horizons. Now, the comparative method itself, well, comparativists really just do politics using the comparative method. And what that means is that it's an effort to use similarities and differences between political units, that's at least how Schmitter defines it, as a basis for developing theory, for testing hypotheses, inferring causality, and producing reliable generalizations. So most of the things that we do as political scientists, you know, coming up with stories about the world, that's the theory, testing hypotheses, um, figuring out whether our expectations are true, affirming causality, whether one thing causes another, and producing generalizations. So finding larger patterns about the world, that is everything that we do with the comparative method on this particular course.

So other sub-disciplines of political science might be doing this too, but they're not doing it through the use of comparison, which is what this course is going to teach you. So there's different ways of applying the comparative method. obviously, and most of the differences between the application of the method come from what you're trying to do with it.

So the rest of this first lecture is very much going to consist of what are the purposes of comparison and how can the comparative method help us for each of these purposes. So we could compare to describe things better, we could compare things to explain them, to simplify them, to evaluate them, or maybe even to govern them, so to come up with policy solutions to whatever we find, or to the questions we have. So we can apply the comparative method differently for different purposes, and keep these things in mind whenever you hear something in the rest of the course about how the comparative method is used, and ask yourself just really briefly what are we trying to do here?

Is this study trying to describe the world? Is it trying to explain it, simplify it, evaluate it, or maybe even govern it? The last one is kind of rare but we'll come to that on the last slide. So the first thing we can do with comparison is description.

Describing the characteristics of an object is the first thing that we tend to use comparison for. And this starts from the very simple observation and that is that the characteristics of any object, of any phenomenon, or any concept, are always defined and evaluated in relation to others of the same class. Now the sounds a little bit abstract.

So let's break that down a little bit in more common commonplace language. So you can actually evaluate ...or say anything at all about the characteristics of an object if you don't also at the same time put it into context with other similar objects. So, is this a fast car?

Well, you can't answer that really. Is this a stylish outfit? Well, you know, compared to a potato sack it might be, but compared to other things it might not be.

So, you can play a little game with your friends and family that is called, well, compared to what? So, whenever... someone asks you a political question, for example, you know, oh my god, taxes are so high, oh dear, Britain has too much immigration, you know, Brexit is the worst policy ever, it's so hard to find a job nowadays, or this pandemic is terrible, you can always ask yourself, quietly or out loud, your friends, well, compared to what?

So yes, of course, the pandemic is bad, but is it bad when we compare it to previous pandemics? By the way, this is not to say that the current pandemic is bad, but that if we want to say something about the characteristics, how deadly is it, for example, how much of a public policy problem is it, then we can only find a good answer if we compare it to previous episodes. And then, of course, we can discuss how comparable those previous episodes are.

But, you know, if you're one of those people that opens Twitter every morning and thinks, oh dear, this is the darkest timeline, surely we're living in the worst worst ever time, then you should ask yourself again, well, compare to what? You know, if you compare yourself to, let's say, the blissful days of early 2016, that might be true. If you compare it to the 30 years war, probably not.

So comparison is a key in understanding the characteristics of what you're actually looking at. And you can compare across space and across time. And over time, that's already what I talked about in one of the previous slides. So Because we can really only ascribe characteristics to an object when we compare it to others, explicitly or implicitly, the same is really true for political analysis.

So when we look at political institutions, at regime types, at public opinion, at policymaking, that is all often defined in relation to other things in the same class. So is a particular public policy popular? Well, you know what, if you just look at one case and you see you know, 60% of the citizens like this public policy, that's actually not enough.

That doesn't really tell you if that's a popular policy. You either have to compare it to other policies. Is this the most popular policy of all the ones that you've polled?

Or are you comparing it to policies in other countries, for example, and you see that in this particular country, this public policy has a very low approval rating compared to others. So that's the idea of using comparison as a descriptive tool, essentially. You are putting things into context, you're comparing an object with other objects in the same class. So here's one little graph that shows how this can work, for example.

So if you analyze things across space, you can, for example, analyze the electoral systems of countries across the world. which is called a cross sectional analysis. So do you have for example a proportional system or a majoritarian system as it is for example in the UK?

And we'll come to these in greater detail. But so that can be one axis that you compare things on across space and then you have over time that's the vertical axis that's this axis here that basically goes from the 19th century and the formation of what we consider modern states down here. all the way to the 21st century where we are now, and we can compare things over time.

And we can, for example, say, you know, are parties today the same as parties were when parties first appeared on the political stage in the 19th century? And we can both describe what parties are better through this, but maybe we can also... perform some of the other functions of comparison such as the explanatory function.

So what explains for example the way that parties have changed over time if indeed they have? Another example here, this question I brought up, you know, does Britain have a lot of immigration? Does Britain maybe even have too much immigration? Probably sounds a little bit weird coming from an immigrant myself, but that's certainly a question that undoubtedly you've dealt with in your own lives, at least thinking about that or hearing about that in the papers or from people that you know. Now, if we just look at absolute numbers here, if we just look at the graph for the UK, we see very.

clearly, even though this ends in 2015, that there has been a net influx of people into the UK. 1990s there have been more people that have migrated into the UK than people that have migrated out of the UK and You could look at this graph and you could say well look clearly You know Britain has tons of migration because the red line is clearly above the blue line and it's been above the blue line for a long time so, you know clearly Pretty clearly from this graph, we must conclude that Britain has a lot of migration. Maybe it even has too much migration because, you know, shouldn't those two lines be the same really? We should only let as many people in as people are going out. And it's really only when you put things in context, when you compare Britain to other states, that you see where Britain ends up on the overall scale.

So if you put Britain into context with all the other OECD member states, so basically kind of the Western world, you see that Britain actually lands smack dab in the middle when you express immigration as a percentage of population. So Britain actually doesn't have, compared to its population, an above average level of migration. In fact, it's significantly below the EU average and the OECD average in terms of how many people are flowing in.

into the country. Now granted, there are other countries that have less net migration, even EU countries, even neighboring EU countries, you know, the US actually has less migration as a percentage of population. It's partially because it's a very big country, but also places like Italy, the Czech Republic. Israel or France actually have less migration than the UK. Then you see at the other end of the scale here you see a huge number of countries that actually have far more migration than the UK when it's expressed at the percentage of the population.

Countries like Austria, Germany and then a very big outlier here Luxembourg because it's such a small country have a lot more migrants per coming into the country. as a percentage of population. So now has your opinion then changed?

If your opinion before was, you know, Britain has a lot of migration, would you correct, could you correct this view if you looked at this graph? At the very least, it teaches you that Britain is by no means exceptional in terms of how many people it attracts coming into its country. So that's the first thing that we can do with comparison, is describe these sort of differences better.

We can, of course, also have a broader view of the world, and we can look at, for example, things like electoral systems, which is a lecture that I will hold. And I know this sounds... not terribly exciting right now, but we're going to make this exciting when we get to it, because electoral systems are actually super interesting, and they have far more electoral and political ramifications than you might think. And you see here, if you just basically open a map of the world, I stole this shamelessly from Reddit here, if you just open a map of the world and you just graph which electoral systems are used where, you see that there is a lot of variation across the world.

It's also not the case that there's just proportional and majoritarian systems on either side. You can actually see that there's a lot of variations of these systems. So if we think about, you know, the state of electoral systems around the world, if we don't use comparison we don't get this kind of full picture. What you see, for example, is interestingly, maybe, is that there seems to be a world that is mostly first past the post. That's the red world here, which also tends to overlap pretty significantly with the former British Empire.

And then you have a blue world that uses some form of proportional representation that seems to be a little more widely distributed around the world. In the lecture that we have on this, we'll look a little more in greater detail at this. We'll figure out why that is the case, why certain countries...

have chosen certain electoral systems, and we'll look at a few of them in detail, and we'll work out their advantages and disadvantages. My personal favorite here is the board account system, which is really only used by one state. I'm not going to tell you what, you're going to have to wait for the lecture for that.

But the board account system tends to elect not the people that are liked by the most, but the people that are hated by the least. which I think is a would be a good way to conduct things in the in the rest of your life too. So this type of description of the world really shows the amount of variation in a specific category or phenomenon.

In this case systems and we learn already that there's a lot more variation than you might have expected even within the same world region. So the overall idea in using comparison to describe things is to identify specific characteristics. So what's distinct about a particular policy, a society, or a political system and what does it have in common with others?

And sometimes we simply don't know the answer to this. For not every political questions have we had a good systematic comparative analysis that encompasses the whole globe. for example, and that would allow us to come up with specific types.

So one thing that we could look at, this is just a random map that I stole from somewhere. is the phenomenon of who delivers the kind of end-of-the-year wrap-up speech for the country. Now, some countries do this as a Christmas speech, and you see those in blue here. And some countries in light blue here. And some countries do this as a New Year's speech.

You see those countries as a dark blue. We also see that in some countries the president delivers the speech. And in some countries... countries the monarch delivers the speech, but even in a fairly homogeneous continent like Europe, we see that there's a good bit of variation.

And now we could think about, well, does this tell us something maybe about the political system? Does this tell us something about which actors are key to the political system, or maybe which actors are tasked with the representative functions of political systems and why do these differ? For example, why do, of all countries, Germany and the Czech Republic have a Christmas speech while all the other countries around it, even the other German-speaking countries such as Switzerland or Austria or Slovakia here, why do those have New Year's speeches rather than Christmas speeches? Does this have something to do, for example, with the importance of religion in the political system and how religion is tied to specific... political rituals?

We don't know. But until we make such a systematic comparison, we have no chance of really coming up with any explanations because we can't even describe the variation in the world properly. So we have to measure things, we measure things through comparison, and we can identify trends using comparison with this too. So that's all the first part of what we use comparison for. Description, getting a better map of the world.

essentially. And map can be both spatial or temporal. by the way, right?

Mapping a variation across time is also perfectly fine as a method. Now, we can also use comparison as an explanation. So the question that we're asking here is, why do things vary?

So in the descriptive part, we've established that there is variation, for example, or maybe that there's no variation, and that's maybe even more surprising. And then the next logical question that we're asking is, well, why does this variation exist? So why do society's systems... institutions or policies vary, and which factors can explain the patterns or trends. So in the previous example, in the slightly frivolous example, which factors could explain why countries have Christmas speeches versus New Year speeches, and which what factors could explain who holds those.

It also allows us for a better way of controlling other confounding factors. So comparison allows us to test certain claims of assumptions by controlling for similarities or differences. So in other words, we can, for example, pick very similar countries that have different outcomes.

So are there, for example, a lot of countries that are poor, but only some of them have a problem with corruption? Then we can control for poverty as a cause of corruption, if we pick all poor countries basically, and we can find out well what are the differences between those countries that might explain why some have a problem with corruption and some of them don't. And we're controlling for poverty in this case because we've chosen all poor countries. for our comparative case study.

So we can also find out of course which factors cause what. So does poverty imply corruption? So does poverty breed corruption or does corruption make people poor?

And that kind of stuff we can explain if we do temporal comparisons. So if we look at poverty and corruption at time t and then at time t plus one essentially, and we do this over a number of years, we can see which factor tracks which other? So, you know, does poverty go up and then corruption goes up?

That would probably mean that poverty breeds corruption. Or does corruption go up and then poverty goes up? This is highly simplified, obviously, and that would imply that corruption breeds poverty. One classic example of this is revolutions are breaking out when people are poor or when people are deprived.

We can establish that through a comparative case study too, if we control for lots of other things. So if we pick countries, for example, that are very, very different in their political system, different than the political parties, different in the political cultures, but they all are experiencing deprivation, like that's the only thing that connects them. And then we get revolutions in all of those countries that we look at. That is a pretty strong indicator that... It is the deprivation that makes the revolutions happen rather than any of the other factors that are sometimes present, and sometimes they're not.

We also can build theory, of course, through this explanatory function, because once we've done a systematic comparison, we've come up with a few factors that can explain certain outcomes, then we want to come up with a general explanation of why those things are connected. So once we assess more than one case, we can then build theoretical frameworks that help us understand the connections between phenomena. Simplification is often a good thing that comparison can give us in that once we are forced to step away with just one case, maybe it's our pet case, maybe it's the case that we know most about, once we step away from that we actually compare it to many other things, we find it easier to abstract from complexity and nuance. So because we don't have to dig into any one case in specific, maybe if we compare, you know, 20 countries, 50 countries, and so on, we really take a bird's eye view of the situation, and we maybe gain a better understanding of what the broad strokes outline of the problem or the question is if we compare.

So the risk of getting too tied up into the minutiae of any specific case is reduced when we use comparison. We can also narrow down our focus because we are not worried about, say, all aspects of a political system, but we're only comparing the upper house of several countries and, you know, we want to find out what it does or why it does the things that it does. So we can conduct analyses of specific elements of political systems and that allows us to keep a narrower focus rather than us just looking at one specific case.

We can codify concepts, categories, and classifications. So the simplification factor comes into play when we sort countries into certain categories. So the idea of categorizing things through comparison is one that is quite strong. One way that we'll encounter this later on in the course is, for example, that the social scientist S. Bing Anderson found out that there are specific types of welfare states.

So how states are taking care of their citizens, that's not randomly distributed around the world, there is very specific models that correspond with specific countries and world regions. And these kind of categorizations can help us understand better why they came about and why they vary. And then lastly, of course, the simplification helps us with quantification and measurement.

So comparison, means that we can quantify things better and we can measure things better. And we'll come back to that in a few slides. What are you doing back there?

Are you bothering the cat? No, no cat bothering. Okay. Now, evaluation is another thing that is tied in to comparison as a tool.

I've technically already talked about this a little bit when I told you that we'll always evaluate the characteristics of an object in the descriptive function when it is compared to other objects in the same category. So if you want to find out which countries, systems or institutions are poor, which ones are dangerous, and undemocratic, authoritarian, unequal, or ineffective. Or if you want to see on the other side of the medal, which countries are successful, peaceful, democratic, liberal, equal, fair, and effective, we can really only establish that through the comparative method.

So evaluating where countries rank on all of these factors is a key element of what the comparative method can give us. So in this case, we are generating data and statistics using comparisons. So we do rankings, we do league tables.

I think there's a good chance that you actually are studying where you're studying now because you looked at a league table somewhere and you found out that Edinburgh ranks quite highly. Maybe not so much on the student satisfaction. We're still trying to figure that out, but it ranks pretty highly on other factors. So undoubtedly that has influenced even your individual decision making.

So it's a pretty powerful tool ranking countries, building indices and indicators, and benchmarking countries in terms of their relative characteristics to others. Now, not always are such comparisons meaningful. So, of course, we have to understand the limitations of them, because not every time we rank something does that necessarily mean that, A, we've understood what's behind it, and B, that that implies necessarily a specific course of action that comes out of this comparison. So how much analytical understanding can these comparisons really offer?

So we'll always have to stay critical. Just because something's in a league table, just because something's been ranked, doesn't mean that we should just uncritically accept this as gospel. I'm going to give you two examples of how this evaluation function can be performed by the comparative method.

The one you'll probably have seen this at some point, this is the fragile state index. The FSI, until a couple years ago, this was still called the failed state index, but they realized that that wasn't, you know... such good marketing. No one wants to be ranked on the failed state index.

And also some countries rank really low on the failed state index. So that means they're only failing a little bit. It's just not a very good concept.

So they've now pivoted and called it the fragile state index. So the fragile state index looks at countries around the world and it evaluates how resilient their political systems are, how stable their political systems and their societies are. And you see that this is a map that you often see in political context. You see that most of Europe, Northern America, and certain other parts of the world such as South America, Oceania, and parts of Asia are really stable.

They're really not very fragile, but you already see that there's a lot of differences even within Europe. Not all European states are equally stable and there's also a lot of variation in regions that you tend to associate with fragility of states. So let's take Africa here or the Middle East, for example. But we, of course, have to first understand how we've arrived at this index.

This is clearly based on essentially one number. You see the scale here on the right-hand side. It goes from 0 to 120. So how have we arrived at this number? And then what does this number actually tell us?

The fact that we've ranked these countries? Well, that doesn't really tell us much about what we're supposed to do with it. Because just knowing that something is fragile doesn't necessarily imply a specific policy that's related to that.

How do we stabilize these states? How do we help states that are currently in a fragile position? Because, for example, the index tells us nothing about how they've arrived there. Are they unstable due to economic concerns, political concerns? Are there military conflicts?

Could be a combination of all of those, and so on. So that's maybe one evaluative function. performed by the comparative method.

Another one that you actually were a part of, whether you knew that or not, is the PISA test scores. So you know that these test scores are collected all over the world and they are supposed to measure how well students in schools are doing relatively speaking. So again, this can only be evaluated relatively speaking if I just ask you how good are British students at reading, how good are British students at math.

You can't actually say anything about that because you have no comparative object. Now, you could say, for example, that people in London might be better than people in Oxford at math. But then again, you've already introduced an element of comparison. In the PISA test scores, we want to know how well whole countries are doing on these scales.

And we can see that the UK tends to do OK on the science scale. I know, by the way, these numbers are a couple of years old. I couldn't find nice graphs for the last ones.

The UK is doing quite well on the science side, the UK is not doing all that well on the reading and on the math side, where certain Asian countries are all the way at the top of the league table. And again, we have to first understand where these numbers are coming from, and then that might imply what kind of policy actions we can take. And just to illustrate that there is a lot of variation both across cases, so across countries, but also there's variation.

within cases, I've given you the inner UK scores for the past couple of years. So you see the constituent nations of the UK here, Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and you see that in fact they're not all scoring equally well. So yes, England has the highest overall scores, but then there's a good bit of variation in the other countries.

So Wales, for example, consistently scores worse in these subjects that are being evaluated. than the other nations, and there's also quite a bit of movement. Northern Ireland, for example, has recently overtaken Scotland, although that is mostly due to Scotland just seeing a steeper decline here.

But so what does that imply? What kind of policy actions should we then take? So if you were to advise the Prime Minister, God forbid, if you were to advise the Prime Minister on, you know, how do we improve our PISA scores, A, you have to look at this comparatively, you have to know where you are compared to others, and then you have to know essentially who you have to steal from. So which methods can you adopt to improve your own scores?

And we also see that maybe the methods that we adopt have to be different. depending on which part of the UK we're in. Now the last aspect of comparison that I want to cover is governance.

And this is again this is quite quick because I've already related to it, because I've already talked about it in the on the previous couple of slides. So governance really in this case means influencing behavior through both regulation and through resource allocation. So you might make certain things illegal for example that might be regulating.

Or you might encourage certain other things. You might give tax breaks for specific behaviors. You might give money to specific industries to help them thrive. And so, in other words, you're trying to influence society and the economy around you to go in a certain way.

And now, there's an important aspect to this type of comparison, for example, in that it is performative. So performativity comes mostly from critical studies, and it relates to the idea that the way that we think, and especially the way that we talk about the world, can influence our courses of action, and will influence how we see certain problems, and which solutions seem obvious to us, and which other solutions we're not seeing. So, you know, considering climate change to be a problem for the whole world is true. But once we imply comparison, we also see that certain states are much more responsible for this, of course, than others.

You know this, but if you look at this graph, which is 10 years old, so I should really find a better one, you see that the United States and the European Union are still responsible for over half of the CO2 emissions. So once we bring comparison into this, it suddenly implies a different course of action maybe than, say, us thinking that the whole world has to come together because really the rest of the world is a relatively small fry compared to the influence that the US and the European Union have over climate change and CO2 emissions. So the way we think about this, the way we compare ourselves to others, the way we compare our countries to others can have an effect on governance.

For example, countries hate being named and shamed. Countries hate coming last in league tables. It looks bad for the government. It's always bad when you can express your failure into just one number. Every one of us that's done poorly on an essay knows this.

And it will influence how you attack a certain problem, how pressing certain things seem to be. So these rankings, this benchmarking, these league tables that have really proliferated over the past couple of decades, as the availability of data has gone up, and as our... methods of analyzing data have become more sophisticated, they've often been now used as the basis for justifying international action. You know, how dramatic a problem climate change is, is very much dependent on us comparing our current timeline to previous times and estimating how severe a problem it is, but also having a better understanding of who contributes how much to climate change and what policy actions that should imply.

So Comparison can also of course then become a source of pressure at the national level. I already said, if it's really evident and can be expressed in numbers that your country is doing poorly, then your domestic actors will have a much easier time exerting pressure on you. If it's clear that in the PISA test your country is doing much worse than others, even your immediate neighbors, that will generate huge public pressure, and it has. empirically speaking, in the past. It will generate huge public pressure for you to change policies and divert resources to where they're supposedly needed to improve these scores.

So the simple fact of creating these PSAS scores has changed the entire priorities of whole educational systems in the past. Now obviously we could ask, you know, are all these numbers justified? How are they generated?

Should they really be our only basis for evaluating our approaches? And should they especially be our only basis for coming up with specific policy actions, or is this all comparison gone crazy? as you see in the bottom right corner there you know just because you have numbers and you can add them up doesn't necessarily mean that what you come up with is the best possible solution so this was a quick sort of ride through why we're actually doing comparison you know we could describe things we could explain things we could evaluate things we could govern things we could simplify things so we can do a lot of things with a comparative method you On all of these jobs that the comparative method can perform for us, we can always generate really interesting insights, but we have to stay critical.

We have to understand what we're comparing, whether we can actually compare those things. So how comparable are these cases? And are the insights that we generate really reliable?

Or can they be generalized to other cases that we haven't necessarily looked at? And these and other issues we'll look at in the in the coming few lectures. So thanks for sticking with me so far, I will see you in the next lecture.

Transcript for:Understanding Comparative Politics and Its Importance

Transcript for:
Understanding Comparative Politics and Its Importance