Comparative Government And Politics An Introduc...

Offering a comprehensive introduction to the comparison of governments and political systems, this new edition helps students to understand not just the institutions and political cultures of their own countries but also those of a wide range of democracies and authoritarian regimes from around the world.This new edition offers:-A revised structure to aid navigation and understanding-New learning features, 'Using Theory' and 'Exploring Problems', designed to help students think comparatively-Empirical global examples, with increased coverage of non-Western scholarship and analyses-Coverage of important contemporary topics including: minorities; LGBTQ+ issues; identity politics; women in politics; political trust; populism; Covid-19.Featuring a wide range of engaging learning features, this book is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Comparative Politics, Comparative Government, Introduction to Politics and Introduction to Political Science.

Based on the Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe) model, this course framework provides a description of the course requirements necessary for student success. The framework specifies what students should know and be able to do to, with a focus on big ideas that encompass core principles, theories, and processes of the discipline. The framework also encourages instruction that prepares students for advanced comparative political science coursework and to be active and informed about politics abroad.

This unit introduces students to the comparative study of politics and government. Students will become familiar with a broad range of theories and concepts used in comparative studies of politics. The theories and concepts will be applied intensively and comparatively to seven country cases: France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nigeria. The unit begins by looking at some fundamental topics in the study of comparative politics including the purpose of comparison and leading theoretical approaches to comparative politics. A consideration of the process of state formation leads into a comparative analysis of transitions to democracy. The next section of the unit examines the role played by political parties as mediators between social forces and the formal institutions of government. The unit then examines the impact that formal institutions of government have on political outcomes. Themes covered in the final section of the unit include economic management, presidential executives, parliamentary systems, federal and consociational devices used to manage political conflict.

Introduction to Comparative Government and Politics is the first open educational resource (OER) on the topic of comparative politics, and the second OER textbook in political science funded by ASCCC OERI, in what we hope will become a complete library for the discipline. This textbook aligns with the C-ID Course Descriptor for Introduction to Comparative Government and Politics in content and objectives.

With chapter contributions from Dr. Julia Wendt at Victor Valley College, Dr. Charlotte Lee at Berkeley City College, Jessica Scarffe at Allan Hancock College, Dr. Masahiro Omae at San Diego City College, Dr. Josue Franco at Cuyamaca College, Stefan Veldhuis at Long Beach City College, Dr. Byran Martin at Houston Community College, and myself, the purpose of this open education resource is to provide students interested in or majoring in political science a useful textbook in comparative politics, one of the major subfields in the discipline.

It is organized thematically, with each chapter accompanied by a case study or a comparative study, one of the main methodological tools used in comparative politics. By contextualizing the concepts, we hope to help students learn the comparative method, which to this day remains one of the most important methodological tools for all researchers.

I chose to pursue this project as I felt that an OER textbook in comparative politics would otherwise never have been written. After many years of teaching at a community college, my colleagues and I realized a need existed for a zero-cost textbook. With the rising costs of education and textbooks, community college students may be deterred from exploring political science courses. I believe that this is where the next elected leader, policymaker or military strategist needs to come from. This is a grassroots textbook, written with these and future community college students in mind.

Comparative politics is a field in political science characterized either by the use of the comparative method or other empirical methods to explore politics both within and between countries. Substantively, this can include questions relating to political institutions, political behavior, conflict, and the causes and consequences of economic development. When applied to specific fields of study, comparative politics may be referred to by other names, such as comparative government (the comparative study of forms of government).

Comparative politics is the systematic study and comparison of the diverse political systems in the world. It is comparative in searching to explain why different political systems have similarities or differences and how developmental changes came to be between them. It is systematic in that it looks for trends, patterns, and regularities among these political systems. The research field takes into account political systems throughout the globe, focusing on themes such as democratization, globalization, and integration. New theories and approaches have been used in political science in the last 40 years thanks to comparative politics. Some of these focus on political culture, dependency theory, developmentalism, corporatism, indigenous theories of change, comparative political economy, state-society relations, and new institutionalism.[1] Some examples of comparative politics are studying the differences between presidential and parliamentary systems, democracies and dictatorships, parliamentary systems in different countries, multi-party systems such as Canada and two-party systems such as the United States. Comparative politics must be conducted at a specific point in time, usually the present. A researcher cannot compare systems from different periods of time; it must be static.[1]

While historically the discipline explored broad questions in political science through between-country comparisons, contemporary comparative political science primarily uses subnational comparisons.[2] More recently, there has been a significant increase in the interest of subnational comparisons and the benefit it has on comparative politics. We would know far less about major credible issues within political science if it weren't for subnational research. Subnational research contributes important methodological, theoretical, and substantive ideas to the study of politics.[3] Important developments often obscured by a national-level focus are easier to decipher through subnational research. An example could be regions inside countries where the presence of state institutions have been reduced in effect or value.[3]

The name comparative politics refers to the discipline's historical association with the comparative method, described in detail below. Arend Lijphart argues that comparative politics does not have a substantive focus in itself, but rather a methodological one: it focuses on \"the how but does not specify the what of the analysis.\"[4] Peter Mair and Richard Rose advance a slightly different definition, arguing that comparative politics is defined by a combination of a substantive focus on the study of countries' political systems and a method of identifying and explaining similarities and differences between these countries using common concepts.[5][6]

Comparative politics is significant because it helps people understand the nature and working of political frameworks around the world. There are many types of political systems worldwide according to the authentic, social, ethnic, racial, and social history. Indeed, even comparative constructions of political association shift starting with one country then onto the next. For instance, India and the United States are majority-rule nations; nonetheless, the U.S. has a liberal vote-based presidential system contrasted with the parliamentary system used in India. Even the political decision measure is more diverse in the United States when found in light of the Indian popular government. The United States has a president as their leader, while India has a prime minister. Relative legislative issues encourage us to comprehend these central contracts and how the two nations are altogether different regardless of being majority rule. This field of study is critical for the fields of international relations and conflict resolution. Near politics encourages international relations to clarify worldwide legislative issues and the present winning conditions worldwide. Although both are subfields of political science, comparative politics examines the causes of international strategy and the effect of worldwide approaches and frameworks on homegrown political conduct and working.

Harry H. Eckstein traces the history of the field of comparative politics back to Aristotle, and sees a string of thinkers from Machiavelli and Montesquieu, to Gaetano Mosca and Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, on to James Bryce - with his Modern Democracies (1921) - and Carl Joachim Friedrich - with his Constitutional Government and Democracy (1937) - contributing to its history.[9]

Philippe C. Schmitter argues that the \"family tree\" of comparative politics has two main traditions: one, invented by Aristotle, that he calls \"sociological constitutionalism\"; a second, that he traced back to Plato, that he calls \"legal constitutionalism\"\".[10]

Gerardo L. Munck offers the following periodization for the evolution of modern comparative politics, as a f