Workbook for comparative government

In the last twenty years, political science has become more systematie: theoretical
studies and empirical work have increasingly converged and it is becoming
accepted that studies, even of an individual case, should not merely describe this
case or even state the general lesson which can be drawn from it, but suggest the
theoretical hypotheses which they attempt to test. This move has been part-
icularly helpful to the discipline; we can now view the study of politics in terms
of a gradual build-up: questions of major theoretical and practical importance can
be tackled in the hope that, with time and, of course, luck, answers will be found
and difficulties settled.
In order to increase the pace of this development, it is of the utmost
importance that we should streamline our analysis and look for underlying
relationships; we can no longer be satisfied, if we are to progress, with an
examination of the conditions which may or may not lead to a particular
situation; we can no longer simply list a number of concrete characteristics which,
in a given context, help to account for an occurrence. We must be more general.
Whether in the study of governments or in connection with political activity in
general, we must strive, however painfully at the start, to assess the direction
which events will take if a variable is at play, to see how variables combine to
increase their effect, or to state whether, by their interference, they stop or
reduce this effect. It is with this aim in mind that this workbook was prepared.
An Introduction to Comparative Government looks at the problem of government
as systematically and as generally as the level of our knowledge of governments
allows us at present; it describes a series of relationships and accounts for their
occurrence. The workbook is designed to help to focus on these relationships and,
once they are discovered and understood, to apply to particular cases the mode of
thinking which has been acquired. The aim is not to amass knowledge; it is to
become acquainted with the type of approach with which one has to look at
problems of government. We must think in terms of gymnastics or, in a more
lofty fashion, of training, if we are to benefit truly from the move towards
theory. We need training not only in those techniques which political science
mercifully began to use on a much wider scale in the course of the last decades;
but also in the logic of the governmental and political process which, unfortun-
ately but unavoidably, has too often and for too long given to the discipline the
appearance of a long list of recipes drawn, somewhat haphazardly, from the bag
of human experience.