Lecture: Comparative Politics
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 13
Opening
Picture two community gardens in neighboring towns. They're the same size, with the same soil, the same budget, and the same number of volunteers. After three seasons, one is thriving and the other has gone to weeds. You can't rerun those seasons with one thing changed. So you hunt for the one thing that differs. The thriving garden keeps a shared watering rota, and the other one leaves watering to whoever shows up.
You'll use that move far beyond gardening: a business major choosing where to open an office, a public-health student asking why one clinic network reaches rural towns, anyone reading a report that ranks countries. Each time, you set two places side by side and ask what the comparison can tell you.
Here's where we are. Week 1 named comparative politics as one of the five subfields. Week 5 sorted regimes into democracies and autocracies. Week 8 gave you the three-layer read of design, practice, and verdict. Week 12 drilled one question into you: is this a correlation or a cause? In this lecture we turn that question on the biggest puzzle in comparative politics. Why are some countries rich democracies and others not, and how would you test an answer?
I'll walk you through eight moves: two ways to plan a comparison, the problem of too few cases, two axes people blur, four rival explanations, two published indices, and a debate with no verdict. Then Week 14 takes us to international relations.
1. Two ways to plan a comparison
Think about a chemistry lab. Two beakers match in every way except the heat. That's an experiment: you change one thing and hold everything else fixed.
Nobody can do that with countries. You can't hand one country a new constitution and keep an identical twin without one. So political scientists choose their cases on a plan. A case is one unit a political scientist compares, such as a country, a region, or an election, chosen on a plan rather than at random. Two plans come from Przeworski and Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, published in 1970.
The first plan is a most-similar systems design: a comparison of cases that are alike in most respects but differ in the outcome, so the one difference that tracks the outcome becomes the explanation to test. Doranth and Kesslin are made-up neighbors. They match on 4 traits: region, income band, main export, and population size. They differ on 1. Doranth has an independent election commission, and Kesslin doesn't. Doranth has held 3 peaceful handovers of power, and Kesslin has held 0.
The second plan is a most-different systems design: a comparison of cases that are unlike in most respects but share an outcome, so the one trait they also share becomes the explanation to test. Amberlay and Tsendi, also made up, differ on region, income, export, and legal tradition. They share courts whose judges can't be removed for their rulings, and they share decades of elections the incumbents sometimes lose.
Here's the key line. Both designs are tools for narrowing explanations, never proof machines. The difference you find might be a coincidence. Something you never measured might be doing the work.
Pause and try this. Doranth and Kesslin match on 4 traits and differ on 1, and their outcomes differ. Which design is that?
Count what they share before you answer.
Here's the answer. It's a most-similar design, because the cases are alike in most respects and differ in the outcome.
So when someone says "I compared two countries," your first question is, "On what plan?"
2. Too many reasons, too few cases
Picture two cafés on your street. One is always busier. You list reasons: price, location, music, seating, opening hours, friendly staff. With only two cafés, you can't tell which reason explains the gap.
Comparative politics has that problem on a world scale. Lijphart named it in a 1971 article, "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method", in the American Political Science Review. A variable is a feature that differs from one case to another, such as a country's wealth or its electoral rule. Many variables, small N is the core problem of comparative politics: there are many possible explanations and only a few cases to test them on, so a comparison can narrow the explanations but rarely settle them. N is the number of cases, so Doranth and Kesslin give you an N of 2.
Lijphart offered partial fixes. Extend the study across time, so each country gives you several observations. Narrow the property space, the set of variables a comparison tracks, by combining related variables. And pick comparable cases, which is the most-similar logic again.
Here's the time fix in action. Watch Doranth and Kesslin at 3 elections each, and you have 6 observations instead of 2. That helps you see change inside each country, but it doesn't hand you a new country.
Pause and try this. Does watching the same 2 countries over more elections give you more countries to compare?
Think about what each new observation still shares with the old ones.
Here's the answer. No, because each new observation comes from the same 2 countries, with the same history and everything else you didn't measure.
More years help. They aren't more countries.
3. Two axes, not one
Picture two delivery companies. One reaches every street in the region, on time. The other has neighborhoods it never reaches. Now ask a separate question: who picks each company's leaders? Maybe the workers elect the board. Maybe one owner decides everything. Reach and leadership are two different questions.
Countries work the same way. State capacity is whether a state can tax, deliver services, and enforce its laws across its whole territory, a dimension separate from who rules and how. Regime type is the other dimension: who rules and how, the question you met in Week 5.
Here's the made-up grid. Marrowby collects taxes everywhere and holds competitive elections, so it's a capable democracy. Solvane collects taxes everywhere and holds no competitive elections, a capable autocracy. Ytrel holds competitive elections but can't run schools outside its capital, a weak democracy. Quoravi holds no competitive elections and can't enforce its laws in its border provinces, a weak autocracy. Two dimensions with two levels each give 4 combinations, and each country fills one.
The trap is treating these as one axis, as if a strong state has to be a dictatorship. Solvane and Marrowby both collect their taxes. Only one holds competitive elections.
Pause and try this. A country holds competitive elections but can't run schools outside its capital. Where does it sit on the grid?
Ask the two questions one at a time.
Here's the answer. It's a weak democracy, like Ytrel, because its elections make it a democracy and its reach makes it weak.
Can the state do it, and who decides? Two questions, two axes.
4. Wealth and democracy: the correlation trap
Here's a pattern you might notice in a city. Neighborhoods with more coffee shops tend to have more bike lanes. Do coffee shops build bike lanes? Probably not. A crowded, walkable neighborhood tends to bring both.
Keep that picture in mind. Democratization is the process by which a country becomes democratic, moving toward free and fair elections and protected rights. The oldest explanation is modernization theory: the explanation that economic development, meaning wealth, education, and urban life, makes democracy more likely to emerge or to last, resting on a robust correlation whose mechanism and direction are still debated. Lipset made the classic early statement in 1959, in an article called "Some Social Requisites of Democracy".
The finding itself is solid. Wealth and democracy tend to come together, and that correlation has been found again and again. What's argued over is the arrow. Wealth might support democracy, because secure, educated citizens demand a say. Or the arrow might run backward. Reverse causation is the possibility that the arrow runs the other way from the one first assumed, as when democracy supports wealth rather than wealth supporting democracy. Or a third factor might drive both, like the walkable neighborhood.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "Lipset proved that wealth causes democracy." What's wrong with that sentence?
Remember Week 12's question.
Here's the answer. Lipset documented a correlation, an association, and the mechanism and the direction are still debated, so "proved causes" claims too much.
Found together isn't proof of cause.
5. Three rival explanations
Modernization has three rivals, and I'll give each one its strongest case and its sharpest critic.
Start with two housing co-ops. In one, any member can propose a rule and the budget is posted for everyone. In the other, the founding family controls the budget. Acemoglu and Robinson, in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, put rules like these first. Inclusive institutions are political and economic rules that spread power widely, protect rights, and let people use their talents. Extractive institutions are rules built to transfer resources from the many to a narrow group. Proponents argue that institutions explain both wealth and democracy. Critics respond that institutions are hard to measure apart from the outcomes they're meant to explain.
Next, picture two volunteer fire companies with the same rules on paper. In one, members trust each other and accept a lost vote. In the other, every lost vote starts a feud. Political culture is the widely shared set of beliefs and values about politics in a society, such as trust in others and tolerance of opponents. Proponents argue that trust and tolerance help a democracy last. Critics answer with the circularity critique: if you measure a democratic culture by democratic behavior, and then use that culture to explain democracy, you've gone in a circle.
Last, picture a town council funded entirely by a lottery jackpot. It never has to ask residents for taxes. The resource curse is the claim that wealth from oil and minerals tends to come with less democracy. It comes from Ross, in a 2001 article titled "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?". Proponents argue that rulers who live on resource income need less consent from taxpayers. Critics respond that the pattern's strength depends on which countries and years get counted, and on the institutions in place before the discovery.
Pause and try this. A critic says a theory explains democracy by pointing to democratic behavior. Which explanation is that critic attacking?
Think about the word "circle".
Here's the answer. It's the political-culture explanation, and the objection is the circularity critique, because the cause is measured by the very outcome it's meant to explain.
Four explanations, four critiques, and no winner handed to you.
6. Reading Freedom in the World
Think about the score in a restaurant window after a health inspection. Trained inspectors use a published checklist, score each item, and add them up. It's useful, and you can check how it was built. It's still a judgment. And it tells you the kitchen's condition on inspection day, not why the kitchen is that way.
A governance index is a score that combines many expert judgments about a country's political conditions into one number or category, published with a stated method. Our first one is Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2026, covering 2025, for 195 countries and 13 territories. An indicator is one specific question an index scores for each country. This index has 25: 10 for political rights and 15 for civil liberties. Each gets a score from 0 to 4, so political rights add up to 40, civil liberties to 60, and the total runs to 100. Expert coding is trained people scoring each indicator for each country against a published method, which makes an index transparent and still a judgment process. The total sorts a country as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free.
Here are the four scores we pin. Canada, 97, Free, from 39 and 58. Japan, 96, Free, from 40 and 56. Botswana, 75, Free, from 31 and 44. Mexico, 58, Partly Free, from 26 and 32. And the headline: 88 of 195 countries rated Free, which is about 45.1 percent of countries, not of people. Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year. In 2025, 54 countries declined and 35 improved. Bolivia, Fiji, and Malawi moved from Partly Free to Free.
You always say the edition, the year an index is published, beside the year it covers. So it's Freedom in the World 2026, covering 2025.
Pause and try this. Botswana scored 75. Does that number tell you why Botswana scored 75?
Think about the inspection score in the window.
Here's the answer. No, because an index reports conditions as coders scored them, and it shows no cause.
And a low score is never a verdict on a people. It describes conditions in a year.
7. A second index, in its own words
Back to the restaurant. The inspector posts a number. A food critic posts stars. Four stars isn't "a 96", and you'd never average the two.
V-Dem's Democracy Report 2026 is our second index, and it counts regimes for 2025 in its own four categories: 31 liberal democracies, 56 electoral democracies, 57 electoral autocracies, and 35 closed autocracies. An electoral autocracy is a regime category in which multiparty elections are held but fall short of free and fair. A closed autocracy is a regime category in which no multiparty elections choose the top offices at all. The report says 74 percent of the world's population lives in autocracies and 44 countries are autocratizing. Autocratization is movement away from democracy, whatever a country's starting point.
Add them up and you get 87 democracies and 92 autocracies, for 179 countries. Notice something. Freedom House rated 88 countries Free, and V-Dem counted 87 democracies. Those sit close. They're still different measures, with different categories, counting different sets of countries: 195 against 179. So you never merge them, and you keep each category exactly as its source spells it.
Pause and try this. A classmate adds Freedom House's 88 Free countries to V-Dem's 31 liberal democracies to get one total. What's the problem?
Think about the stars and the inspection score.
Here's the answer. The two indices use different categories and count different sets of countries, so their figures can't be added or merged.
Categories follow the source.
8. Which explanation, and how would you test it?
Back to the gardens one last time. Four neighbors give four reasons for the weeds: the watering rota, the town's wealth, the volunteers' habits, and a grant that meant nobody had to fundraise. Which reason holds up when you test it against other gardens?
That's this week's open question. Proponents of modernization point to a correlation that has held up across many studies. Proponents of institutions argue that rules about power come first. Proponents of political culture argue that values make rules stick. Proponents of the resource curse argue that where a government's money comes from shapes whom it must answer to. Each side names a real weakness in the others.
Keep the kinds of claim apart. "Canada scored 97 in Freedom in the World 2026" is empirical, checkable against the country page. "Wealth tends to come with democracy" is empirical, a correlation. "The index ought to weight civil liberties more heavily than political rights" is normative, and no score settles it.
Pause and try this. Is "The index ought to weight civil liberties more heavily than political rights" an empirical claim or a normative one?
Think about the word "ought".
Here's the answer. It's normative, because it says how the measure should be built, and that has to be argued from values.
The verdict on the big question is yours. Your reasons, and the cases you'd compare to test them, are what count.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Most-similar and most-different designs both narrow the suspects, and neither proves a cause. Many variables, small N is the field's core problem, and the fixes help without solving it. State capacity and regime type are two axes, with all four combinations real. Modernization rests on a robust correlation whose arrow is still argued over. Institutions, political culture, and the resource curse each have a strong case and a sharp critic. Freedom in the World 2026 rated 88 of 195 countries Free, and V-Dem's Democracy Report 2026 counted 31, 56, 57, and 35 regimes, each read with its edition and year. An index reports conditions, never causes, and never a verdict on a people. And which explanation wins is yours to argue.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then Week 14, International Relations, asks what explains conflict and cooperation when there's no world government at all.
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