T407016 // Autumn 2026 // Université de Genève
Comparative
Politics
Session 01. What comparison is for.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jihye Park
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva. I earned my PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester.
Research
International political economy
- Politics of trade and trade agreements
- Intellectual property rights
- Development finance and foreign aid
- Firm lobbying
Quantitative methods
- Large language models and text as data
- Causal inference
- Panel data analysis
Fourteen weeks, one question
Why is political life organized so differently across countries, and what follows from those differences? Each week pairs comparative research with a question a policy analyst actually faces.
The reading load is light on purpose. One or two texts a week, read closely. Come ready to say what the author claims and whether you believe it.
Two slots a week
- Thursday class
- 16:15 to 18:00 in Uni Mail M2160. The main class, following the weekly schedule.
- Tuesday complement
- 16:15 to 18:00 in Uni Mail M2170, on four dates. Practical skills the readings assume.
- Room changes
- 1 October in Uni Mail M R030 and 29 October in Uni Dufour U300
- Moved class
- Week 4 moves from Thursday 8 October to Tuesday 6 October, in Uni Mail M2170
- Office hours
- Thursdays 14:30 to 16:00 in M4328. No appointment needed.
- Jihye.Park@unige.ch
Complement attendance is mandatory, and what we cover there is examinable.
How your grade adds up
| Component | Weight | When |
|---|---|---|
| Written final exam | 40% | Thursday 17 December, in class |
| Reading quizzes | 25% | Six quizzes, best four count |
| In-class group work | 25% | Thursday sessions |
| Participation | 10% | Across the semester |
The fine print
Six 20-minute quizzes open the class and cover the readings and lectures since the previous quiz. Your best four count, so the two weakest drop automatically.
That drop also absorbs absences. There are no make-ups and no paperwork. Miss more than two and come see me.
Groups form in week 2 and stay together. Most Thursdays you apply the week's framework to a case or policy problem you have never seen.
Each group hands in a short written output at the end of class, marked on a three-point scale. Your lowest mark drops.
I grade the quality of your engagement with the reading, on Thursdays and at the complements.
Disagreeing with the author counts. One sharp point about the text beats ten vague ones.
Written, in person and cumulative, on Thursday 17 December. You write an essay that reasons with the material, often about a country or policy problem that is new to you.
Missing the exam without a documented justification means a failing grade.
Dates to know
- Groups form
- Quiz 1Uni Mail M R030
- Week 4 class
- No class
- Quiz 2
- Quiz 3Uni Dufour U300
- Quiz 4
- Quiz 5
- Quiz 6
- Exam review
- Final exam, in class
Quizzes open the class, so be on time on quiz days.
Complement sessions
Four sessions. Practical skills, no assigned reading unless noted.
- Concepts, measurement and validity
- Hypotheses and how they are evaluated
- Reading regression tables
- Exam review
AI tools and email
Use it to understand a reading, check your own summary of an argument, or quiz yourself before the exam. I encourage all of that.
Every assessment is handwritten in a supervised room. The real risk is ending up with a fluent summary and no ability to argue with the author.
Trust me, I can spot that gap.
- Put T407016 in the subject line
- Open with a greeting, address me as Dr. Park, sign with your name
- Check the syllabus first. Rooms, dates and weights are all there.
- Allow two working days for a reply
- Anything longer than a paragraph belongs in office hours
What comparison
is for
Lijphart, Arend. 1971. "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method." American Political Science Review 65(3), 682-693.
A federal office sends you one question
Would compulsory voting raise turnout in Switzerland?
Which places would you look at?
What else differs between those places and Switzerland?
Would the experience of one country be enough to convince you?
Compared with what?
Is Swiss turnout low? A single number means little until it sits next to other countries.
Check whether a factor travels with an outcome across cases, while holding other things roughly constant.
Before recommending a reform, look at what it did in places that already tried it.
For Lijphart, comparison is a method of control. We compare to rule out rival explanations for the relationship we care about.
Four ways to test a claim
Experimental
You assign the treatment yourself. The strongest control, and rarely possible with whole countries.
Statistical
Many cases. You control for rival factors mathematically, through partial correlations.
Comparative
The same logic with too few cases for statistics. Control comes from choosing cases carefully.
Case study
One case, studied in depth. It can generate hypotheses, probe them, or show where a theory fails.
The squares show how much control each method gives over rival explanations.
Many variables, small N
Four countries and fourteen candidate explanations. Almost any story fits the data. Lijphart suggests four ways out.
- Add cases where you can, across more countries or a longer period
- Combine related variables into fewer categories
- Pick comparable cases that are alike in many respects and differ in the variables you study
- Let theory narrow the list to the few variables that matter most
A case of what?
A case is one instance of the thing you want to explain, bounded in space and time.
One country can supply one case or hundreds. Your question decides whether the unit is a country, a canton, an election, a vote, or a voter.
Most similar or most different
Most similar systems
| Case A | Case B | |
|---|---|---|
| Background factors | same | same |
| Explanatory factor | yes | no |
| Outcome | yes | no |
Hold the background fixed. See whether the one factor that differs moves with the outcome.
Most different systems
| Case A | Case B | |
|---|---|---|
| Background factors | differ | differ |
| Explanatory factor | yes | yes |
| Outcome | yes | yes |
Let the background vary. See whether the one shared factor comes with a shared outcome.
John Stuart Mill set out both logics in A System of Logic (1843). Lijphart's comparable cases follow the most similar design.
Depth or breadth
Case study
- Gain
- Context, sequence and precise concepts
- Risk
- Hard to generalize
Small-N comparison
- Gain
- Control through case choice, detail intact
- Risk
- Too many variables for the cases
Large-N statistics
- Gain
- General patterns and estimates of uncertainty
- Risk
- Thin measures that stretch concepts
Many of this semester's readings sit on the right, and the Tuesday complements teach you to read them.
Three traps
Study only the countries that democratized and every factor they share looks like a cause. You also need the cases where it did not happen.
Geddes 1990
Neighbors learn from and imitate one another, so countries are rarely independent observations. This is known as Galton's problem.
Carry a concept to too many places and it ends up meaning very little. Sartori calls this conceptual stretching.
Sartori 1970
Back to the federal office
Schaffhausen
The only canton that still requires citizens to vote, and its turnout is regularly among the highest in the country. Same federal ballots, different rule.
The Netherlands
Dropped compulsory voting in 1970. Turnout at the next national election fell sharply.
Which design is each comparison? What does it settle, and what could still fool you?
Before Thursday 24 September
Week 02. States and state capacity.
Tilly, Charles. 1985. "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime." In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol. Cambridge University Press, 169-191.
Hanson, Jonathan K., and Rachel Sigman. 2021. "Leviathan's Latent Dimensions. Measuring State Capacity for Comparative Political Research." Journal of Politics 83(4), 1495-1510.
- Groups form in class
- Quiz 1Uni Mail M R030
- Week 4 classM2170
Progress saved
Questions?
Office hours Thursdays 14:30 to 16:00 in M4328