Response #1

My response is on “A Survey of the Field of Comparative Government” by Roy Macridis.
I was very interested to see Macridis dissect what has been the traditional study of “comparative politics”: to describe a formal organization/institution on a singular basis and not analyze and compare parallels or differences of organizations and institutions between states of all types.
Understandably, as Macridis notes it is easy to settle on working with only similar and familiar cultures as a foundation for further studies because of accessibility, availability, and cultural affinity (4), but I agree that we are now beyond that and must be less narrow-minded and limited to western thought processes if we are to legitimately compare policies, governments and peoples.
In addition to using Western terms to describe non-western governments, the study of comparative politics has been satisfied too much by titles and not enough multi-faceted detail (ie. growth, change, and development). Traditionally, the study focuses on “what happened or what is?” and not “how it got there and why?”
Comparative politics needs to connect human behavior (like what King said regarding the 1950s & 60s Behavioral Revolution) more to political and economic developments intra and inter states. This connection could help with acknowledging and addressing the informal factors in addition to formal factors that contribute to politics, economics, and society.
I’m still not convinced whether area studies programs are for the better or worse. It seems logical to focus thoughts on an area to attain expertise and to assess situations with comparable ones in comparable states if the area study is used, as Macridis recommends, as a cautious analytical concept providing controls in situations to discover and describe variables; however, that focus can contribute to generalizing and associating a stereotype with an entire region/continent/hemisphere without any true means to compare systems in an analytical way across the globe.