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Unit 2: Comparative Method and Politics

which means that many votes are just wasted. This leads for more citizens to act in informal and Notes
unorthodox forms of political participation.
For comparison, Germany adopted the additional member system, which can be described as a
hybrid of single member plurality system and proportional representation. Voters vote within this
electoral system: for their party and also for their local representative. So half of the seats in the
Bundestag are allocated in the same way as in Britain and the other half of the seats are allocated
according to the proportion of votes received by each party in each region. This allows fairly
proportional allocating seats in the parliament and also allows smaller parties to have
representatives even if they are not successful in any individual constituency. But it should be
mentioned that still the result is not strictly proportional as there is a threshold of support which
is five percent. This is done to deny access to parliament for minor radical parties.
Of course, there are certain difficulties and disadvantages in comparative method as well. Common
problem of social sciences is that there are usually too many variables and too few cases. There are
more than 200 countries in the world, but unfortunately for us, they are all quite different. It is
impossible to compare radically different or completely identical countries, so in order to take the
advantage of comparative method, only similar countries with minor differences should be
compared and in some cases it may prove to be complicated to find such.
The other problem with the comparative method is that research might be not objective and the
researcher deliberately chooses countries to show negative or positive moments to proof his/her
point of view. For example, let’s consider a hypothesis, that countries with weak trade unions are
more economically successful than countries with strong trade unions. Here, trade unionists and,
on opposite side, managing directors have a political point to make, so more than likely their
conclusions might completely differ. So we should be aware that conclusions are not driven by
someone’s motivations and values.
Comparative method is definitely the best choice to study and analyze contemporary politics, but
we should be aware of the difficulties associated with this method.
Comparative approach to studying of politics also enables us to move beyond mere description,
toward explanation and within this method we can talk about comparative politics as a science.
But on the other side, we shouldn’t forget that any research of comparative method is vulnerable
to personal interests and motivations. Therefore we need to make sure that such research should
only consist of facts, conclusions derived from these facts and be free of any assumptions.
2.1 Comparative Method and Comparative Politics

Among the several fields or subdisciplines into which the discipline of political science is usually
divided, comparative politics is the only one that carries a methodological instead of a substantive
label. The term “comparative politics” indicates the how but does not specify the what of the
analysis. The label is somewhat misleading because both explicit methodological concern and
implicit methodological awareness among students of comparative politics have generally not
been very high. Indeed, too many students of the field have been what Giovanni Sartori calls
“unconscious thinkers” —unaware of and not guided by the logic and methods of empirical
science, although perhaps well versed in quantitative research techniques. One reason for this
unconscious thinking is undoubtedly that the comparative method is such a basic, and basically
simple, approach, that a methodology of comparative political analysis does not really exist. As
Sartori points out, the other extreme—that of the “overconscious thinkers,” whose “standards of
method and theory are drawn from the physical paradigmatic sciences”—is equally unsound. The
purpose of this paper is to contribute to “conscious thinking” in comparative politics by focusing
on comparison as a method of political inquiry. The paper will attempt to analyze not only the
inevitable weaknesses and limitations of the comparative method but also its great strengths and
potentialities.
In the literature of comparative politics, a wide variety of meanings is attached to the terms
“comparison” and “comparative method.” The comparative method is defined here as one of the
basic methods—the others being the experimental, statistical, and case study methods—

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