I should probably start by explaining what I am doing here. When I tell people that I am reading an M.Phil in Comparative Government, that means that I am studying for a Masters’ in Comparative Government.
When I’ve said that I am studying Comparative Government, people ask, as the title of the post suggests, “What exactly does that mean?” What is Comparative Government, you ask? Well, professors of Comparative Government often can’t answer.
Comparative government developed in America, actually. The first political scientists studied American government. Then, in the early 20th century, we decided it would be a good idea to study countries other than our own. “Comparative Government” meant “studying forms of government that aren’t our own.” So according to this definition, Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, The Parent Trap, and Ace Ventura 2 are all good studies of comparative government. Comparativists could specialize in a country (Italian politics), a region (Latin American politics), or a particular ideologically-linked group of countries (new democracies). These studies tell us about parts of the world we knew nothing about before: I have, for example, learned more about Burma in the last week–and why I call it Burma, and not Myanmar (if you support the democratic government, it’s Burma)–than I could have thought because of the work of comparative government.
Then there is the more aspirational definition of Comparative Government–using it as a method to analyze issues and learn hopefully applicable lessons about governance that are more universal. In recent years, Comparative Government has been defined by taking an issue–democratization, farm subsidies, authoritarianism–and analyzing how the issue plays out in more than one government, analyzing successes and failures, and drawing conclusions that can teach larger lessons about governance in general. This is the ambitious goal–to figure out what works, and to learn from governments’ mistakes in the hopes that they won’t be made again.
Under this notion, the scientist of Comparative Government can analyze, for example, the difference between the Union and the Confederacy’s military strategy and draw greater lessons about how to run a military, or look at how several sub-Saharan African countries manage water in order to provide the best-informed blueprint. This is the kind of Comparative Government I hope to do–I hope to learn a lot about the world and develop a problem solving skill set through rigorous analysis of how different governments and societies handle different problems. This blog will keep you posted on what I am learning and how I’m interpreting what’s going on in the world. I hope to have a lot of fun, too.
Of course, the fun won’t be limited to just the program–but that’s for another post.
Off to keep reading…
Ross
