Curriculum

Appearance

201. Comparative Government ​

Learning outcomes ​

  • When a country's politics looks unlike its neighbour's, or when a democracy you'd expected to hold starts to slip, you'll know how to put the case against the standard explanations (income and class structure, elite bargains, the distribution of wealth, inherited state capacity, the rules-as-applied) before reaching for a country-specific story.

The comparative-politics frame and methods sit in Practice of Politics and Political Analysis. What follows goes deeper on three live research programmes: democratisation and its reversal, state-building, and institutional change.

Democratisation and its reversal ​

Samuel Huntington's The Third Wave (1991) framed the modern subfield. The world has seen, in his accounting, three waves of democratisation: a long first wave from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, a short second wave after 1945, and a third wave starting in 1974 in Portugal and accelerating after 1989. Each wave has been followed, partly, by a reverse wave; the question of why some democracies survive and others revert is the field's central puzzle.

The three waves and their reversals, in count of electoral democracies. Source: Our World in Data, Democracy, drawing on the V-Dem Regimes of the World classification. Values are approximate and vary across coding schemes.

Three families of explanation have dominated.

Modernisation theory argued that democracy correlates with development: rich, urban, literate societies tend to democratise and stay democratic, poor agrarian ones do not. Lipset's 1959 article fixed the pattern in the literature, and cross-country data has held up. The mechanism is contested.

Lipset attributed it to a middle class that demands political inclusion. Przeworski and co-authors, working through the 1950 to 1990 panel, showed something narrower: poor democracies can be installed but rarely survive, while no democracy with per-capita income above roughly $6,055 (1985 PPP dollars, then Argentina's level) had ever fallen in the period they observed. Income may not cause democratisation so much as protect it once installed.

Transition theory emphasised elite bargains. Democratic transitions in Latin America and southern Europe across the 1970s and 1980s did not follow modernisation gradually. O'Donnell and Schmitter's Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986) read them as brokered between hardliners and softliners inside the regime and between moderates and radicals in the opposition. The pact-based account fits the cases well but generalises poorly outside that period.

Structural and exclusion-based explanations turn on the distribution of wealth and the credibility of mass action. Boix's Democracy and Redistribution (2003) and Acemoglu and Robinson's Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006) gave the family its modern statement: democracy is likelier where the rich do not fear redistribution under majority rule (because inequality is moderate, or because capital is mobile enough to flee taxation), and where mass mobilisation is credible enough to make repression too costly.

Recent work has shifted toward democratic backsliding. The pattern: it tends to come from elected incumbents, not military coups; it works through gradual constitutional erosion (judicial capture, media consolidation, electoral manipulation) rather than abrupt rupture; and the diagnostic question Levitsky and Way introduced is whether opposition can still compete on a level playing field and win, not whether elections are still held.

Hungary's Fidesz government rewrote the constitution and packed the courts after 2010. Turkey's AKP captured the judiciary and the media after 2013, then rewrote the system in 2017. India's BJP has eroded media independence and used investigative agencies against opposition figures since 2014. Poland's PiS government did similar work on the courts from 2015 until losing in 2023, the first major case of a backsliding regime defeated at the polls.

State-building ​

Charles Tilly's slogan "war made the state, and the state made war" captured the leading account of European state formation. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (1992) argued that the interstate competition of early-modern Europe forced rulers to extract revenue and conscripts more efficiently, which required centralised bureaucracy, regular taxation, and a standing army. The states that built these capacities survived; the rest were absorbed.

The thesis travels imperfectly outside Europe. Postcolonial states inherited the institutional shells of European states but not the state-society bargain (elite consent to taxation, the population's willingness to be conscripted) that came from centuries of contested state-building. The result is the cross-country variation in capacity comparative work catalogues: similar formal institutions, vastly different ability to enforce them.

Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail (2012) offers a complementary frame focused on the institutional choices that shape long-run state capacity. Inclusive institutions generate capacity through legitimate bargaining; extractive institutions concentrate power and discourage the productive activity that funds the state. Their canonical paired comparison is Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, two halves of one town with the same geography, climate, and ethnic composition but starkly different income, life expectancy, and rule of law on either side of a border that selects different institutions. The thesis is contested in its strongest form, but it has supplied the contemporary vocabulary for why some states function and others do not.

The pre-2011 border fence cutting through Ambos Nogales, with Nogales, Sonora on the left and Nogales, Arizona on the right.Ambos Nogales, circa 2008. The fence runs through one continuous urban fabric: same desert, same families on both sides, sharply different state capacity. Source: Elnogalense, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Institutional change ​

Institutions are sticky, but they change. Comparative scholars have moved away from old debates about whether institutions matter (they do) toward harder questions about how they change.

The dominant frame is path dependence. Decisions made at critical junctures (post-war constitutional design, decolonisation, regime transitions) lock in arrangements that increasing returns then make hard to reverse. Why the United States never built a national health system: a path-dependent argument points to the WWII-era tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance, which created an employer and worker constituency that defeated every later universal proposal.

Mahoney and Thelen's edited Explaining Institutional Change (2010) classified the main modes of incremental change: layering (new rules added on top of old ones), drift (rules left unchanged while their context shifts), conversion (existing rules redirected to new ends), and displacement (new rules replace old ones). Most institutional change in stable democracies is layering or drift, not displacement, which is part of why reform is hard and why apparent stability often masks real change in the rules-as-applied.

Party systems also change, slowly. Lipset and Rokkan's 1967 "freezing" thesis held that western European party systems crystallised around early-twentieth-century cleavages (church versus state, owner versus worker, centre versus periphery, urban versus rural) and stayed frozen on those lines. Half a century later, de-alignment (declining identification with traditional parties) and re-alignment (newer cleavages around immigration, education, globalisation) have produced visibly different party landscapes in most rich democracies, even where formal electoral rules are unchanged.

References ​