- Comparative government
Comparative government or comparative politics is a method in political science for obtaining evidence of causal effects by comparing the varying
forms of government in the world, and thestate s they govern, althoughgovernment s across different periods ofhistory may also be the units of comparison. There are several methods at work in comparative government (method of difference as opposed to method of agreement and variable as opposed to case study approaches) but all have in common the explanation of differential changes in dependent variable by the presence of different independent variables in the systems under comparison. The nature of dependent (what is to be explained) and independent variables (what explains the pattern of the dependent variable) in the method is almost unlimited, from government form to electoral system to economic or cultural factorsIt has areas of concentration that include topics such as
democratization , state-society relations, identity and ethnic politics,social movement s, institutional analysis, andpolitical economy . Methodologies used in comparative politics includerational choice theory ; and political cultural, political economy, and institutional approaches.Aristotle (with his comparative study of constitutions in Greek states),Jean-Jacques Rousseau ,John Locke , Baron de Montesquieu, andThomas Hobbes are some of the key early thinkers in this subdiscipline.Another method of comparison looks at the inputs and outputs of the political system. Inputs include socialization, recruitment,
interest articulation , interest aggregation, political parties and methods of communicating policy. Outputs are generically rule making, application and adjudication.Connection to international relations
Comparative politics is not a subfield of
international relations . How each government conducts itsforeign policy is a consideration inside comparative politics. International relations is the study of these interactions and the process of these interactions. These two fields do of course overlap, but are separate fields of study.The study of political institutions
Some of the major units of study in the subject are political institutions such as
* executive
*legislative branch
*judicial
*bureaucratic elitesee also
*
Politics of Australia and Canada compared
*Politics of Australia and New Zealand compared
*Canadian and American politics compared External links
* [http://home.millsaps.edu/~omobai/LEC-A130.HTM What is comparative politics?]
* [http://wikisum.com/w/Category:Comparative_Politics Abstracts of seminal books and articles in the study of comparative politics]
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