POSC 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Harold Lasswell, Islamic Democracy, Comparative Politics
4 Dec 2017
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Explaining how politics work around the world. Opinions (intuition on & feelings) vs. arguments (step back and evaluate) *making sense of the world based on fact* Tools of comparative research: agreement & difference, correlation vs causation, quantitative vs. qualitative. Comparative method good questions hypotheses evidence method of difference method of agreement. The comparative method is a way to examine patterns of facts or events to narrow down what is. Countries that share attributes but experience different political outcomes are puzzling important in terms of building a convincing comparative politics argument because we expect countries with the same features to undergo similar experiences. When a diverse set of countries experiences the same political outcomes, the reason cannot be mere coincidence outcomes, seeking the one attribute these cases share outcomes. The method of agreement compares and contrasts cases with different attributes but shared. What is politics who gets what, when, and how? (harold lasswell)
