Lecture 1

the study of governments, public policies and political processes, systems and political behavior

a term, idea or category such as power or democracy

a broader understanding or interpretation of a concept

behavior becomes political because of where it takes place

behavior becomes political because of distinctive qualities

• Political/legal • Economic • Physical/coercive • Information/ideas/expertise • Social norms/values • Personal/charisma • Numbers/size

• institutional approach (institutions) • behavioral approach (individuals) • rational-choice approach (interests) • structural approach (interrelations of groups) • cultural approach (influence of societal cultural values) • interpretive approach (ideas)

• known as one of the historical theoretical approaches and remains an important tradition in comparative politics • core to the discipline • positions within organizations matter more than the people who occupy them; • Institutions provide the rules of the game and shape individual behaviors • institutions are pillars of the order in (liberal democratic) politics; provide sources of continuity and predictability

• In the 1960th, a shift from institutions towards individuals • Study of individuals, as the unit of analysis, rather than institutions; e.g. legislators instead of legislature, judges rather than courts • Generalization about political attitudes and behavior • Apply innovative social science techniques; e.g. public surveys • Objective, ‘value-free’ research, scientific explanation rather than descriptions • Criticism: too much science and too little politics

• Rooted in ahistorical economics • The elementary unit of social life is individual human action • Rationality and self-interest as core assumptions • Based on universal model of human behavior (which is questionable) • Criticism: the collective action problem: individual rationality leads to a poor collective result; moreover, people are not always rational actors!

• The objective interrelationship between social groups • Corrective to the limitation of individual-level analysis • Embrace change more easily than institutionalists • Emphasize objective relationships among social groups rather than the interests and outlooks of particular actors • Importance of social structure and social relations which shape, constrain and empower actors • Using comparative history methodology, contrast with non-historical generalization favored by behavioralists/rationalists

• How cultural norms and practices support/undermine different political preferences/forms? • Understanding the influence of cultural norms • The challenge of defining culture • The values, beliefs, norms and habits that co-determine the action, reaction and preferences of a society, even in the face of individual differences • Multiculturalism • Criticism: danger of stereotyping and ethnocentrism

• Distinctive focus on ideas and interpretations – assumptions, identities, constructions, meanings and narratives • Structures of human association are determined by shared ideas rather than material forces; no objective or political reality • Identities and interests of actors are constructed by shared ideas rather than given by nature • Ideas shape our interests, goals, allies and enemies • A social approach rather than a psychological one • Political affairs cannot be a behavioral science seeking laws but rather must be an interpretative one seeking meaning • Criticism: with emphasis on meaning, misses commonplace observation; the interpretive approach is more aspiration than achievement!