Introduction to Comparative Politics

POLS 1340

Fall 2002

Instructor: Takayuki Sakamoto

Office: Carr Collins 201

Office Hours: TTh 1:50-3:30, or by appointment

Phone: 214-768-2521

E-mail: sakamoto@mail.smu.edu

(No class meeting on August 29. I’ll be at a conference in Boston.)

Objective

The purpose of this course is to introduce to students the methods, thinking, and theories used in comparative politics—one of sub-fields of political science—as well as country-specific knowledge to help students think about and learn comparative politics. Comparative politics is not merely a study of multiple foreign countries, but is a research field that acknowledges that comparative analysis is a productive approach to gaining the best possible knowledge of any country, political behavior, and social phenomena. We humans often emphasize differences when talking of a foreign country or society, but we do not know if it is really different until we look closely at other countries and compare—Upon close examination, we often find that foreign countries and people are not so different. Some differences may be real, but we know something is different only in relative terms. So in this course, we think about how best we can try to understand seemingly dissimilar politics and phenomena across countries. Upon completing this course, students will have a substantial knowledge of the subfield of comparative politics as well as selected countries.

This course has several other equally important goals. Among those are:

· to develop students’ research and presentation skills, which are required of anybody if they wish to put their critical and analytical thinking capabilities to practical use;

· to better prepare students to be able to meaningfully analyze other kinds (i.e., non-political) of human behavior and social phenomena as a result of human interaction in their future study in political science or other disciplines; and

· to increase students’ critical and analytical thinking skills so that whatever career students pursue in or after college, they can use those skills to advance their goals.

To be a critical thinker is not to be an unconditional, blind negator of every argument you hear. Critical thinking requires being open to new or different ideas, as well. A critical thinker helps an author or an analyst improve her analysis to ensure that her findings and conclusions—and ultimately all of our knowledge—are the best possible knowledge she could get at the time. You should always ask, “Does this argument make sense?,” “Is this logically coherent?,” “Is it supported by evidence?,” “Is the evidence collected and presented in an appropriate, legitimate way?” Importantly, a critical thinker needs to apply the same strict standards to her own work. We will keep these elements of critical thinking in mind throughout the course, particularly in class discussions and research paper projects.

Course Requirements

(1) Class performance (20%): Students are required to read all assigned texts and be prepared to make input in class discussion when coming to each class meeting. (I repeat: Do all assigned reading before coming to class!) This requirement is essential to this course, since the purpose of this course is to develop students’ critical thinking skills, not merely for them to passively absorb given information, and we use our readings as a basis on which to build our thoughts. Therefore, students must read assigned materials for a topic by the class meetings in which we are scheduled to deal with the topic. Your class participation affects not only your participation grade but also your grades in the research paper and exams, because the level of critical and analytical thinking fostered in class will naturally be reflected in the quality of your paper and exam answers. Empirical records make it abundantly clear that students who do readings and participate more achieve higher grades in their exams and papers.

Also, all of us participating in this course will work together to help each other learn and think, so that everybody will get most out of this course. Class discussion is the primary means to achieve this collective goal and will be stressed in computing your overall grade. Your contribution to research project discussions (to be explained below and to be conducted in the second half of the semester) will particularly closely be monitored for your class performance grade.

Attendance will be monitored. Repeated unexcused absence may result in an F. I keep this provision for the sake of students, because students who miss class tend to fail in exams and papers most often, thereby ending up with an overall F, even if they do not fail due to a poor class participation grade.

Some of you may hesitate to speak up in class because of the fear of mistakes and embarrassment. Keep in mind: It is okay to make mistakes. We learn from mistakes. Our world would have very little progress if it were not for mistakes. And most of us feel nervous about speaking in public or making mistakes. So embarrass yourself or make a fool of yourself if you have to. (I do it all the time.) When you do, you will realize that making a fool of yourself is not that embarrassing after all, and that the world does not come to an end even if you foul up.

(2) Midterm exam (20%): The midterm exam (October 10) will assess your grasp of the subjects covered in the course and be based on the readings, lectures, and class discussions. Makeup exams will not be provided under normal circumstances.

(3) Research paper (30%): A research paper is due December 3 (by 2:30 PM). The topic of the paper will be announced in class. The paper must be typed, double-spaced, and securely stapled. Late papers will be marked down. The magnitude of the markdown may depend on the reason for the missed deadline. The works you draw from must be cited throughout the text of your paper and referenced at the end of the paper. Using others’ ideas or sentences (and even phrases) without citations constitutes plagiarism and will result in an automatic F.

The criteria to be used in evaluating the paper are (Read this most carefully!): (1) how well your research question is formulated and thought out, and how interesting and original it is; (2) how well designed your research is and how well it is executed; (3) how coherent and strong your logic is in formulating your hypotheses and making your arguments; (4) how well you collect evidence to test your hypotheses or to support your arguments and how cogent the evidence is; and (5) how you draw the conclusions of your research given the nature and strength of the evidence you provide (it means in part how well you use and interpret data).

Tips:

Re (1) & (4): Think hard before you decide on your research question and try to choose as “researchable” a question as possible. Try to find a question that is interesting to both you and potential readers (although judgment about what is interesting is partly subjective, it has an objective component, too). Your paper should not be a summary or recapitulation of other researchers’ existing works. Your reader will be interested in your own ideas, not somebody else’s.

Some students may ask, “We are not experts, just undergraduate students. How could our paper be original when we have to rely so much on previous scholars’ works?” Remember that a critical thinker does not just blindly accept what established scholars say. You always need to evaluate the theoretical and empirical validity of their explanations and arguments with your own analytical skills and abilities, no matter how authoritative those researchers are. Even if you were determined to entirely trust what a scholar says, what would you do if two scholars provide competing explanations? Would you accept the two different explanations together that contradict each other? In a different vein, how would you know that scholars agree on something after reading only several books? In principle, you should not be able to tell whether they all agree until you exhaust the entire literature. Besides, if we said, “We can’t be original, when there are already so many bright scholars who have studied the subject so thoroughly,” our world would see no progress. We build and improve on our predecessors’ works, and there is always room to make your own contribution;

Re (2): Before starting your research (or data collection), give sufficient thought to the questions of what kind of effective evidence you want to and can reasonably expect to find, how you can collect such cogent evidence, and how efficiently you can do so; and

Re (5): Try to demarcate what you can confidently say your findings show and what your study cannot explain or tell, or what it leaves out; that is, don’t overstate or understate your case.

(4) Research outline and progress report (10%, pass or not pass) and presentation: A research outline is due on October 10. The outline must contain a research question and a research design, including what is the question you need to answer, how you try to find the answer, and the kind of information (or data) you intend to collect. Since this is due in early October, students should start thinking about the research paper fairly early in the semester (around the 5^th week). If you make fast progress beyond the formulation of the outline, you may also attach a progress report to the outline. The more concrete the outline or progress report is, the more helpful advice you will receive from class and the instructor. Do not wait to start drafting the outline until near the deadline because the deadline is the same day as your midterm exam.

Students will also present their research projects in class, and class will discuss them. The major purposes of this exercise are for the entire class to: help students think through their research; help them with specific difficulties they may encounter in actually executing their research (e.g., in formulating research ideas, collecting data, etc.); and help them make their research projects and papers as good as possible. In any discipline, scientific inquiry is an collective effort to arrive at the best possible knowledge. People around us usually notice things we are not aware of and have different ideas than we do. There is no reason not to try to benefit from our peers’ insight. Because of time limitations, we may only be able to spend shorter time on each project than we would like, we will give it our best shot to take a good look at everyone’s project. The other goal of the presentation is to help students build the ability to get their ideas across (presentation skills). Since time limitations may deter us from allocating equal time and attention to each individual student’s project, the performance in the presentation itself, for fairness, will NOT be graded.

But in order to ensure each student will get sufficient feedbacks, students will form study groups to help with their research papers. The purpose is to increase students’ opportunities to receive feedbacks on their research projects and make their papers better. Each group is required to meet and discuss its members’ projects three times: (1) before drafting research questions and designs to help each other with their research outlines; (2) sometime during conducting their research to help with specific problems that may occur in carrying out their projects; and (3) to critique a very first rough draft sometime before the deadline for paper submission. Try to meet far in advance of each official or unofficial deadline. The groups are more than welcome to meet more than three times. When your group comes across a difficult problem its members cannot address, the group is encouraged to see the instructor.

In addition to peer review, the instructor will provide comments on students’ paper outline and progress report.

(5) Final Exam (20%): December 10. This exam will simply test how much and well you have read our reading materials and thought through our subjects throughout the semester.

Required Texts

(1) Mark Kesselman, et al. Ed. 2000. Introduction to Comparative Politics: Political Challenges and Changing Agendas, 2^nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (available for purchase at SMU Bookstore).

(2) Shively and Sodaro, McGraw-Hill Primis Course Packet Assembled for Introduction to Comparative Politics (PLSC 1340) (available for purchase at SMU Bookstore).

(3) Michael P. Todaro. 2000. Economic Development, 7^th ed. Addison Wesley: Chapters 3 and 16 (on reserve: Make your own copies of the two chapters).

Other Things

If you have a problem in this course in any respect, please talk to me.

Suspected cases of academic dishonesty will be handled according to the university’s policy.

If you need academic accommodations for a disability, please contact Ms. Rebecca Marin, Coordinator, Services for Students with Disabilities (214-768-4563) to verify the disability and establish eligibility for accommodations.  Then make appropriate arrangements with the instructor.

Topics and Schedule

Note: The subject matters of comparative politics actually encompass a far wider range of and deeper issues than are explicitly mentioned in the schedule described below and explained in our textbooks. We do not hesitate to go off track (schedule) to examine issues and subjects that are not mentioned in the schedule if they are important. And we usually do not know whether they are important until we examine them. This class deems thinking and discussing important. So the pre-set schedule below may change from time to time, except for deadlines. When it changes, it will be announced in class.

Dates	Topics	Readings
8/22	Introduction: Class Outline
8/27	What Is Comparative Politics	Kesselman et al., ch. 1
8/29	No Class Meeting	Try to get ahead in your reading.
9/3, 5	Political Institutions	*Shively & Sodaro, “Decision Making in the State,” “Democracy: How Does It Work?,” “Political Conflict,” pp. 1-67. *Kesselman et al., ch. 1. *Lightly browse Sections 3s and 4s of chs. 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 in Kesselman et al. Make sure you browse all of the above.
9/10, 12	Policy Making and the Economy	* Shively & Sodaro, “The State and the Economy,” “Political Economy,” pp. 68-111. *Lightly browse Sections 2s of chs. 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 in Kesselman et al. Make sure you browse all of the above.
9/17, 19	The United Kingdom: Institutions, Policy Making, and the Economy	Kesselman et al., ch. 2
9/24, 26	Japan: Institutions, Policy Making, and the Economy	Kesselman et al., ch. 5
10/1, 3	Germany: Institutions, Policy Making, and the Economy	Kesselman et al., ch. 4
10/8	China: Institutions, Policy Making, and the Economy	Kesselman et al., ch. 11
10/10	*Midterm Exam *Paper Outline Due
10/17	China: Institutions, Policy Making, and the Economy	Kesselman et al., ch. 11
10/22, 24	*Economic Development and Underdevelopment. *Political Culture and Behavior	*Todaro, chs. 3, 16. * Read the sub-section on political culture in section 4s of Kesselman et al., chs. 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11
10/29	Catch-Up and Review
10/31	Research Project Presentation and Discussions
11/5	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/7	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/12	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/14	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/19	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/21	Project Presentation and Discussions
11/26	Project Presentation and Discussions
12/3	Project Presentation and Discussions Paper Due
12/10	Final Exam