Comparative Politics

Comparative politics is the subfield of Political Science. As a sub-discipline, it attempts to understand and analyze how politics and government work within particular countries and regions across the world. As the name itself indicates, Comparative Politics, mainly focuses on making comparisons with other countries, regions, period or system. Comparative Politics highlights the similarities, differences and uniqueness of a particular political system, constitution, political parties, governance, political culture etc with other countries and regions. In some cases comparisons can be made within different regions of the same country as well. Comparative Politics also analyses the transformation and regime changes that a particular political system undergoes within a particular period of time. In traditional political science literature, Comparative Politics was popularly perceived as the comparative study of constitutions and government systems across the world. However, after the end of colonialism new states emerged in Asia, Latin America and Africa and these nation- states were entirely different from the American- European model of political systems. Most of these states witnessed frequent regime changes, strong sense of nationalism, military dictatorships and increasing role of religion in politics. Further, these states were economically weak and dependent on foreign aid. These developments, coupled with globalization and trans-nationalization of capital further expanded the nature and scope of Comparative Politics. Hence, in the contemporary era, Comparative Politics is a broad field of study that analyses political system, political culture, emergence of protest movements, terrorism, development/underdevelopment debate, economic growth, nationalism etc in a comparative perspective.

Against this context, this book makes a modest attempt to address some of the core issues that are central to discipline of Comparative Politics. The book is a collection of articles ranging from the theories of earlier pioneers like Kautilya, Machiavelli, Locke and Rousseau to the latest debate on Arab Spring and political marketing. Every effort is made to make the book relevant for readers by including diverse issues, problems and regime changes in a comparative framework.