Introduction

In a famous passage from his "The English Flag," Rudyard Kipling writes,

And what should they know of England
who only England know?

Contrast the essence of distinction. In that sense, any serious study of politics--or anything else--must be comparative. The sub-discipline of comparative politics applies the tools of comparison to a specific end: understanding the internal politics of states and other large corporate entities by identifying differences between cases distributed across space and over time. In this course we will learn how to make effective, useful comparisons employing the types of explanations that political scientists find most useful. These explanations range from the actions of particular individuals to deep, underlying social forces, from the culturally specific traits to common underlying human rationality. To help us focus our efforts, we will explore many of these questions within the context of noteworthy academic work on substantive questions of societal division and democracy.

Goals

The course is designed to help you achieve the following vital skills which are essential for success as a graduate student and for a future in academia or in the realms that use academic knowledge to advance practical politics:

To learn the basic methods of comparison used in social science and to gain familiarity with those who have gained renown for using them well,
To understand the families of potential explanations and how these interrelate,
To be able to apply the full range of methods and potential explanations to particular cases, and
To express yourself well. This includes a clear, engaging writing style and organization that gets to the point without oversimplifying or ignoring complex questions. It also includes a strong speaking style and the ability to explain and defend your written arguments.

Methods

This course will require intensive reading, writing and discussion, each of which will reinforce the other. Readings and discussion will provide you with the methods and the approaches; writing and discussion will provide you an opportunity to apply your reading to improve your means of expression. Various writing assignments will encourage particular types of expression ranging from summary and analysis to intensive critique. These are discussed briefly below and in more detail in the actual assignment definitions.

Assignments

The following list of assignments and expectations should give you an idea of what you will need to do in this course:

Assignments:	Date Due:	Weight:
3-5 page review of the discipline	Monday, September 25	10%
5-10 page analysis of assigned text	To be determined in class	20%
2 page response to fellow student's analysis	To be determined in class	5%
Option A: 10 page take-home midterm	Monday, November 27	25%
Option A: 10 page take-home final	Thursday, December 21	25%
Option B: 20-30 page research paper outline	Monday, November 13	50%
Option B: 20-30 page research paper and presentation	Monday, December 18	50%
Participation (in class and electronic) including the Group definition assignment	Every single day	15%

Writing. Publications are the currency of academia, and your academic life will be determined not only by what you write but by how you write. It is therefore critical that you learn to write well. This is not always easy since the rigor of academic thought may seem incompatible with the readability of less precise efforts written for a wider audience. Usually, however, it is possible to find solutions that preserve your own scholarly integrity while at the same time protecting your readers from confusion and boredom.

Grammar and Syntax. Good writing is good thinking. Writing is one of the most important things you can learn in graduate school. Therefore, papers will be marked and graded as if this were an English class. I am hopeful that at the graduate level questions of grammar and syntax will not be an issue, but if such problems appear more than fleetingly in your work, you can expect not only a reduction in your grade but also a long conversation about how to improve. In the meantime if you anticipate problems with style or content, please take the opportunity to talk to me about possible remedies and I will do whatever I can to help. On-line guides to writing in the English language can be found at the the following websites:

Grammar and Style resources website
Wayne State University's Academic Success Center

Style. Readers often criticize academic writing for being inaccessible and turgid. While it is true that academic writing imposes additional burdens, you can still be rigorous and clear at the same time. Indeed you must learn to write so that your readers can understand and want to read on On this journey you cannot ask for better guides than the following two authors:

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, Chapters 2 through 4.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language

Electronic Paper Submission. Papers are due by 4:30 p.m. on the specified due date. Unless you have discussed alternatives with me, you should submit each paper electronically through the Digital Drop Box that is available under the "Tools" section of the course page on Blackboard (http://blackboard.wayne.edu). This will provide a formal record of the paper's submission including a time and date stamp. It also allows you to submit your papers from home or work. Unless we have agreed ahead of time you may not not submit your papers by email because there is no way to verify claims that papers have been sent.

Electronic Research and Writing Tools: In order to help you become familiar with the tools that you will need for your future academic and/or other professional careers, I will require you to make active use of the following:

Endnotes bibliography software (for creating bibliographies)
del.icio.us (for creating public bookmarks)
The course wiki page (for signups and the group definition assignment)
The course blog (for posting analyses and responses)
Electronic journals and other electronic scholarship resources

Paper Deadlines. Deadlines are firm. Each day of lateness will cost you one-third of a letter grade (dropping an A- to a B+, for example). There will be no exceptions, barring written evidence of trauma or tragedy. It is particularly important to understand that your classmates depend on your prompt submission of the text analyses so that they have sufficient time to write a response. Lateness on these papers be result in a grade of E. Be forewarned also that papers handed in late may not be handed back to you as promptly as those handed in on time.

Format. Unless you have prior approval from me, you must prepare your papers and take-home exams on a word processor in one of four formats: text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), Microsoft Word (.doc) or Word Perfect (.wpd). Papers must be double spaced, with reasonable font size (10-12) and margins (1 inch), and within the specified length guidelines. All these guidelines are there for your benefit as well as for mine. A paper that is too long bears evidence of inability to be concise and organized. A paper that is too short suggests that something is missing. Finally, think for at least a moment about aesthetics. Before submitting a paper that is messy, crammed together or otherwise unreadable, think about how it will affect the mood of your instructor--upon whose evaluation depends your grade.

Citing your sources. In our information-based society ideas and words are just as precious as gold and silver of earlier eras. Stealing someone else's ideas is no more acceptable than stealing someone else's possessions, and it will get you in a lot of trouble. Plagiarism at the graduate level will cost you your entire graduate career.

But why steal something that is already free? The only cost to you as a student for using somebody else's ideas is that you must give them appropriate credit and that is very easy to do. At the graduate level, this should be obvious, but in case it is not, let me make it explicit: if you get an idea from any source, you must cite that source, even if you do not use the same wording. As a colleague of mine has suggested, "Follow this simple rule of thumb: 'when in doubt, cite your source'"(Cason, 1998). The previous sentence is a case in point. I took the quotation from web-site of Prof. Jeffrey Cason at Middlebury College. If this syllabus had a section for Works Cited, it would contain the following entry:

Cason, Jeffrey. 1998. Course Requirements. Available WWW:
http://cweb.middlebury.edu/ps103a-s98/requirements.html [Accessed 17 August 1999].

Dr. Noel Parker of the University of Surrey has posted an excellent guide to when and why to cite others' words, which might also be helpful. For the sake of clarity, I will require you to follow a particular format for citations. My choice is the author-date method as defined in the Chicago Manual of Style, which I have used in the example above. The format consists of a parenthetical reference within the text (Author Year of Publication, Page Number) and a full elaboration of the reference in a Works Cited section at the end of your paper. I have put full guidelines for citation on-line, but I would also be happy to give you a printed copy.

If you have any questions or doubts about what to cite, you must contact me before you hand in a paper with questionable references. Although the assignments in this course cannot be answered by anything you can buy or copy whole from the internet or fellow students, there have been enough attempts (yes, even at the graduate level) that I now subject papers to a random screening process involving text-based search engines and the surprisingly discerning services of on-line plagiarism detectors; In the unlikely event that a student still finds it necessary to plagiarize, I will deal with such incidents in accordance with the provisions of the Student Due Process Statue specified in the university's Academic Integrity statement, which you can obtain online at: http://www.otl.wayne.edu/pdf/2006_july_aibrochure.pdf

Speaking. Another key skill for any academic is the ability to talk about one's own scholarly work without putting others to sleep, bewildering them, or insulting them. Those of you who have attended scholarly conferences will know that this skill is insufficiently widespread. As part of this course, I will therefore require you to give formal presentations at least once during the course of the semester, and perhaps more depending on your choice of assignment. These presentations will be modeled on the format used on most conference panels. On at least one occasion, you will be required to give a 15 minute presentation based on your 5 page analysis of one of the texts that we will read for class. On a second occasion, you will be required to present your critique of a classmate's paper.

Grades. Grades depend on you. Except in cases of remarkable collective excellence or incapacity, the median grade for the course will hover around a 3.5. Know, however, that because historical circumstances, a grade of B+ can be regarded much as the C's of old as a sign of significant need for improvement. Final grades will, in general, reflect assignment grades, but other factors can also affect your overall result:

You must participate actively. Unprepared rambling, stony silence, or regular absence can reduce your grade by the same amount. If you are having problems with discussion, find me and talk with me about it.
Class attendance is mandatory and will be recorded. More than three unexcused absences can result in a penalty of one full letter grade. Habitual lateness is indistinguishable from absence--especially since you will miss the daily question--and can incur the same penalty.
No student can receive a passing grade without completing all required assignments; it is not enough simply to do well on most assignments and leave one or two undone.

Accessibility

Every student should have the best possible chance to engage in learning. If you are registered with the Educational Accessibility Services office, please see me during the first week of class so that we can determine how I can help you. Please bring your paperwork from EAS to our meeting.

Books and materials

This course will use some printed material, but like the profession itself it is moving toward almost exclusively electronic distribution of informaiton. Most of the journal readings are available on-line through JSTOR and Project Muse and other databases to which Wayne State subscribes. These are available from any on-campus computer and with off-campus computers that are correctly configured. If you would like to print these out using the computers in the department's computer lab, you need only let me know and have a sufficient supply of paper.

Of the books we will be using, there are only three that require your purchase, though several others that merit your consideration. I am requiring you to purchase the following, available now at Marwill's Bookstore on Cass and Warren:

Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds. Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Lichbach and Zuckerman is available at Marwill's Bookstore on Cass and Warren, and others might become available as well. If there are problems with availability or price, you might want to try an on-line bookseller such as Half.com, Powells.com or Amazon.com. You may also want to look for these books at local used book stores such as John K. King's Bookstore, 901 W. Lafayette, 961-0622.

There are several other books from which we will read multiple chapters. I recommend them to you as a good starting point for a library in comparative politics, but I will not require you to purchase them and will make the sections available in the reader. These are,

Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987
Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1966
George Tsebelis, Nested Games, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990
Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, The Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994

Feel free to buy any of the other books on the list, as they are all classics in the field. If you want to start putting together a basic comparative politics library that goes beyond this syllabus, feel free to ask for suggestions.

The Class Schedule

This list represents a minimum set of readings for the course. I reserve the privilege of making additions over time, but I promise to inform you about any such changes well in advance.

I. Introductions

SHALL I COMPARE THEE...
Class 1: Monday, September 11.
Tasks:

Write Review of the Discipline due on Monday, September 21.
Connect to JSTOR from on-campus computers to see the American Political Science Review. For help with writing see: Grammar and Style resources on-line

WHERE WE'VE COME FROM
Class 2: Monday, September 18
Tasks:

Read: Tocqueville, Democracy in America , Volume I , Preface , Chapter 17 , Chapter 18 ( only " Conclusion")
Read: Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Introduction , Section I , Section VI ( only the timeline at the very end), and Section VII
Read: Weber, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," New York: Scribner's Press, 1958, Introduction , Chapter I and Chapter II
Read: Mill, " Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method "

THE STATE WE'RE IN
Class 3: Monday, September 25
CHANGE IN LOCATION: Class will meet in the TRC Instruction Lab in the Purdy/Kresge Library. Cindy Krolikowski, the social sciences librarian will instruct you in the use of electronic resources and assist you in the completion of your in-class electronic research assignment.
Tasks:

Hand in: Review of the discipline via the digital drop box on Blackboard
Hand in: In-class electronic research assignment.

For today, to be reviewed in next week's class:

Read: Lichbach, Mark I. and Zuckerman, Alan. 1997. Research Traditions and Theory in Comparative Politics: An Introduction. (Lichbach and Zuckerman text, Chapter 1).
Read: Roy C. Macridis, "Comparative Analysis: The Search for Focus" and Robert H. Bates, "Area Studies and the Discipline," and Chalmers Johnson, "Perception vs. Observation" in Bernard E. Brown, ed., Comparative Politics: Notes and Readings, New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000, Chapter 1 (pp. 20-37).
- Presenter: Kevin Deegan-Krause (actual presentation on Monday, October 2)
- Discussant: Kevin Deegan-Krause (actual presentation on Monday, October 2)
Read: Mair, Peter. 1996. Comparative Politics: An Overview. A New Handbook of Political Science edited by Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Read: Apter, David E. Comparative Politics. Old and New. A New Handbook of Political Science edited by Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Comparative Politics		KEVIN DEEGAN-KRAUSE
Class Hours:	Monday, 6:30 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.	Class Location:	113 State Hall
Office Hours:	Monday, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.	Office Location:	2053 F/AB
Web Address:	http://www.la.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/seminar	Office Phone:	313-577-2630