Intent and focus of the course

POS 190
Political Analysis •
•
On successful completion of this module a student will be able to:
Demonstrate knowledge of the range of analytical and methodological approaches

and Research
Jovanie Camacho Espesor
Department of Political Science
Master in Public Administration Program, School of Graduate Studies
Mindanao State University, General Santos
•
in Politics and International Studies.
Critically evaluate and apply theories and methods in Politics and International
Studies
• Gain an understanding of major conceptual and analytical debates in Politics and
International Studies
• Think critically, analyse texts and structure essays in the field of Politics and
International Studies
• Analyse aspects of politics and international studies from a variety of perspectives
• Apply theories to case studies
• Critically evaluate the relationship between knowledge, power and policy.

• The term political analysis is ambiguous. It is often associated

The scope and limits with analytical politics, which is synonymous with rational choice
theory.
of political analysis • Diversity of analytical strategies for those engaged in the analysis
of ʻthe politicalʼ.
• Though rationalism is one such strategy, and a highly distinctive,
influential and important one at that, it is but one strategy among many.
It has no privileged or exclusive claim on the analysis of the political or
the label political analysis.
Jovanie Camacho Espesor • ʻPolitical analysisʼ: neutral with respect to analytical strategies and
Department of Political Science traditions. Hence, inclusive.
Master in Public Administration Program, School of Graduate Studies
Mindanao State University, General Santos
• From the descriptive to the prescriptive.
Notes on ʻpolitical analysisʼ
• First, the political should be defined in such a way as to encompass
the entire sphere of the social.
• Events, processes and practices should be labelled ʻnon-politicalʼ or
ʻextra-politicalʼ simply by virtue of the specific setting or context in
which they occur.
• All events, processes and practices which occur within the social
sphere have the potentials to be political and hence, to be amenable to
political analysis.
• The realm of government is no more innately political (same with
culture, law or the domestic sphere). Consequently, the division of
domestic labor is no less political- and no less appropriate a subject for
political analysis ‒ that the regulation of the domestic division of labor
by the state. Indeed, one might well argue that any adequate analysis
of the politics of the regulation of the domestic division of labor itself
entails a political analysis of the domestic division of labor.
Notes on ‘political analysis’
• The role of extra-political variables.
• Not all aspects of the social can be captured in political terms, not that the political is
indistinguishable, say from the economic or the cultural. Economic and cultural processes
may be inherently political ‒ in so far as they concern relations of power they more certainly
are ‒ but this does not mean that they are exhausted by this description.
• Political analysts simply cannot afford to leave the analysis of economics to economists,
history to historians and so forth. In so far as there are economic and/or cultural conditions
of existence of political dynamics, these need to be acknowledged and interrogated by
political analysts.
• Disciplinary boundaries have always been arbitrarily drawn (interdependence)
• For, in a world of (acknowledged) interdependence, rigidly disciplinary approaches to social,
political and economic analysis will tend to find themselves reliant upon assumptions
generated by other disciplinary approaches to social, political and economic analysis will
tend to find themselves reliant upon assumptions generated by other disciplinary
specialisms whose validity they are either incapable or unwilling to adjudicate.
• The clear danger is that the conclusions of our analyses may increasingly come to depend
upon externally generated assumptions whose empirical content we do not regard ourselves
worthy to judge.
Obvious question?
• What makes political analysis political? What distinguished political
analysis from cultural or sociological analyses which might also claim
to encompass the entire sphere of the social? What is here required is
the political itself.
• What makes political analysis political is the emphasis it places on the
political aspect of social relations. In the same way, what makes a
cultural analysis cultural is the emphasis it places on the cultural
aspect of social relations.
• Definition: politics and the political as concerned with distribution,
exercise and consequences of power.
• A political analysis is, then, one which draws attention to the power relations
implicated in social relations. In this sense, politics is not defined by the locus
of its operation but by its nature as a process.
Case: political-economic imperatives of
globalization and social democratic regimes
• This is a now all too familiar experience and is nowhere more
clear than in the literature on the political economic imperatives
globalization supposedly summons for social democratic regimes.
Here the debate circles endlessly around the nature and degree of
negotiability of the constraints that economic integration is seen
to imply. Opinions vary ‒ wildly.
• Yet what is almost entirely absent from such discussions is any
attempt to describe empirically, let alone to evaluate, the precise
nature of social democratic regimesʼ external economic relations ‒
with respect to trade, finance and foreign direct investment
(FDI).
• The debate on the constraints implied by globalisation
(real or imagined) is but one example. What it, and
others like it, suggest is that, as political analysts we
simply cannot afford, if ever we could, to get by without
a rather more thorough grasp of the cognate disciplines
on whose assumptions we have increasingly come to rely.
• That implies a political analysis which refuses to restrict
its analytical attentions to obviously political variables
and processes; in one sense it implies, too, an
interdisciplinary political analysis.
• Issues of interdependence and international economic
integration raise a final issue, crucial to the practice of
contemporary political analysis.
• Relationship: between the domestic and the international
(political science and international relations)
• Issue: conventional approaches to the social sciences,
based on rigid disciplinary and sub-disciplinary fault lines
and demarcations, do not prepare us well for a world of
interdependence.