studying power in Western Europe. However, the idea that local studies can
help in making generalized analysis of an equally unclear centre has already
shown itself to be promising in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe
(seedemocratic transition).
Comparative Government
Comparative government (or comparative politics) is one of the main branches
of the academic study of politics. The essence of comparative government as a
study is to compare the ways in which different societies cope with various
problems, the role of the political structures involved being of particular
interest. The aim is to develop an understanding of how different institutional
mechanisms work within their contexts, and, more ambitiously, to develop
general hypotheses concerning government. A typical examination paper in
comparative government will ask whether the French or American presiden-
cies enjoy the most power, or ask for a comparison of the roles of the
legislatures in Britain and Germany.
Though comparative government is nowadays usually clearly differentiated
frompolitical theory, this is a recent and probably unfortunate development.
Aristotle, who is normally thought of as a political theorist, certainly also
carried out a comparative study of the political systems known to him, though
unfortunately his collection of nearly 200 city state constitutions has not
survived. Later theorists, such as Jean Bodin (1530–96), argued for compara-
tive political analysis in the hope that it would reveal universally valid rules and
values.
In studies of comparative government, progress has been made in some
areas. For example, the effect of different electoral systems on the party system
is fairly well understood from wide-ranging comparisons, and predictive
theories have been developed which work quite well in relationship to
coalitionmembership inmulti-party systems. The main problem for
comparative government as a science is that it lacks a generally-agreed
theoretical framework that would identify what the principal tasks of a political
system are, and thereby locate the institutions or structures that should be
compared. In other words it is hard to know what comparisons are worthwhile
or sensible; and as a result, researchers have tended either to stick to obvious
comparisons within a limited range, or to rely on less-than commonly-
accepted theories, usually borrowed from other approaches, such asfunction-
alism. More recently, therational choice theoryapproach common in other
areas of political science has been used quite successfully in comparative
government, sometimes under the label of ‘The New Institutionalism’. This
in part owes its success to a shift towards the study of policy formulation and
outcome, which allows for a greater unity of national experiences.
Comparative Government