It is one of the branches of politicalscience that deals with the study of the patterns of government in our time,but the precise definition of the domain of the governments of the two maindifficulties encountered:The first difficulty relates to thedifficulty of studying and what are the activities that constitute the essenceof government activity.The second difficulty is the most important.
It is connectedto the relationship between values ??on the one hand and government activity onthe other, from the time when each government has a certain individuality ofits historical bequest that marks the arrangement and classification ofgovernments unclear. From this variety in main the meaning and consequence ofthe term, two basic analytical levels can be distinguished within the worthy ofcomparative policies: Straight Level Association of supervision activity withinthe unrestricted with LGU activities and possibly with lesser units such astrade unions, churches and organizations that agree with the government in substantialsomewhat than quantity. Comparison of the development of the same government across different historical periods.
This type of analysis has already dominated the study of comparative policies for a long time, revealing the weights of the various variables in the impact on government activity and the degree of continuity of this effect. Comparison of the various governments of the modern world, in which very different criteria were used.While these are the most prominent models of the classification of governments in the world, they are not the only ones, where the attempts to categorize and modeling according to the criteria used are very diverse, but it is noted that this method in the comparative study faces the same difficulty of gathering in-depth information.There are four terms used by political scientists as vocabulary: comparative governments, comparative politics, comparative analysis, and comparative approaches. Scientific curricula, scientific works and analysis use any of them without acknowledge the reason.Comparative breakdown is an important part of any orderly study in any science, and therefore political science is the bottom line of political insight.The concept of comparative politics welcomes the other three concepts as well as the most significant in the expression of the field of comparative political systems.
There is disagreement about the limits of comparative science. There are those who see it as the heart of modern political science and demand that it be expanded to include the largest number of States, and hence of comparable institutions and political interactions.They went with the political systems of Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Third World countries.If parliaments are, why are not parties? If the parties, why not be the leadership and methods of political recruitment?They also argued that limiting the scope of science in advance to institutions in their own right in certain countries narrows the scope of comparison and limits the possibility of interpretation.
For example, a party in a state may be an independent variable, and in another a dependent variable.Another group, however, warns against expanding the scope of comparative policy to include the same science of politics, and calls for limits to comparative political science. This division has two positions:The first is that it is not permissible to expand the understanding of the content of comparative politics to the extent that the differences between them and political science disappear, and then between them and other branches such as international relations and political theory.Second, the content of comparative policy should be expanded as a comparative analysis of political systems by increasing the quantity and quality of the main and subsidiary political systems under study in order to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of political institutions and patterns of political interaction in different countries.That the comparative analysis of the systems ofgovernment has been a constant journey of political thought since itsinception. In general, however, it is generally possible todistinguish between two phases in the development of the comparative policystudy: the pre-World War II and the later.The first stage: Aristotle, who lived in the fourthcentury BC, is the father of comparative political methodology, using thecomparative method in the study of forms and methods of governance.
In this regard, a comparative approach has been developed in identifying the problem (sources of stability and instability), collecting information on 158 constitutions of the city states, classification of information in the sense of the classification of constitutions according to several factors including the number of rulers, the method of governance and class survival, More or less stable and explain it.Aristotle said that the stable political system is focused on the rule of the middle class, which combines the relatively large number, and the mediation of the level of economic and reasonable education and culture.Polypias, who lived after Aristotle for almost a century and a half, compared the Persians, the Spartans and Macedonians to the Roman Republic and sought the most complete constitution.In the Renaissance, McAfee uses almost the same method as Aristotle Talesian. During the sixteenth century, the French thinker Jean Baudin studied the governments of European countries and ancient civilizations with their characteristics and manifestations of power.In the 19th century, comparative analysis deviated from that of previous scholars. Comparative studies were concerned with the interpretation of political developments in the light of the ideas of continuous progress, racial superiority and democratic optimism.At the end of the century, the studies of the systems of governance took on a theoretical and legal character that had nothing to do with the actual reality of these systems.
Some studies tended to glorify or criticize the democratic, aristocratic, socialist and anarchist doctrines without paying attention to the systems that adopt these doctrines.After World War I, comparative studies became more complex. The emergence of totalitarian regimes after the war has drawn attention to the study of Soviet, fascist and Nazi regimes in terms of their characteristics and their extent to their conflict with the Western democratic model.In this period, some comparative political writings emerged: Hermann Feiner: The Modern Government between Theory and Practice 1932, Karl Frederick: Constitutional Governance and Politics 1937, Edward Sait: Political Institutions 1938, but these works were limited to Western political systems, Of the legal approach – largely formal. However, the general characteristics of the comparative study of pre-World War II governance can be determined in the following points:1. Western Rule: Western political systems were the subject of comparative research.
2 – The predominance of the legal nature – Formality: The study focused on government institutions, the three powers of the legislative, executive and judicial systems in comparison from a constitutional perspective without much attention to non-governmental organizations such as parties and lobbying groups.3 – The trend towards description and not analysis: the study in general did not go beyond description to interpretation.4. The predominance of the conservative trend: Comparative politics has tended to pay attention to what is fixed and unchanging in the systems of governance, that is, the description of the evolution of political institutions in which they have reached their present status.5 – Absence of theoretical concerns: The scholars of comparative politics did not care to build an empirical theory of the systems of government, and no one knew that he tried to formulate hypotheses or generalizations to accept the test.6.
Systematic Inertia: The field of comparative politics has been characterized by severe systemic shortcomings.First, the policy itself was not considered empirical at the time, but an impressionist one.Second: The descriptive and legal study of the institutions of governance did not require complex research techniques.
Those were the characteristics that characterized the field of comparative politics before the Second World War.The second phase:During this period, the field of comparative politics witnessed a great development that deserved to be called revolution or explosion, as I went to Comparative Politics magazine in its first issue in 1968.In 1925, the ratio of comparative policy courses to the total number of political courses at the undergraduate level was in 1965.
This was accompanied by a protest against the traditional approach togovernance, a protest whose roots date back to the 1920s and 1930s. In thewritings of George Catlin, Charles Miriam, Harold Lasopell, a warning ofinstitutional-legal study and a call for comparative analysis of power andpower relations.
