Comparative Politics

Comparative politics is a field and a method used in political science, characterized by an empirical approach based on the comparative method. In other words, comparative politics is the study of the domestic politics, political institutions, and conflicts of countries.

U.S. election campaigns are insanely long when you compare them to other countries.

Americans may think their taxes are high, but compared to lots of other places, we have it pretty good.

How do we really compare different governments? Some have kings and some have presidents. But wait, some have prime ministers. Luckily, political scientists have a structure to compare governments, as this lesson shows.

Welcome to the website of the Newsletter for the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Comparative Politics Section. The Newsletter publishes symposia on various substantive and methodological issues, highlights new data sets of broad appeal, and generally informs the community about field-specific developments.

Comparison is such an intrinsic methodological assumption that it is not separated out as a specific subfield or approach. This background suggests the thesis of this article: that contemporary comparative politics is a movement rather than a subfield or subdiscipline.

Comparative politics is a broad discipline of analysis, as graduate students examine different countries through research and methodologies. These are the top political science programs for comparative politics.

Comparative Politics, an international journal presenting scholarly articles devoted to the comparative analysis of political institutions and processes, communicates new ideas and research findings to social scientists, scholars, students, and public and NGO officials. The journal is indispensable to experts in universities, research organizations, foundations, embassies, and policymaking agencies throughout the world.

Comparative Political Studies (CPS), published fourteen times a year, offers scholarly work on comparative politics at both the cross-national and intra-national levels. Dedicated to relevant, in-depth analyses, CPS provides the timeliest methodology, theory, and research in the field of comparative politics.

Comparative politics is about classifying, comparing, and sometimes even choosing, except that the "things" that are of interest to comparative politics specialists are the really big ones: states, societies, ideologies, political systems, countries, regions, time periods, worlds, and so on.