Political Science

When the economy is low, there is generally a decrease in economic activity, resulting in lower levels of production, employment, and spending. This can lead to decreased consumer confidence, business closures, and financial hardships for individuals and businesses. Governments may intervene with policies to stimulate economic growth and recovery.

Islamic law (Sharia) serves as the primary source of legislation in Libya, as stated in the country's constitution. However, other legal principles and customs also influence the Libyan legal system, reflecting a mix of Islamic, customary, and statutory law.

The pluralist model suggests that power is widely dispersed among various groups in society, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few. It emphasizes the importance of different interest groups having the ability to influence decision-making processes and policy outcomes. This perspective holds that no single group dominates completely, leading to a more balanced distribution of power.

Economics is related to social sciences like sociology through its focus on understanding human behavior, social interactions, and societal institutions. In sociology, economics helps analyze how economic factors influence social structures, inequality, and power dynamics. When considering natural services, economics examines how economic activities impact the environment and natural resources, leading to discussions on sustainability, conservation, and resource management within the broader social context.

Comparative politics is a subfield of political science, characterized by an empirical approach based on the comparative method. When applied to specific fields of study, comparative politics may be referred to by other names, such as for example comparative government (the comparative study of forms of government) or comparative foreign policy (comparing the foreign policies of different States in order to establish general empirical connections between the characteristics of the State and the characteristics of its foreign policy). Sometimes, especially in the United States, the term "comparative politics" is used to refer to "the politics of foreign countries." This usage of the term, however, is often considered incorrect while sometimes political research must be conducted by analysing the behaviour of qualitative variables in a small number of cases. The case study approach cannot be considered a scientific method according to the above definition, however it can be useful to gain knowledge about single cases, which can then be put to comparison according to the comparative method

Comparative politics is not defined by the object of its study, but rather by the method it applies to study political phenomena. Peter Mair and Richard Rose advance a slightly different definition, arguing that comparative politics is defined by a combination of a substantive focus on the study of countries' political systems and a method of identifying and explaining similarities and differences between these countries using common concepts . Rose states that, on his definition: "The focus is explicitly or implicitly upon more than one country, thus following familiar political science usage in excluding within-nation comparison. Methodologically, comparison is distinguished by its use of concepts that are applicable in more than one country.

The comparative method

The comparative method is - together with the experimental method, the statistical method and the case study approach - one of the four fundamental scientific methods which can be used to test the validity of general empirical propositions,[ i.e. to establish empirical relationships among two or more variables while all other variables are held constant.In particular, the comparative method is generally used when neither the experimental nor the statistical method can be employed: on the one hand, experiments can only rarely be conducted in political science; on the other hand the statistical method implies the mathematical manipulation of quantitative data about a large number of cases, Some major works in comparative politics.

Aristotle: In his work The Politics, Aristotle compares different "constitutions", by introducing a famous typology based on two criteria: the number of rulers (one, few, many) and the nature of the political regime (good or corrupt). Thus he distinguishes six different kinds of "constitutions": monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (good types), versus tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (corrupt types).

Montesquieu:

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Seymour Martin Lipset:

Barrington Moore: In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) Moore compares revolutions in countries like England, Russia and Japan (among others). His thesis is that mass-led revolutions dispossess the landed elite and result in Communism, and that revolutions by the elite result in Fascism. It is thus only revolutions by the bourgeoisie that result in democratic governance. For the outlier case of India, practices of the Mogul Empire, British Imperial rule and the Caste System are cited.

Samuel P. Huntington:

Robert A. Dahl:

Arend Lijphart: Patterns of Democracy (1999), an unrivaled, comprehensive study of democracies around the world.

Giovanni Sartori: Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structure, Incentives and Outcomes

Theda Skocpol: In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China Theda Skocpol compares the major revolutions of France, Russia and China: three basically similar events which took place in three very different contexts. Skopcol's purpose is to find possible similarities which might help explain the phenomenon of political revolution. From this point of view, this work represents a good example of a research conducted according to the Most Different Systems Design.

WHAT IS COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Why are some countries poor and others wealthier?

What enables some countries to "make it" in the modern world while others remain locked in poverty?

Why are the poorer countries more inclined to be governed autocratically while the richer countries are democratic?

What accounts for the regional, cultural, and geographic differences that exist?

What are the politics of the transition from underdevelopment to development and what helps stimulate and sustain that process?

What are the internal social and political conditions as well as the international situations of these various countries that explain the similarities as well as the differences?

What are the patterns that help account for the emergence of democratic as distinct from Marxist-Leninist political systems?

These are the kinds of questions that lie at the heart of the field of Comparative Politics.

COMPARATIVEPOLITICS DEFINED AND its SCOPE

Comparative Politics involves the systematic study and comparison of the world's political systems. It seeks to explain differences between as well as similarities among countries. It is particularly interested in exploring patterns, processes, and regularities among political systems. It looks for trends, for changes in patterns; and it tries to develop general propositions or hypotheses that describe and explain these trends. Comparative Politics covers a broad range of topics. The field has no one single focus. Different scholars have different preferences. There are several different kinds of studies. Among the types of studies that students of Comparative Politics actually do are the following:

1. Studies of one country -- or a particular institution (political parties, militaries, parliaments, interest groups), political process (decision making), or public policy (e.g., labor or welfare policy) in that country. When we focus on a single country or institution it is necessary to put the study into a larger comparative framework. That means we should tell why the subject is important and where it fits in a larger context.

2. Studies of two or more countries -- Provides for genuine comparative studies. (usually harder and more expensive in terms of research and travel costs).

3. Regional or area studies -- This may include studies of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Europe, or other subregions. Such studies are useful because they involve groups of countries that may have several things in common -- e.g., similar history, cultures, language, religion, colonial backgrounds, an so on.

Regional or area studies allow you to hold common features constant, while examining or testing for certain other features.

4. Studies across regions -- Often expensive and difficult to carry out.

Such studies might involve comparisons of the role of the military in Africa and the Middle East, or the quite different paths of development of the East Asian countries and Latin America.

5. Global comparisons -- With the improved statistical data collected by the world bank, the UN, and other agencies, it is now possible to docomparisons on a global basis.

6. Thematic studies -- Comparative politics focuses on themes as well as countries and regions. E.g., themes such as dependency theory, corporatism, role of the state, process of military professionalization. Thematic studies are often complex and usually carried out by more senior scholars.

WHY STUDY COMPARATIVE POLITICS? NATURE

There are a number of reasons for studying Comparative Politics.

1. First, it's fun and interesting, and one learns a lot about other countries, regions, and the world.

2. Second, studying Comparative Politics will help a person overcome ethnocentrism.

All peoples and countries are ethnocentric, but Americans seem to be particularly afflicted.

3. Third, we study Comparative Politics because that enables us to understand how nations change and the patterns that exist.

4. A fourth reason for studying Comparative Politics is that it is intellectually stimulating.

Consider these questions: Why do some countries modernize and others not? Why are some countries democratic and others not?

5. Fifth, Comparative Politics has a rigorous and effective methodology. The comparative method is sophisticated tool of analysis and one that is always open to new approaches.6. Finally, Comparative politics is necessary for a proper understanding of both international relations and foreign policy.

Without an intimate knowledge of the other countries with which we conduct foreign relations, we cannot have an informed, successful foreign policy.

HISTORY OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Comparative politics has a long and very distinguished history dating back to the very origins of systematic political studies in ancient Greece and Rome. Comparative Politics is about 2,500 years old -- and maybe older. One could argue that the study of Comparative Politics goes all the way back to humankind's first recorded history. Even the most ancient of peoples, organized as clans, tribes, or extended families, compared their situations with those of other peoples with whom they came in contact. The Bible is perhaps one of the first written statements of Comparative Politics. Particularly in the Old Testament the prophets are constantly comparing the people of Israel with other peoples: Egyptians, Persians, etc. The earliest systematic comparisons of a more modern, secular sort -- with almost all the ingredients of today's Comparative Politics -- were carried out by the ancient Greeks. The two foremost political scientists in ancient Greece were Plato and Aristotle. Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, are really the beginning of political science as we know it today -- and among the great books of all time. In these two books the authors cover almost all the key issues of politics: the nature of power and leadership, the different forms of government, public policy, and so on. For our purposes, what is important about Aristotle and Plato is their analysis of Comparative Politics.

Aristotle -- more a "scientist" -- collected approximately 150 constitutions of his time, mainly from the Greek city-states but from other areas as well. He studied these constitutions extensively. He wanted to know which form of government was most stable, so he began looking at the causes of instability. Both he and Plato arrived at a system or scheme for classifying the then known world's political systems. A modified form of this classification of systems is still used today. Montesquieu, the 18th century French philosopher, is the next great comparativist. Unlike Hobbes and Locke who focused on one country, but assumed it had universal validity, Montesquieu was a true comparativist. In his book The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu attempted to move beyond the constitutional procedures of a country to examine its true culture and "spirit." His greatest contribution to the field was his model for the separation of powers that influenced the U.S. system.

COMPARATIVE POLITICS: HISTORY AND APPROACHES

-- Comparative politics in the early days concentrated on only a handful of countries in Western Europe (Britain, France, and Germany; the Soviet Union was included later.

-- The approach was INSTITUTIONAL.

-- WW II and the Nazi genocidal policies brought about a wave of European emigration to the U.S. --- included among the immigrants were thousands of intellectuals.

-- Many of these intellectuals achieved top positions in U.S. universities. They included some top comparativists -- Friedrich, Loewenstein, Franz Neumann, and Hannah Arendt.

-- WWII had a profound ethical and moral effect on their writings and teaching, particularly in their efforts to dissect the Nazi system, to analyze the root causes of fascism, to study totalitarianism comparatively.

-In the 1960s a combination of factors -- the cold war, the sudden surge of a host of newly independent nations onto the world stage, and the internationalist posture of the kennedy administration, a global preoccupation with "development," availability of federal grants and opportunities for travel -- helped make comparative politics an attractive field.

The cold war and the fear of the spread of communism and Soviet totalitarianism was the impetus for some very important works in comparative politics.

-- W.W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960).

-Another path-breaking book was Almond and Coleman's The Politics of Developing Areas (1960).

-Many of the new leading scholars in the field began to be strongly critical of the institutional approach. They had been caught up in the broader revolution then sweeping political science, which called for an emphasis on interest group behavior and on the more informal aspects of political behavior.

THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH

Other scholars were strongly influenced by the Parsonian revolution in sociology, particularly Talcott Parson's structural- functionalism, his presumption of a universal social science of development, his notion of a system of social and political life and change, and his "pattern variables," which seemed to offer a convenient way of contrasting developing and developed societies. The view that comparative politics should be nonparochial, nonformalistic, nonlegalistic, analytic, and genuinely comparative became the prevailing position among scholars. Gabriel Almond, influenced by Parson's structural-functionalism and applied it to the study of comparative politics. The approach was strongly represented Almond and Coleman's The Politics of the Developing Areas.

THE FUNCTIONAL APPROACH

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT BECAME THE MOST POPULAR AREA IN THE 1960s. New and exciting studies analyzing political development were conducted. Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man (1959) showed the interrelations between social modernization and political democracy and implying that the two went hand in hand. As countries achieved greater literacy, were more strongly mobilized, and acquired more radio and television sets, they would also tend to become more politically developed -- i.e., liberal and democratic, just like the United States. In the 1960s the political development approach was very attractive. It was neat, coherent, intellectually and emotionally satisfying. The problem with this approach was that it presumed that Western institutions and policies both would and ought to be present in developing nations. When they were not, it was the local developing nations that were usually thought to be problematic, not the theory of development. Because these countries had few and weak parties, trade unions, and similar institutions, they were frequently declared "dysfunctional." While they may be dysfunctional in terms of the particular institutional arrangements of the West, they may be quite viable in their own terms. Thus political and moral preferences began to distort scholarly analyses. In 1968, in what many have called the last great integrating book in the field, Samuel P. Huntington provided a critical evaluation of the modernization literature and offered an alternative perspective. Huntington argued that social mobilization and modernization, rather than being supportive of and correlated with democracy and institutional development, in fact served often to undermine them in developing nations. Huntington's critique of the theories of modernization came to be generally accepted in the field, though his alternative proposal for an emphasis on orderly stable institutions such as political parties or armed forces as the key agencies of development was often criticized as a conservative formulation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, criticism of the dominant developmentalist paradigm was widespread. The developmentalist approach was criticized as being biased, ethnocentric, and less than universal. It was accused of ignoring the phenomena of class and class conflict, the play of international market and economic forces, and dependency. As the developmentalist approach began to loose its dominant position in comparative politics, a variety of alternative approaches began to emerge. They included: the corporatist approach; the political economy (which emphasized the economic constraints on politics) and the dependency approach.

THE METHODOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS:

Many studies employ quantitative methods such as opinion surveys and aggregate analysis, and the use of time-series data has also increased. Comparative politics has developed a greater awareness of the usefulness of combining quantitative and nonquantitative materials.

Group identity refers to the sense of belonging and shared characteristics or experiences that people have with others in a particular group. It can include cultural, ethnic, social, political, or other affiliations that contribute to an individual's sense of self within a larger community. Group identity often plays a role in shaping individual behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes.

1. Automatic adjustment: Flexible exchange rates allow currencies to fluctuate based on market forces, enabling automatic adjustment to changes in supply and demand without the need for government intervention.
2. Insulation from external shocks: Countries with flexible exchange rates are better able to insulate themselves from external shocks, such as changes in global economic conditions or commodity prices, as their currency can depreciate or appreciate to rebalance the economy.
3. Independent monetary policy: A flexible exchange rate regime gives countries greater freedom in conducting their own monetary policy, as they are not constrained by the need to maintain a fixed exchange rate.

Overall, a flexible exchange rate regime provides countries with the ability to adapt to changing economic conditions, maintain independence in their policy choices, and enhance economic resilience.

A scalar question is a survey question with multiple response alternatives (e.g. a Likert item) where only the polar endpoints are labeled.

See, for example: http://www.sesrc.wsu.edu/dillman/papers/2006/theeffectsofmodeandformat.pdf

The purpose of the national convention system is to bring together delegates from each state to nominate a candidate for the presidency of the United States. It serves as a platform for party members to discuss and determine the party's platform and select its presidential and vice-presidential nominees.

Social Darwinism, that of believing that all creation came about from tiny organizims and proceeded to grow and develop on their own, is still very much alive. From scientific examination, one can conclude, that indeed this is how all life began. However, coming from a Chrisitian standpoint, all creation comes from God. Now, the two can come together and conclude that all life begins with tiny organisims--matter--but developed only through and from, the power of God.

Sociology employs the scientific method as it's basis of research and this is what makes it a science. It is also combined in the same field as other social sciences such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, etc...

hope that helps!

Race distinguishes people by their physical appearance (skin tone), while ethnicity distinguishes people by their culture- what they "share" with others (i.e. language, religion).

Race and ethnicity are socially constructed, which means that they are only apparent because of how people view others. Race and ethnicity are created by society as a way to create generalized assumptions- labels. They are used because they are distinct markings- people can easily be grouped together by their similarities and separated by their differences.

Even though race and ethnicity are socially constructed, people do not always have the ability to choose their race or ethnicity. This is because race and ethnicity are not random. They originate from geographical location.

Social sciences are the field of studies that study "society." These include: anthropology, archaeology, business administration, communication, criminology, economics, education, government, linguistics, international relations, geography, history, law, and psychology. Political science may deal with all of these studies.

Behaviouralist methodology and positivism (i.e the use of quantitative data) within political science are methods and perspectives "borrowed" from psychology and natural sciences.

The census, in many places, counts the population every 10 years.

Science can improve people's lives in so many ways! Science is good for so many things. Think: without science we would have no cures for any sicknesses and people would be still dieing from a simple fever! We would also still think the earth is flat, and that cigarettes aren't killing people! Without science, we would never have landed on the mood, made fire, or have ANY modern technology. Science is in everything!

The power to make treaties with foreign countries is typically considered an executive power held by the government's executive branch. In the United States, this power belongs to the president as outlined in the Constitution.

Tools of social mobilization include social media platforms, community organizing, grassroots campaigns, and public demonstrations. These tools are used to engage and mobilize individuals towards a common goal, raise awareness, and create social change.

Political sociology is a subfield of sociology that examines the relationship between politics and society. It analyzes how power, authority, and governance are organized, maintained, and transformed within societies. The scope of political sociology includes studying topics such as political institutions, social movements, political behavior, and the impact of social factors on political processes.

Social Studies is the study of man and their past. Social Science is hard to explain... the Social Sciences are the fields of scientific knowledge and academic scholarship that study social groups and, more generally ,human society.

The full form of PPP is Point-to-Point Protocol. It is a data link protocol used to establish a direct connection between two nodes in a network. PPP is commonly used in connecting computers to the internet via dial-up or dedicated connections.

Questionnaires allow for standardized data collection, making it easier to compare responses and analyze results. They can gather data from a large number of participants efficiently and are cost-effective compared to other data collection methods. Questionnaires also offer anonymity to participants, which can lead to more honest responses.

EXCHANGE RATE IS THE RATE AT WHICH ONE COUNTRY'S CURRENCY IS CHANGED FOR ANOTHER COUNTRY'S CURRENCY. FOR EXAMPLE THE RATE AT WHICH ONE DOLLAR CAN BE CHANGED FOR POUND STERLING OR ANY OTHER CURRENCY.

Estimates vary, but it is estimated that corporations own or lease around 10% of the Earth's land. Ownership can vary depending on the region and type of land use.

Political science and social sciences examine various aspects of human behavior, societies, and political systems. They both seek to understand social phenomena, power dynamics, and institutions to explain and predict behaviors, interactions, and outcomes in society. By exploring political structures, policies, cultural norms, and social relationships, both political science and social sciences contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities of human societies.

The third step in the problem-solving model is typically to explore and generate potential solutions to the problem. This involves brainstorming different ideas, evaluating their feasibility, and selecting the best course of action to address the issue at hand.