Issues In compararive politics: a text with readings

ISSUES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS
While the study of comparative politics is not immediately concerned as a discipline with normative ends such as egalitarianism, liberty and human dignity, it is concerned with those issues which relate to the empirical conditions for these ends. This means that the significant issues in the study of comparative politics will always have both empirical and normative elements. A desire to understand what patterns of political life give rise to acceptable standards of human existence has been constant in the history of the subject. Aristotle and Plato attempted to discover which systems of government best promoted the good and ethical life, and while the scope and methods of analysts of comparative government differed greatly in the centuries after that time, the concern for the relationships between political systems and human happiness did not change. This emphasis remains today and while methods are more rigorous than in former days the implicit desire of both traditionalists and modernists is to be able to describe a model political order. This enduring and universal question has led professors of comparative politics to focus their attention on some particular issues.
An issue-oriented approach diminishes one kind of debate within the discipline and focuses it on others . Questions are immediately posed about how to determine which issues are significant, which methodologies should be employed and what topics should be omitted. Our decision about which topics constitute the issues in the field was based on the idea that the issue areas should have certain important characteristics. Firstly, the major issues should generate problems of a lower range or at least subsume other minor issues in the field. Secondly, if these major issues are significant they should lead to questions which call for explanations, not simply descriptions. Thirdly, the problems generated from issues should allow possibilities for empirical testing. Lastly, the issues should lead to the development of theories, that is, logically related generalizations.
Since a debate about methodology continues to rage in the discipline it seems best at the present time to employ a multiplicity of approaches rather than to accept any one dogmatic theory of the polity. The following introductory chapters and choice of readings are based on what we consider to be the most generally accepted approaches to the study of comparative politics. If there is any creed for this selection it is one which disputes the claims of finality put forward by traditionalists, behavioralists, or any other group. One might ask if strict adherence to any of these schools has given us answers to any of the basic questions about comparative politics with such force and persuasion that they are generally accepted as true.