The Importance of Studying Comparative Politics

The Importance of Studying Comparative Politics

Comparative politics is an important aspect of political science in that instead of studying how this country functions, it studies why other countries around the world are the way they are. There must be some medium for finding the differences and similarities between one county and another in order discover what can effect such aspects as economic strength, military strength, and the structure of the regime in power. One reason to compare countries is to help ourselves by allowing us to learn about other countries while escaping the ethnocentric fallacy many of us have. The Unites States may have a good government but is not necessarily a perfect government; certain countries may have aspects of their own government that we could learn from and perhaps improve upon our own system. Another reason to compare countries is to understand how countries evolve, discover patterns, and why they evolve in the way they do. Another very important reason to study comparative politics is to better understand how certain regimes work for purposes of international relations and foreign policy. In order to create policy regarding other countries and in order to give aid to these countries we must know how these countries function so that we can work with the countries instead of blindly trying to change them in a way that we seem fit. This is especially important in the modern age with the evolution of a global cooperation between many countries and the fact that the United States has become the watchdog, big brother, and teacher for many of the less developed countries of the world.

The political culture of a country is the basic values, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas of the people t...

... middle of paper ...

...ch as why Mexico even with regime very similar to our won still is on the most part under-industrialized and poor when compared to the position of the United States in the world order. Comparing culture could help explain dissimilarities in performance when comparing countries of similar regimes. Also by mapping changes in a country's political culture one can correlate those changes with changes in regime and find patterns and trends hopefully create theories and hypotheses that might explain such changes. Another possible use is perhaps applicable to foreign policy and international relations. If the culture of a country can be defined then policies can be formed that could better work with the type of people that live there with as little negative reaction as possible such as many countries that the United States helps are offended by our presence in their lands.