I

The Importance of
Comparison

Comparative politics is central to the development of political theory.

For most sciences, experimentation is the way to test theory, but for
political science, comparison is the principal method. Political science
can be an experimental science only rarely, and then almost always in
highly contrived circumstances. Researchers are sometimes able to
have students or other more or less willing subjects participate in
games or experiments, but those exercises tend to be far removed
from most real questions about governing. Therefore, comparing
what happens when different countries, for their own reasons, modify
constitutions, or party systems, or whatever, provides useful informa-
tion about the probable consequences of different political orders.
The real world of governing and politics is too important to permit
social scientists to manipulate an institution here and a law there just
to see what might happen. It may sometimes appear to the popula-
tions of some poor countries that wealthier governments and inter-
national organisations are indeed experimenting with their political
lives, as one reform after another is imposed on them from abroad.
For example, international organisations are requiring many less
developed countries to implement a variety of reforms such as
privatisation as conditions of receiving assistance. Those reforms
are, however, almost always based on an implicit, if not explicit,
comparative analysis of government, and the institutions being
advocated appear to the foreign government or international orga-
nisation advocating change to be associated with more successful
governance in their own or in similar governments.
B. G. Peters, Comparative Politics
© B. Guy Peters 1998
2 Comparative Politics

There is some question of whether political science would want to

be a more experimental science, even were it possible. When a
scientist conducts an experiment the purpose is to hold as many
factors as possible constant, in order to permit a single independent
variable to operate upon a single dependent variable. Unfortunately
(or fortunately), the real world of politics is not that sterile and
controlled, and there are a host of seemingly extraneous factors that
influence the way people vote, or policies are made, or interest groups
lobby. Thus, any great investment in experimentation might rob the
discipline of much of its descriptive richness and attention to com-
plexity, which are important for understanding what makes politics
in France so different from politics in its neighbour Italy, much less
politics in Nigeria. A great deal of political life involves the interac-
tion of numerous forces, so that any artificial isolation of the causal
factor would almost certainly be misleading as well as less interesting.
Real countries present both problems and benefits for comparative
politics. The benefits are obvious. Within those real countries occur
the real, complex and convoluted sequences of events that are of so
much interest to the student of the subject. On the other hand, the
complexity of real political life means that variables come to the
researcher in large bundles of factors that are almost inextricably
intertwined. It is then up to the researcher to disentangle the sources
of variance, to contextualise the findings, and to provide as useful a
'story' about politics as he or she can.
If the claims of political science to be an empirical method are
based largely on comparative analysis, so too is a good deal of the
substance of normative political theory based implicitly on compar-
ison. Normative political theory is directed at identifying and produ-
cing 'the good life' in the public sphere, and to some extent arguments
about the desirability of different forms of government are based on
the comparative observations of the propounders of those theories.
Certainly, not all normative political theory is that instrumental in its
advocacy of particular solutions to the problem of government, but
much of the analysis has been. Thomas Hobbes had observed that the
absence of effective government - his 'state of nature' - during the
period of the English Civil War produced less desirable social out-
comes than might occur under more effective government. From that
observation, he extrapolated to argue for strong government, even at
the possible expense of some civil liberties. Even when there are no
real-world observations of a particular version of 'the good life',
normative analysts often engage in mental experiments based upon