Prof. Ben Stavis
 

INTRODUCTION

Why should we study foreign governments and politics?
Why does the university core curriculum require "international studies"?
    global village: politics, economics, migration, ethics

Why focus on government and politics?
    Governments and politics shape the global village
 

What is politics?  Assumptions:

• Political systems provide "authoritative allocation of values within a state".

Authoritative = backed up by official, public force (law, police, courts)
Allocation = distribution
Values = interests
State = near monopoly of tools of coercion within accepted boundaries
• If there is no near-monopoly of coercion, there are warlords, civil war, banditry, chaos
        i.e., "failed state"
• Note that US laws making terrorism against US citizens abroad a US crime stretches the traditional boundaries of state power.
• Historic origin of states:
• Conquest
• State uses force to extract, exploit, repress
• Political culture of resistance
• Social Contract
• people agree on state to provide public services (defense, roads, public health)
• protect property and markets
• curb anti-social behavior
• political culture of participation
• In reality, systems evolve and mix both elements

• Link theories about behavior with empirical data. (like physics)
• Use data from all political systems over space and time. (like biology)
• Social sciences are probabilistic (like meteorology and epidemiology)

• Distinctive aspects of  "social science": people learn and change (unlike apples, electrons), and interact in ways that change their environment.
• No pure experiments
• people and analysts have values, they care about results
• politics is "interactive" and "path dependent"; each step is hard to predict, and influences the choices available in the future.  You can not go backwards and try again with a different choice. (like a chess game or meteorology)

    1. Legal structures of government (rules of the game)

    2. Recurrent patterns of political behavior (plays):

Voting systems, party systems, parliamentary systems, dictatorship, political violence, political corruption, ethnic/religious/cultural politics

England, Japan, Russia, China, Mexico, India, Nigeria, Egypt
events reported in press  

1. We have to classify, but how? size? alphabetical?

2. We compare,  as in biology and chemistry
 

Notes:

1.  --ocracy=rules: bureaucracy, kleptocracy

2. number of  rulers (one, few, many) = topic of political participation and representation.

3. Confucius (100 years earlier) had a similar approach, but recognized rule by one only.  Did not observe rule by few or many.
 

4. Our text book follows this basic analytical framework (p. 12)
 

• Political development, culture

• political system -- constitutional structure, relations between one, few and many; are laws followed?

• Representation -- is basically how many people rule, and how they do it

• Public policies -- does state provide public goods or emphasize private goods?       Is it a conquest state or a social contract?

 

• voice and accountability
• political stabilty and absense of violence
• government effectiveness
• regulatory quality
• rule of law
• control of corruption

• World Bank Governance home page
• abstract and link to main report

5.  Here is an attempt to classify countries by political type  http://www.worldaudit.org
      Rankings for environmental policy
 
6. World Bank has developed a rating of countries by "governance"
    This is close to Aristotle's idea of "Natural" and "Deviant" types of government

• voice and accountability
• political stabilty and absense of violence
• government effectiveness
• regulatory quality
• rule of law
• control of corruption
• World Bank Governance home page

abstract and link to main report

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