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Chapter 1. Comparative Politics and the Good Society
Chapter Overview
The chapter begins with the question of why some countries are better than others at creating
conditions in which citizens can achieve their potential. It then suggests comparative politics can
help answer this question. The introduction to the chapter explains what comparative politics is
and how it differs from international relations, with which it is often confused.
The second section of the chapter introduces students to the logic and practice of comparative
analysis. It begins by discussing hypotheses, independent and dependent variables,
operationalizing variables, and using controls. It then explains three methods of comparative
analysis: using case studies, comparative case studies, and comparing many countries. It
provides examples of how each method has been used. This section explains the difference
between correlation and causation and between empirical and normative judgment.
The third section considers two visions of a good society, one using GDP per capita as a measure
of success and the other using national happiness as a measure of success. It finds both wanting.
GDP per capita includes goods and services that are not indicators of a good society, omits
behavior many believe is desirable, and does not take into account how income is distributed in a
population. Happiness measures do not examine the different ways people find happiness, have
difficulty separating out cultural effects on how people report happiness in surveys, and
discriminate against very deprived citizens who tend to have lower standards for judging their
happiness than wealthier people.
The following section makes the case that the capability approach provides the most useful way
of measuring the good society. The approach focuses upon individuals’ freedom to live the kind
of lives they value. Doing so requires four basic capabilities: physical well-being, informed
decision making, safety, and being able to participate effectively in the political choices that
determine one’s life.
The final section of the chapter responds to criticisms of the capability approach. The section
argues that the approach is not too idealistic, is not contrary to human nature, and is not guilty of
cultural imperialism, using culturally-biased ideas argued from the United States and Europe to
judge and evaluate other countries.
Learning Objectives
1.1 Define comparative politics and illustrate the value and usefulness of studying it.
1.2 Outline the steps involved in doing comparative political analysis.
1.3 Analyze wealth and happiness as measures of the good society.
1.4 Define and apply the capabilities approach.
1.5 Analyze criticisms of the capabilities approach.
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Chapter Outline
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Some countries do a much better job than others at creating conditions in which
their citizens can live well and fulfill their potential.
B. These differences have dramatic consequences for people’s lives.
2. Citizens’ life expectancy was 15 years longer in Botswana than Zimbabwe.
C. Why do such differences exist?
3. The border between the two subfields is porous, however, and politics among
countries can affect politics within countries.
II. THE LOGIC AND PRACTICE OF COMPARATIVE ANALYIS
A. Doing comparative analysis is not limited to a course in comparative politics.
B. People do comparative analysis throughout their lives.
1. Students compare colleges when deciding where to apply.
2. Men and women make comparisons when they decide who they want to date.
C. Comparative political analysis differs from comparison in everyday life by using a
systematic process. Its main components are:
1. Hypotheses
a. State relationships that we expect to find among variables.
b. They often take the form of “if, then” statements, such as “if a country’s
wealth increases, then its citizens will be healthier.”
2. A hypothesis has a dependent variable, or what we are trying to explain, and
an independent variable, or what we believe explains them. In the hypothesis,
“the wealthier a country is, the healthier its citizens are,” wealth is the
independent variable, and health is the dependent variable.
4. Correlation is not causation.
a. In the example we have just used, GDP per capita is correlated with life
expectancy; the higher the GDP per capita, the longer the life expectancy,
but this correlation does not prove that increases in GDP per capita cause
longer life expectancy.
b. Ice cream consumption was correlated with the number of polio cases in
the 1950s. This did not mean that ice cream caused polio.
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c. Political scientists use control variables to try to establish causation.
Controls hold some variables constant in order to see whether we still
obtain the same results or if they were spurious.
D. Comparative politics uses three methods to test hypotheses.
1. Case studies – example of a study of capitalists and democracy in China
a. Examine topic in-depth in a single country to draw inferences about how
larger forces and structures behave
b. Advantage – offers detail and depth
c. Disadvantage – can be confident about results for the country in the case
study, but cannot generalize to other countries with assurance
2. Comparative case studies – example of why Uganda has had more success in
combating AIDS than Botswana
a. Examine a few countries in-depth instead of just one
b. Advantage – allows broader generalizations than case study
c. Disadvantage – difficult to control for all the variables that might affect
the results
3. Comparing many countries
a. Uses quantitative data to examine many countries – example of testing
hypothesis that as GDP per capita increases, so does life expectancy
b. Advantage – increases confidence in broad generalizations about the
relationship between variables
c. Disadvantage – does not provide as much insight as to why the
relationships exist as the other two approaches
E. The value of doing systematic comparison
1. Using systemic comparison is more difficult than the way we use comparison
in our everyday lives but is worth doing because it leads to more accurate
results than relying upon intuition and common sense.
2. It also provides a procedure for validating whose intuition is correct when
people disagree.
3. It can be satisfying because it is a kind of puzzle-solving, and the answers we
get and can act upon can have important consequences for people’s lives.
4. It helps us evaluate the world around us and enables us to form two kinds of
judgments about it.
a. Empirical ones based on observation and description about what
governments and states do, such as observing that Sweden spends more on
its welfare state than the United States
b. Normative ones that are judgmental and evaluative about what
governments should do, such as asserting that governments should create
conditions that enable citizens to be healthier
c. The Good Society combines both forms of comparison—empirical and
normative. It provides standards for judging a good society and uses
empirical methods to examine why some countries do a better job than
others of achieving the standards.
d. The questions at the heart of the text are what constitutes a good society
(normative) and why are some countries better than others at creating one
(empirical)?
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e. To answer these questions, we must develop general criteria for a good
society. This is the task of the following section.
III. VISIONS OF THE GOOD SOCIETY: GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT AND
GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS
A. Can get widespread agreement on what is not a good society.
1. A society that allows slavery
a. Slavery is total control of one person by another for the purpose of
economic exploitation.
b. At the end of the 20th century, there were an estimated 27 million people
worldwide living in slavery.
2. A society that experiences large-scale ethnic killing – example of Rwanda
where 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militants
3. A society where large numbers of children die from preventable diseases –
millions of infants die of preventable diseases each year
B. The more difficult task is to get widespread agreement on general criteria for
deciding what constitutes a good society.
C. Level of economic development
1. The case for using level of economic development
a. Citizens tend to be better off in wealthy countries than poor ones.
b. These countries do not have large-scale slavery, ethnic violence, or high
infant mortality rates.
2. The case against using level of economic development as measured by GDP
per capita
a. GDP per capita includes goods and services that are not indicators
of a good society, such as the cost of cleaning up oil spills.
b. GDP per capita omits behavior many see as desirable, such as families
taking care of children without pay.
c. GDP per capita may hide considerable differences in how income
is distributed.
d. National income per person and economic growth is important,
especially for poor countries, but it is not an end in itself. It is a means
toward other ends.
D. Happiness as the measure of a good society
1. The case for using happiness
a. Many people desire to be happy.
b. Happiness is an end itself—people do not want to be happy in order to
achieve a further goal.
2. The case against using happiness
a. People have different ways of finding happiness, including ways
that harm other people.
b. People may give priority to other worthy goals that require sacrifice and
hardship.
c. Surveys of happiness in countries may be measuring differences in
the ways cultures approve of openly expressing happiness or concealing
it rather than actual differences in happiness.
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d. Poor people tend to apply lower standards to evaluate their happiness
than wealthy people. While reports of happiness by poor people may be
genuine, they are also expressions of acceptance of conditions they
would probably change if they had the power to do so.
IV. CAPABILITIES AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE
A. The text suggests that the measure of a good society is whether governments
provide conditions that enhance individuals’ freedom to choose the kind of life
they have reason to value. “A capability is the power to do something.”1 To
pursue the goals important to their lives, four capabilities are especially
important:
1. To be able to meet physical needs
2. To be able to live in safety
3. To be able to make informed decisions
4. To be able to exercise civil and political rights
B. The four capabilities in more detail
1. Physical well-being
a. Physical well-being requires nourishment, health care, and housing
sufficient to support a long life.
b. One way of measuring physical well-being is to use poverty as the
indicator, but there are problems with this measure. Many countries do
not draw a poverty line. The U.S. does, but using U.S. poverty level of
$22,000 in 2008–09 for family of four as a poverty line would be
inappropriate for less-developed countries.
c. A better measure of physical well-being is infant mortality rates, which
measure the number of children who die during their first year of life
for every 1,000 live births.
d. Infant mortality rates provide a useful window into broader social
conditions in countries.
e. There are big differences between countries. In Sweden, less than three
infants per 1,000 die in the first year of life, while in Sierra Leone in
West Africa there are 154 deaths per 1,000.
2. Informed decision making
a. Being able to read and write and have math skills is essential for
making effective choices and choosing the kind of lifestyles people
want to live.
b. Without these capabilities, individuals are excluded from many
occupations and are vulnerable to manipulation.
c. To assess informed decision making, the book uses literacy rates in
countries.
d. There are big differences in literacy rates among countries and within
countries. In many countries, literacy rates are lower for women than
men and for racial and ethnic minorities. In South Africa, the literacy
rate for whites is 99 percent, while it is only 75 percent for blacks.
3. Safety
1 Amatya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2009), p. 19.
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a. People cannot lead a good life if they are in constant fear of being
beaten, shot, raped, or tortured.
b. Just as there are substantial differences in the degree to which countries
meet their citizens’ physical needs, there are also profound differences
in the extent to which they meet their citizens’ need for safety and
security.
c. To assess safety, the text uses homicide rates because data for
homicides are more accurate than those for other kinds of violent
crimes.
d. Canada’s homicide rate of 1.5 per 100,000 in 2004 was much lower
than the U.S. rate of 5.9 per 100,000.
e. People are threatened by civil wars as well as by isolated murders. In
the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa, more than 5
million people have died as a result of a civil war.
4. Democracy
a. Without influence over the laws that govern them, people cannot press
for improvements in their physical well-being, safety, and education.
b. Freed slaves in the United States discovered the importance of
democracy after the Civil War, as they lost voting rights and with them,
land, safety, and access to good schools.
c. There are big differences in the quality of democracy and citizens’
ability to use their right to vote effectively.
d. The book uses the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy
to measure democracy.
C. Caveats about the way the capability approach is used
1. First, it may be that all “good things do not necessarily go together” and
tradeoffs among physical well-being, safety, education, and democracy
may be necessary.
2. Second, the goal of a good society is to make it possible for each individual
in a country to enjoy a high quality of life, and not just for the average
quality of life to be high.
3. Third, the approach does not specify a particular set of economic, political,
or social institutions that are necessary for a good society.
4. Finally, the approach does not assert that it is the state’s responsibility to
ensure that all individuals thrive. It is, however, the role of the state to
create conditions in which persons can choose to pursue a flourishing life.
V. RESPONDING TO CRITICISMS OF THE CAPABILITY APPROACH
A. The capability approach has won widespread support in recent years from
eminent scholars and important international organizations.
B. There are, however, criticisms of the approach.
1. It is too idealistic.
a. It is certainly idealistic to assume that every citizen in every country can
enjoy a high quality of life, but it is not idealistic to believe that many
countries can do a much better job than they currently do.
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b. Many countries, including many poor countries, have made significant
improvements in infant mortality, literacy, safety, and democracy in recent
decades.
2. It is contrary to “human nature” because people are too competitive, greedy,
and selfish to create better societies.
a. People are capable of a wide range of behavior, from the most greedy and
selfish to the most altruistic and cooperative.
b. Assuming there is a universal “human nature” that is competitive, greedy,
and selfish makes it hard to explain why there are dramatic differences in
citizens’ behaviors and capabilities from one country to another.
3. It puts too little emphasis on the ways in which greed is useful and necessary.
a. One problem with this assertion is that even persons who argue that greed
can be beneficial do not claim that it achieves wonderful results under all
circumstances. Unrestrained greed and selfishness would leave the
advocates of greed themselves vulnerable to being cheated, robbed, or
even killed.
b. Whether the pursuit of self-interest leads to good results for individuals
depends a great deal on the institutional setting in which that pursuit takes
place. The pursuit of self-interest in Nigeria leads to high levels of
corruption, poor schools, and poor medical care, while in Denmark it leads
to the opposite.
4. It represents a form of cultural imperialism prescribing criteria for a good
society to be used as a standard of comparison for all countries.
a. Cultural relativists believe that it is inappropriate to try to establish criteria
for a good society that apply to all of the world’s countries. They claim
that each society can be evaluated only by using criteria from that society.
b. This criticism does not address the question of who establishes the criteria
for a society.
c. Cultures are seldom, if ever, monolithic in which everyone agrees but are
often filled with different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations.
d. Cultural relativists simply legitimize the power of those who have
triumphed over others in the conflict over prevailing social values.
e. Cultural relativism is difficult to apply in countries headed by
authoritarian governments to find out about internal value differences
because citizens are not free to voice differing opinions.
f. Cultural relativism provides no independent footing for choosing among
competing values within a country, for example those of the Taliban in
Afghanistan versus those of women’s groups who want better education
for girls.
g. The approach we use, by contrast, offers a reasoned way to establish
standards by which to compare and evaluate societies, one that has been
used and accepted by the United Nations Human Development Program. It
provides general criteria for evaluation and comparison but does not
specify a particular institutional arrangement.
VI. CONCLUSION
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A. What comparative politics does
1. Comparative politics examines why countries are organized in different ways
and what consequences those differences may have.
2. It examines differences within countries, as opposed to relations between
them, which is the domain of international relations, another subfield within
political science.
B. Why comparative politics is a valuable field of study
1. It makes us familiar with other countries.
2. It gives us perspective about our own country.
3. It provides a reference point or standard by which we can make judgments
about government performance.
C. Comparative analysis
1. It is systematic.
2. It proceeds by forming hypotheses, operationally defining variables, and
selecting a method to test those hypotheses.
D. The good society as a criterion for comparison
1. Why wealth is not a satisfactory way of measuring a good society.
2. Why happiness is not a satisfactory way of measuring a good society.
E. Capability as a measure of a good society
1. It focuses on individuals’ freedoms to choose the kinds of lives they have
reason to value.
2. To have these freedoms, they need capabilities to act in specific ways.
3. Four capabilities are particularly important: physical well-being, safety from
violence, making thoughtful choices about one’s life, and having civil and
political rights.
REVEL Assets
1.1 Define comparative politics and illustrate the value and usefulness of studying it.
Video: Cyclone Nargis in Burma
1.3 Analyze wealth and happiness as measures of the good society.
Video: David Cameron speech on well-being
Reading: The Gross Distortions of GDP
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Multiple Choice Questions
1. Achieving one’s potential:
a. depends mainly on one’s talent.
b. depends on working hard.
c. depends on one’s talent and the kind of society in which one lives.
d. depends on being a member of a society’s ethnic or religious majority.
usefulness of studying it.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Remember the Facts
2. The famed investor Warren Buffet’s explanation of his economic success emphasizes:
a. his ability to make better investment decisions than others.
b. his luck in being born at the right time and place.
c. his ability to be disciplined and work hard to reach goals.
d. his frugality.
Answer: b
Learning Objective: LO 1.1: Define comparative politics and illustrate the value and
usefulness of studying it.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
3. Comparative politics is a subfield of political science that studies:
a. politics among countries.
b. politics of countries outside the United States.
c. politics within countries.
d. foreign policies of countries.
Answer: c
Learning Objective: LO 1.1: Define comparative politics and illustrate the value and
usefulness of studying it.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
9
4. Costa Rica and Nicaragua share many characteristics. One difference between the two
countries is:
a. Nicaragua has a better environment for tourism than Costa Rica.
b. Costa Rica is a safer country than Nicaragua.
c. Nicaragua is a democracy with a strong country while Costa Rica struggles to
maintain its economy.
d. Costa Rica offers better life chances than Nicaragua.
Answer: d
Learning Objective: LO 1.1: Define comparative politics and illustrate the value and
usefulness of studying it.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
5. Which of the following is the subject matter for comparative politics rather than for
international relations?
a. education policy in the United States, Germany, and Japan
b. negotiating nuclear weapons treaties
c. forming treaty alliances among nations
d. war between Iran and Iraq
usefulness of studying it.
Topic: Introduction
Difficulty Level: Difficult
Skill Level: Apply What You Know
6. Comparative political analysis differs from comparison in everyday life because:
a. in everyday life, people seldom make comparisons.
b. in everyday life, people do not make political comparisons.
c. in everyday life, people do not follow systematic procedures for doing comparative
analysis.
d. in everyday life, people draw erroneous conclusions from comparisons while
comparative political analysis avoids erroneous conclusions.
analysis.
Topic: The Logic and Practice of Comparative Politics
Difficulty Level: Easy
Skill Level: Understand the Concepts
10
