POLS 1300 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Movement For France, Democracy Index, Biasing
3 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Comparative politics - the subfield of political science that uses the comparative method to analyze multiple case studies. Concepts - ideas that we usually attempt to define as we ask and answer our questions. An idea comparativists use to think about the process we study. Good concepts are clear and coherent, consistent and useful for measuring variables. Examples of concepts are numerous and include freedom, democracy, (as well as liberal democracy, electoral democracy, delegative democracy, and many other subtypes), justice, nationalism, constitutionalism, federalism, identity, gender relations, special interests, and social movements. Conceptualization - process of creating and selecting social science concepts. We do not want to come up with a thousand different definitions of a concept like. Democracy when there are already several good and accepted definitions available. Operationalization - process of making basic concepts measurable. Helps us explain what we are studying. Theories generally have some support for its arguments in the real world.
