On government: a comparative introduction

In recent years, people have become more and more aware of the growing role of government and politics in their lives and their careers. The educated citizen in today's interdependent world cannot remain indifferent to the social institution of government.
Nor can he limit his interest to his country alone; the process of governing is a universal phenomenon, which cannot be studied or
fully understood unless our field of observation is unlimited by time, geography, and personal experience. To evaluate more re-
alistically the government and politics of his own country, the citizen must go beyond the ethnocentric confines of his national
beliefs and experiences and try to understand why other lands are governed in ways that differ from what he considers best. He
must be further prepared to reassess familiar social patterns, ideological orientations, constitutional rules, and economic rela-
tionships, which are being challenged by the realities of a complex and rapidly changing world. Apparently many informed people
are conscious of these needs today, because there is a demand for basic books on government as a social institution.
There is some disagreement among political scientists over the format a comparative study of government should take. One
method is to group in one volume detailed studies of governmental systems in three or four major countries. Another approach is to
study essential features and functions of government by drawing illustrations and insight from a wide variety of countries and
searching for the factors that account for common features and striking dissimilarities.