Comments on Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman's Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure, 2nd Edition 2009 (Cambridge University Press)

(The following was originally posted by Alina Nudelman on the Blackboard site. - Prof. Cocozzelli)

Chapter 1

Zuckerman argues in this chapter that there are many different areas of politics and it is a very broad topic so explanations in comparative politics must be clear on every level (pg. 1). for him explanations and arguments need to be based on acts and proof not just statistics. I think that since politics is so broad sometimes the mere inclusion of facts does not mean that it proves anything because more than likely you will find facts arguing against the initial statement as well. I think that Zuckerman would agree that facts and numbers can be find to support an argument and dismiss it just the same, it is the specifics that make the difference.

In order to understand comparative politics, it is not enough to stick to one way of understanding or researching it. Some use field research, others tend to use a more cultural, rational way of looking at issues such as globalization and politics and violence. Politics takes you to different places all the time, “Changes in the 'real world' of contentious politics have forced scholars to broaden their attention from social movements in Europe and the United States to newer, more wide-ranging, and more violent forms of conflict” (pg. 8, par. 4)



I think it is also true that politics cant “be reducible to the sum of its parts” (pg. 10, par. 3). something always effects something else. The reason a person voted one way could be because of something social or culture that influences him. It is not clear cut and that is truly a problem. Even when it comes to our presidential elections, we only have two choices. What if I don't like either one? Politics is not a subject that can be studied in parts. It needs to be studied as a while because the big picture means more than its individual parts.

However, of all the explanation and ways of research, Zuckermans's research method's explanation seems to be the most reasonable in my opinion. It is only logical to base a research method or argument on something that can be explained within its context, whether it needs to touch on other topics to become for understandable. Using a cultural explanation or a historical one can only help but the explanatory method is the foundation of all others. Even Jonathan Rodden's approach on page 12 to endogeneity and the idea of constructing a theory are only helpers to Zuckerman's explanatory method. You can only guess from history what will happen but just because it happened hundreds of times before, the culture and era need to be accounted for in every particular situation before you can say that it will happen again since peoples ideologies and behavior changed with time. So this only brings about Zuckerman's point even more4 clearly.

Then when it comes to ethnicity, Kanchan Chandra argues that it is most important to define ethnicity in order to come to an understanding about it “Indeed, without a definition, the inference that ethnicity matters is as (un)justifiable as the inference that ethnicity does not matter” (pg. 14, par2). But the problem of defining it is not simple since once again culture, and social cues view “ethnic” as different things. So the outcomes of it will be different when addressing ethnicity. Therefore I find that the broad view of politics is inadequate and its the particulars that should be placed in correct context that should be focused on.

Chapter 2

Ethnicity was the perfect subject to lead into chapter 2. In this chapter, the debate over how to understand politics is brought into view. Some want top understand it as a science and others want to understand it through art and literature. I think that neither one or the other is effective. It simony must be the combination of all, just like in research. “Critics charge that its patterns of evidence, explanation, and discovery never satisfy” (pg. 21, par2). “Correlation is not causation” (pg 22, par. 1). by approaching politics as a science, the deep rooted issues are never explored. By using the approach of combining science and literature to understand politics it will uncover issues and questions that need investigation and it will only be uncovered by first asking completely different questions such as Kuhnmen suggest on page 27.

in order to discover something, I feel that people from all over need to come together. People that focus on the Big Problems and conflicts and people that use puzzles to piece the information together. Without several opinions the understanding of something will not be adequate. The most important factor I believe to be in the problem situation is to remember that the issues being analyzed are from a different time period and therefore need to be examined as unbiased as possible since it is impossible to imagine how things were if you were not apart of that time (pg. 30).

Unfortunately I think that even with looking at the Big Problems from today's standpoint and trying to figure out the “puzzles” it will still be hard to do so without any bias. Through having a bias opinion swaying in whichever way, the discovery and understanding will always be swayed and the information will be manipulated instead of understanding it as the simple facts that they are.

The problem with Big Concepts is that one world is used to describe a phenomenon but one phenomenon cant be describes without another, since all these words are interrelated rather independent, “ Moreover, mechanisms drive their explanatory relevance from theories that lead us to believe tat the explanatory effects occur only under certain conditions. Mechanisms are therefore always congruent “(pg. 40, par. 1). I think a fault without using mechanisms to explain how something led to something else is that with it we will assume it always being like that and that is being naive when we assume that something happens only because of these precursors or those circumstances, we inevitably set ourselves up for failure. When it comes to middle-range casual arguments, I think it is even a more of an ineffective way to explain politics. The notion of politics is so broad that you cannot have one variable without another. You cannot have voting without democracy.

The concept of an analytic narratives used to provide evidence is by far the strongest bit that I am in agreeance with. I like the approach of taking the topic such as gender or education and discussing it as a single variable and using history and previous events that we know if to show a relationship while not losing focus of the initial topic of the “independent variable.”

As I kept reading I came to the phrase “undergraduate who nowadays double and triple major, their spectacular hunger to be in the midst of things leads them to dwell in possibility” (pg. 60).Then the statement by Wedeen about how the more you learn about one thing the less interesting and “dramatic” it gets, really irritated me. The whole purpose of these chapters is t show how the paradigms are so different that there are so many things to do and learn when it comes to politics that this statement simply seemed foolish to me like the undergraduate students who take on more than one major is proof that people are interested in more than one thing and have their own ideas on how to approach it. I simply feel that there is more than one way to approach a situation and more than one way to understand it. The fact that these scholars are opposing each others work is silly. History remains history, it only depends on what angle and from what side you want to look at it from but the events from whichever angle will never change, that is perhaps why undergraduate students take on more than one major, so that there is a accumulation of thoughts in a classroom. Politics is specific to the individual just like the understanding and approach to any other topic, “Practicing comparativists thus discover the necessity of choice” (pg. 60, par. 3). “Those who deny the necessity of choice run into trouble” (pg 61, par. 1)
The statement that best describes my feelings about this chapter and all the different approaches to the discovery, explanation, and understanding of politics is stated on page 66, “The comparative theorist is a traveler, observing different real-world countries and imagining in the mind's eye different ideal-world societies. When in doubt, comparativists compare by journeying to different countries and journeying down rationalist, culturalist, and structuralist paths” (pg. 66, par. 3).

Chapter 3

this last thought also brings in chapter 3 very smoothly. The idea of explanation has to be clear and precise. The clearer it is then the more likely it is that someone will understand and agree and in chapter 3 on page 75 it clearly states that “the more that it includes explanations derived from verified social mechanisms, the more that these account for peoples decisions, the more that the explanations able to account for endogenous relationships, and the greater the number of empirical tests, the more reason there is to accept he explanation” (par. 1).

An explanation has to entail all components of what is argues. I would not believe something based on numbers alone or events alone. There has to be a clear train of thought through these various forms of explanations for me to agree.