Prof. Elisabeth Wood Fall 2004 Department of Political Science December 15, 2004 Yale University
PLSC 777a Seminar in Comparative Politics I
This course, an introduction to the study of comparative politics for Ph.D students, examines the purpose and methodology of comparative inquiry. Designed to introduce students to the study of comparative politics and to assist students in developing research topics and strategies, the course explores key themes -- the process of state formation, the origins of political regimes and other institutions, the politics of redistribution, and the logic of collective action and political violence-- through the critical reading and discussion of classic, contemporary, and unpublished works, supplemented with contemporary readings on social science methods.
(Note: PLSC 777b will be taught in the spring by Stathis Kalyvas and will focus on research design.)
Class Meeting: Tuesdays 1:30-3:20 Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30 - 3:30 (sign up on office door), 8 Prospect Place, room 108. Email address: [email protected].
Requirements:
1. Reviews of the reading. For eight of the weeks of the course each participant will write a short review of the week's reading. Reviews should include a concise summary of the argument and evidence, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and raise questions for discussion. Consider questions such as: What comparative strategy or design is employed? What precisely is being compared? Is there an identified set of cases thought to be comparable? Is the comparison explicit, and if so how were the cases selected? Is there an implicit comparative design? Does the work principally generate ideas, test causal hypotheses, or develop theory, or some combination of these? Does the author appear to believe the conclusions of the study are generalizable? What is the stated scope of the argument? What evidence is presented that is said to confirm or disconfirm the author’s argument? Can you suggest a further or better way to evaluate the author’s claims?
Reviews should be two (not more) single-spaced pages. Reviews should be sent as an email attachment to all class members by midnight Monday.
2. Writing assignment. A paper (10-15 pages) that further explore a theme of the course. The student may choose to write a literature review, a research paper, or a research proposal. The topic must be approved by the instructor by mid-term (October 26), and the student must submit a abstract, outline, and bibliography by November 30.
3. Class presentation. Participants will make occasional short presentations of the week’s reading
1 to the class. Each presentation (no more than 10 minutes) should assess the work’s strengths and weaknesses, addressing questions similar to those listed above.
4. All participants must attend the Comparative Politics Workshop (Tuesdays at 4:00).
Course Materials: Books available for purchase at Book Haven. Anthony Marx. Making Race and Nation. Elisabeth Wood. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador Carles Boix. Political Parties, Growth and Equality
Books recommended for purchase: Steven Wilkinson. Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Gary King, et. al. Designing Social Inquiry. (Will be used in PLSC 777b) Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Wayne Booth, et.al., The Craft of Research
Course Outline
September 7. Introduction: goals of the seminar
September 14. Comparative case study methods
Daniel N. Posner. 2004. The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi. Forthcoming, American Political Science Review 98 (3).
Theda Skocpol. 1979. Introduction and conclusion of States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge.
Barbara Geddes. 1990. How the cases you choose affect the answers you get: selection bias in comparative politics. Political Analysis 2: 131-50.
Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2004. Quality meets quantity: case studies, conditional probability, and counterfactuals. Perspectives on Politics 2(2): 281-93.
James Mahoney. 2003. Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical Analysis. In James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, pp. 337-72. Cambridge.
Background reading (if needed): John S. Mill. Two methods of comparison. In A System of Logic [1846], reprinted in Amitai Etzioni and F. Dubow eds. Comparative Perspectives: Theories and Methods, pp. 205-213. Little, Brown and Company, 1969.
2 Charles Ragin 1987. The Comparative Method. Chapters 2 and 3. California.
Recommended: Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton.
Kiren Aziz Chaudry. 1989. The Price of Wealth: Business and State in Labor Remittance and Oil Economies, International Organization 43:101-45.
Kathryn Firmin-Sellers. 2000. Institutions, Context, and Outcomes: Explaining French and British Rule in West Africa. Comparative Politics 32(3): 253-262.
James Mahoney and Gary Goertz. 2004. The possibility principle: choosing negative cases in comparative research. Mss.
John Gerring 2004. The art and science of the case study. For publication in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, eds., Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
Collier, Mahoney and Seawright. 2004. Claiming too much: warnings about selection bias. Chapter 6 of Collier and Brady 2004.
Atul Kohli, Peter Evans, Peter J. Katzenstein, Adam Przeworski, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, James C. Scott, and Theda Skocpol. The role of theory in comparative politics: a symposium. World Politics, 48(1): 1-49, 1995.
Charles C. Ragin. 1997. Turning the tables: how case-oriented research challenges variable-oriented research. In Comparative Social Research, vol. 16, 1997. An updated version appears as Chapter 8 of Collier and Brady 2004.
September 21. Class, race and state formation
Anthony Marx. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge.
Recommended (includes reading on political regimes): Jeffrey Herbst. 2000. States and Power in Africa. Princeton
Barrington Moore, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon.
Margaret Levi. 1988. Of Rule and Revenue. California
Steven L. Solnick. Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Harvard, 1998.
Charles Tilly. 1992. Coercion, Capital and European States. Blackwell
3 Guillermo A. O’Donnell. Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism. University of California, 1979.
Seymour Martin Lipset. Economic Development and Democracy, Chapter II of Political Man. Johns Hopkins, 1981.
Waldner, David. 1999. State Building and Late Development. Cornell.
September 28. High risk collective action
Elisabeth Jean Wood. 2003. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge
Recommended: Roger Gould. 1995. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. Chicago.
Russell Hardin. Collective Action. Johns Hopkins, 1982.
Michael Taylor. Rationality and revolutionary collective action. In Michael Taylor, ed., Rationality and Revolution, pps. 63-97, 1988.
October 5. Statistical methods
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation. American Economic Review 91(5): 1369-1401.
Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer. 2002. History, institutions and economic performance: the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in India. Mss, MIT Economics
Charles Ragin 1987. The Comparative Method. Chapter 4.
Evan S. Lieberman. 2004. Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Cross- National Research. Mss.
Recommended Christopher H. Achen. 2002. Toward a new political methodology: microfoundations and ART. Annual Review of Political Science 5: 423-50.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2004. Institutions as the fundamental cause of long-run growth. Forthcoming, Handbook of Economic Growth, Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf, eds. (See Acemoglu’s website at MIT).
Nicolas van de Walle. 2001. African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999. Cambridge.
4 October 12. Class politics and the state
Michael Wallerstein and Karl Ove Moene. 1995. How Social Democracy Worked. Politics and Society, 23 (2): 185-211.
Peter Swenson. 2002. Chapters 1-5. Capitalists against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden. Oxford
Peter Swenson. 2004. Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden, Studies in American Political Development 18(1): 1-29
Recommended: Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein. 1988. The Structural Dependence of the State on Capital, American Political Science Review 82:11–30.
Therborn, Göran. 1977. The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy. The New Left Review 103: 3-41.
Adam Przeworski. 1985. Proletarian into a Class: The Process of Class Formation, Chapter 2 of Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge.
Carles Boix. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge.
Dietrich Rueschmeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago.
Isabela Mares. 2003. The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. Cambridge.
Gregory M. Luebbert. 1991. Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy. Oxford.
Kurt Weyland. Democracy Without Equity. Failures of Reform in Brazil. Pittsburgh, 1996.
October 19. The politics of redistribution in democracies
Carles Boix. 1998. Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy. Cambridge.
Recommended: Gøsta Esping-Anderson. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton
Torben Iversen and Thomas R. Cusack. 2000. The Causes of Welfare State Expansion: Deindustrialization or Globalization? World Politics 52 (3): 313-49.
5 Evelyn Huber and John D. Stephens. Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets. 2001. Chicago.
Torben Iversen. 1999. Contested Economic Institutions: The Politics of Macroeconomics and Wage Bargaining in Advanced Democracies. Cambridge.
October 26. Causal mechanisms
Peter Hedström and Richard Swedburg. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Introductory Essay. In Hedström and Swedburg, eds., Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge.
Charles Tilly. 2001. Mechanisms in Political Processes. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21-41.
Nicholas Sambanis. 2004. Using case studies to expand economic models of civil war. Perspectives on Politics 2 (2): 259-79.
Andrew Bennett. 1999. Causal inference in case studies: from Mill’s methods to causal mechanisms. 1999 APSA mss. [replace if possible with chapters from Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, forthcoming, MIT. ]
Due: description of paper topic and initial bibliography
Recommended: Jon Elster. 1999. A plea for mechanisms. Chapter 1 of Elster, Alechemy of the Mind. Cambridge.
Roger Petersen. 1999. Mechanisms and structures in comparison. In John Bowen and Roger Petersen, eds., Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture. Cambridge.
Arthur L. Stinchombe. 1991. The conditions of fruitfulness of theorizing about mechanisms in social science. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 21(3): 367-88.
Timothy McKeown. 1999. Case Studies and the Statistical Worldview. International Organization 53(1): 161-90. Reprinted as Chapter 9 in Henry E. Brady and David Collier, eds., 2004, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Rowman and Littlefield.
Andrew Bennett and Alexander L. George. 1997. Developing and Using Typological Theories in Case Study Research. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Toronto, March 18-22. http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/bea02/
Charles Tilly. 2002. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge.
6 Daniel Little. 1998. Microfoundations, Method, and Causation. Transaction.
November 2. Political violence in war
Stathis Kalyvas. 2004. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Manuscript.
Recommended: Stathis Kalyvas. Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of Massacres in Algeria. Rationality and Society. 1999.
Roger Gould. 1991. Collective Violence and Group Solidarity: Evidence from a Feuding Society. American Sociological Review. 64: 356-80.
Brubaker, Rogers and Laitin, David. 1998. Ethnic and Nationalist Violence. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 423-52.
James Ron. 2003. Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. University of California.
James Fearon. Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict. In David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds. The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear Diffusion, and Escalation.
November 9. Ethnic identities and political regimes
Daniel N. Posner. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. forthcoming, Cambridge
Recommended: David Laitin. 1998. Identity in Formation. Cornell.
Jim Jasper and Francesca Polletta, 2001. Collective Identity and Social Movements. Annual Review of Sociology. 27: 283-305.
Russell Hardin. 1995. One For All: The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton
November 16. Electoral politics and ethnic political mobilization
Steven Wilkinson. 2004. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Cambridge
Due: Paper abstract, outline, and bibliography
Recommended: Kanchan Chandra. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. Cambridge.
7 Donald L. Horowitz. 2001. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. California.
David Lake and Donald Rothchild. 1996. Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict. International Security 21(2): 41-75.
Ashutosh Varshney. 2002. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. Yale.
November 30. New methods in comparative politics: agent-based modeling, Boolean inference, and behavioral experiments
Joshua M. Epstein. 2002. Modeling civil violence: An agent-based computational approach. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99: 7243-7250
Timothy Wickham-Crowley. 1991. A Qualitative Comparative Approach to Latin American Revolutions, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 32 (1-2) : 82- 109
Fehr, Ernst and Simon Gachter. 2000. Fairness and retaliation: the economics of reciprocity, Journal of Economic Perspective 14(3): 159-181.
Recommended: James Mahoney 2004. Comparative-historical methodology. Annual Review of Sociology 30: 81-101.
Elinor Ostrom. A Behavioral Approach to the Rational-Choice Theory of Collective Action. American Political Science Review 92, 1: 1-22, 1998.
Norman Frohlich and Joe A. Oppenheimer. 1992. Choosing Justice: An Experimental Approach to Ethical Theory. California
Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds. 2004. Foundations of Human Sociality. Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies. Oxford.
Samuel Bowles. 2004. Preferences and Behavior. Chapter 3 of Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions and Evolution. Princeton.
James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein. 2004. Ethnic Identifiability: An Experimental Approach. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
Charles Ragin. A qualitative comparative analysis of pension systems. In Thomas Janoski and Alexander Hicks, eds. The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State. 320- 45.
8 Bear F. Braumoeller. 2003. Causal Complexity and the Study of Politics. Political Analysis 11: 209-33.
Charles C. Ragin. 2000. Fuzzy Set Social Science. Chicago.
Rob Axtell, Joshua Epstein and Peyton Young. 1999. The emergence of economic classes in an agent-based bargaining model. In Social Dynamics, Steven Durlauf and Peyton Young, eds. Oxford University Press/Santa Fe Institute.
Due: first drafts of papers
Final papers due December 10, 10:00 am.
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