Introduction for Students
Welcome to the study of Comparative Politics. If you are reading this book, it’s likely that you’re taking a class called Comparative Governments, World Politics, Introduction to Political Science, or something similar. If you’ve been assigned this book for your class, it’s probably because your Professor wants you to look at individual examples (or “cases”) of some of the concepts and ideas that you’re going to learn about in your course.
This book is designed primarily as a companion to other texts. In this book, we’re going to presume that you already know (or are learning about) terms like “regime”, “political culture”, “interest groups”, “political parties”, “ideology”, “parliamentary and presidential forms”, “democratic backsliding”, “political economy”, and many other concepts that are commonly used in the study of Political Science. What this book is going to do is take those concepts and ideas, and show you how they “work” in the real world, by looking at several countries around the globe.
That’s why the book is titled “A Casebook for Comparative Politics”. Each chapter explores a particular “case” (a country). The author of each chapter (all of whom have taught this material many times over their careers) have taken those key concepts mentioned in the last paragraph (plus several others) and applied them to a single country. You’ll notice, as you go through each chapter, that all of the cases are organized in a similar way. We’ve each started by discussing a brief history of how this country (or “state”, to use the term that Political Scientists tend to prefer) came to be in the first place. We then talk about Identity, Political Culture and Civil Society, Participation (things like elections and parties), and formal Political Institutions (Presidents, Parliaments, Assemblies, Courts, and the like). Each chapter concludes with some discussion of current economic and foreign policy issues facing that particular country. Depending on which class your Professor is using this book for, it’s highly likely that you’re learning about many (if not all) of these concepts. The goal of the authors is that these case studies will provide some concrete examples and demonstrations of how these ideas show up, in different ways, around the globe.
