POL222H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Labor Rights, Thick Description, Comparative Politics
Document Summary
Want to know the systematic empirical regularity of political phenomena of our interest. Test theories and build generalizable knowledge about political phenomena. Similarities and differences in domestic politics in countries around world. We will learn methods used in political science research. We will test our theory with data from the real world. We will examine a large number of cases to test our theory. Case studies: may choose to examine a single case or a few cases intensively. Ex: village politics in african politics, go there and conduct research. Collect data on a large number of cases. Quantify relevant information (= an important concept measured in numbers) Study high-performing economies to learn from successful cases. 1960s: germany and japan - defeated in ww2 yet still performed well post-ww2. 1980s: nics or nies (singapore, south korea, taiwan, hong. Prohibition of unions or strikes and/or lack of labour rights. Based on observations of fast growing east asian economies in the 1980s.
