reading 1 (ch. 1 and 2) Flashcards
government vs governance
government =
- institutions and offices through which societies are governed
- all institutions with public authority and charged with reaching and executing decisions for a community
- the group of people who govern
- a specific administration
- the form of the system of rule (e.g. centralized government)
- character of administration (good gov.)
governance = process (and quality) of collective decision-making = the process by which decisions, laws and policies are made, with or without the input of formal institutions
- less about the command-and-control function of government and more about the broader task of public regulation
*government is about a relatively static world of institutions, governance is about a process
!e.g. EU parliament and court of justice are more governance than government (they develop policies and laws + oversee implementation only as far as its member states allow them to do, they are servants of the process of EUintegration)
power vs authority
power = capacity to act and to bring about intended effects
authority = the acknowledged right to take such action
e.g. Russia may have power over Russians in other countries, it has no authority beyond its borders
the benefits of comparative political science
6
- description: core facts about a political system
- context: understanding the context within which a political system functions
- rules: drawing up the rules about government and politics
- understanding: ourselves, others and the global system
- prediction: comparison helps make generalizations that can help us predict outcomes (!some argue that we cannot predict)
- making choices: political choices
comparison + rules about gov. and politics
comparison helps us draw up rules (laws of political science are hard to develop because politics changes from place and across time, IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT COMPARISON)
examples by Cuzan:
- all govs can count on the votes of only a minority of the electorate
- in developed democracies incumbents are re-elected more than half the time thanks partly to their exploitation of state resources
- it is rare for incumbent parties to win with much more than 60% of the vote, and this never happens twice within the same spell in office
- incumbents typically lose support from term to term
- in democracies, the alternation of parties and leaders in office is usual)
*social sciences don’t generate laws so much as theories, tendencies, likelihoods, adages or aphorisms (because they deal with human behaviour rather than physical/natural phenomena)
the institutions of government (table page 54)
- executive: governing, making policy, providing leadership/direction (e.g. president, cabinet, ministers)
- legislature: representing the interest of citizens, making law, forming governments (parliaments, congresses, National Assemblies, Diets)
- judiciary and courts: upholding/interpreting the constitutions (supreme courts, constitutional courts)
- bureaucracy: implementing policy (departments, ministries, divisions, agencies)
- political parties: offering policy alternatives, fielding candidates, forming governments and oppositions (conservatives, liberals, socialists, greens, nationalists)
(good governance)
5
should at a minimum be:
- accountable
- transparent
- efficient
- responsive
- inclusive
politics - definition
5
hard to define, key features:
- it’s a collective activity between and among people
- it involves making decisions about a course of action or a disagreement
- once reached, political decisions become policy for the group, binding and committing its members even if some resist
politics is unavoidable because of the social nature of humans (e.g. limited resources, shared space)
POLITICS = THE PROCES BY WHICH PEOPLE NEGOTIATE AND COMPETE IN MAKING AND EXECUTING SHARED OR COLLECTIVE DECISIONS
spotlight Nigeria
- independent since 1960, incumbent defeated by opponents in elections in 2015
- corruption, big role military, oil economy, poor infrastructure, low foreign investment, security concerns (e.g. attacks since 2002 by Islamist group Boko Haram)
- low HDI
- hybrid regime
- Africa’s largest country by population
- ! understanding Nigeria is complicated: lack of durable patterns of government
- separated by religion
form of gov = federal presidential republic (36 states + Federal Capital Territory), most recent constitution adopted in 1999
executive = presidential (max 2 4year terms) + vice president and cabinet of ministers (one from each state)
legislature = Bicameral National Assembly (lower House of Representatives + upper Senate), elected for fixed and renewable 4year terms
judiciary = Federal Supreme Court (14 members nominated by president + confirmed by Senate or approved by a judicial commission)
electoral system = president must win majority of votes + at least 25% of votes in at least 2/3 of Nigeria’s states
- possibility of two runoffs
- National Assembly elected using single-member plurality
parties = multiparty, led by the centre-left All Progressives Congress and the centre-right People’s Democratic Party
power
power TO
- Latin: to be able
- Bertrand Russell: the production of intended effects (capacity to determine our own fate)
power OVER - Steven Lukes’ three dimensions of power: dimension
- who prevails when preferences conflict? = decision-making
- who controls whether preferences are expressed? = non-decision-making (keeping issues off the political agenda)
- who shapes preferences? = ideological (e.g. denying access to information)
Weber’s three ways of validating political power
- by tradition, or the accepted way of doing things
- by charisma, or intense commitment to a leader and his/her message
- by appeal to legal-rational norms, based on the rule-governed powers of an office, rather than a person
power-> authority (the acknowledged right to exercise power)
regimes and political systems
regime = a political type (e.g. democracy or dictatorship, elitist system etc)
- in practice often used wrong, e.g. regime change when gov is overtrown or removed
political system = summarizes the parts that make up the political life of a given state or community
- core elements in many states are common, how these elements work together differs greatly
*political system = the interactions and institutions that make up a regime
political typologies
- definition
- e.g.
- main two books uses
typology = the system by which the types of something (e.g. states, buildings, organizations) are classified according to their common features
many different typologies, none are generally accepted by polsci
- Aristotle: classification 158 city-states Ancient Greece with 6 classes of gov. (based on form of gov (own interest or general interest) and number of people involved in governing)
- Baron de Montesquieu: 3 regime types: republican (people), monarchical (one person on basis of laws) and despotic (one with own priorities and perspectives)
- Three World system (cold war): first (western/democratic), second (communist), third (poor, less democratic)
book mainly uses:
Democracy Index (Economist Intelligence Unit / EIU)
Freedom in the World index (Freedom House)
comparative method changes over time
substantial changes from Western insularity to a more global perspective
positive and productive changes in the subfield of polsci (e.g. more diversity in approaches and perspectives), still room for deepening and broadening our understanding
- late emergence of comparative politics as a sub-field of polsci (partly because small number of cases available + scholars being interested in their home states) + emerged in US (europeans found differences in its states small or not interesting)
- often more descriptive than analytical (e.g. Aristotle + US before WW2)
- decolonization + end cold war + behaviouralist revo -> interest in new states
comparative research must choose
- unit of analysis (what is it that we want to compare?)
- level of analysis (level of study: macro (political system) to micro (individual) level)
- variables to be studied
comparative research methods
- qualitative (looks at cases in depth rather than breadth)
- quantitative (looks at variables, emphasizes breadth)
- historical (looks at processes) = more available cases
- comparison of these 3
!comparative research lacks a unified approach (can be seen as weakness or strength)
*statistical quantitative research can help find outliers
*speculative version of historical method = to ask hypothetical questions using counterfactuals (what if 9/11 never had happened)
