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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes events of 1789 and a leading parliamentarian like Edmund Burke could successfully draw
the attention of his countrymen towards the horrors of such a violent upheaval.
• Geography has its own part in laying the foundations of a political culture. The insular
character of the British Isles protected the country from foreign invasion and also from the
massive influx of foreign races that could have created the problem of ethnic differences.
• The factor of political geography engages our attention when we find that the rebellious
tribesmen very much thrive on the support of the alien enemy nations as the Nagas of India,
or the people of a country like West Germany were forced to accept the existing political
structures of a neighbouring state like that of East Germany—virtually an integral part of
their own—because of the geographical compulsions and also because of the competing
international alliances then led by the United States and the Soviet Union.
• Developments in the field of science and technology have their impact on the growth of
agriculture and industry; they also have their impact on the process of transportation and
communications, migrations and immigrations, imports and exports, revolutions and warfares.
• The Americans, for instance, abandoned their foreign policy of splendid isolationism at the
time of the first Great War and they adopted the policy of effective intervention after the
Second world War for containing the growth of communism.
• “It is in the secularisation process that bargaining and accommodative political actions become
a common feature of the society, and that the development of special structures such as
interest, groups and parties become meaningful.”
• A nation’s political culture includes its citizens’ orientations toward three levels: the political
system, the political and policymaking process, and policy outputs and outcomes.
• The process level includes expectations of how politics should function, and individuals’
relationship to the political process. The policy level deals with citizens’ and leaders’ policy
expectations from the government.
• Orientations toward the political system are important because they tap basic commitments
to the polity and the nation. Feelings of national pride are a revealing example of this aspect
of the political culture.
• Citizens may grant legitimacy to a government for different reasons. In a traditional society,
legitimacy may depend on the ruler’s inheriting the throne or on the ruler’s obedience to
religious customs, such as making sacrifices and performing rituals
• In other political cultures, the leaders may base their claim to legitimacy on their special
grace, wisdom, or ideology, which they claim will transform citizens’ lives for the better,
even though the government does not respond to specific demands or follow prescribed
procedures.
• In systems with low legitimacy or where the claimed bases for legitimacy are not accepted,
people often resort to violence to solve political disagreement. Legitimacy may be undermined
where the public disputes boundaries of the political, system (as in Northern Ireland or East
Timor) rejects the current arrangements for recruiting leaders and making policies (as when
Filipinos took to the streets and demanded the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos and free elections)
or loses confidence that the leaders are fulfilling their part of the political bargain in making
the right kinds of laws or following the right procedures (as when Indonesians protested
deteriorating of living conditions under Sukarno).
• The general loss of confidence in the Communist Party as the dominating political structure
led many people to call for new arrangements. Finally, shortages of food and consumer
goods caused people to lose faith in the government’s short-term economic and political
policies.
• The global wave of democratization in the 1990s has, raised democratic principles to a position
of prominence.

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