Fundamentals of Political Science

1. Fundamentals of Political Science Dr. Sujian Guo Professor of Political Science San Francisco State Unversity Email: sguo@sfsu.edu http://bss.sfsu.edu/sguo

2. Central Questions? • Why has the democratic transition that occurred in some countries failed to occur in others? What factors that contributed to the transition in the former were absent in the latter? • Why did the two largest communist countries, China and the Soviet Union, which had much in common, show such different transition outcomes in the late 1980s and the early 1990s?

3. Theoretical Approaches • Structuralist • Strategic choice • Institutionalist • Political economy

4. Structuralist Approaches • Major authors Seymour Martin Lipset, Karl W. Deutsch Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, David E. Apter, Barrington Moore, Jr., Robert A. Dahl, Charles Lindblom, Adam Przeworski

5. Structuralist Approaches • Major Arguments Focus on macro-level social conditions, or socioeconomic and cultural prerequisites of democracy, emphasize the long-term causes and effects of democracy, and seek to establish a causal connection between socioeconomic and political structures.

6. Structuralist Approaches • Major Critics They can hardly explain why different political actors make different choices, why their preferences and policy choices shift from one to another within the same social and structural context. Moreover, fundamentally flawed is the assumption that democracy can be duplicated or any society today could follow the same path that led to democracy in Western countries.

7. Strategic Choice Approaches • Major Authors Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Tatu Vanhanen, Giuseppe di Palma, Herbert Kitschelt

8. Strategic Choice Approaches • Major Arguments Focus on the micro-level, the critical role of elites and their strategic choices, the splits within the authoritarian regime, and the compromise between the “softliners” and “hardliners,” and emphasize the autonomy of political processes rather than the social, economic and cultural determinants of political change.

9. Strategic Choice Approaches • Major Critics The process of transition is temporary, with much uncertainty, and therefore largely unpredictable. Moreover, the decision-making process under the old regimes usually take place behind closed doors or half closed doors, and therefore the elite model or strategic choice is impossible to fully comprehend how and why elites make those strategies and choices.

10. Institutionalist Approaches • Major Authors James G. March, Johan P. Olsen, Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Stephen D. Krasner, Walter W. Powell, Paul J. DiMaggio, Patrick H. O’Neil, Ali R. Abootalebi, Terry Lynn Karl, Patrick H. O’Neil, Helga A. Welsh

11. Institutionalist Approaches • Major Arguments Emphasize the impact of institutions on the formation of policies and the role of institutions in shaping and constraining the objectives and preferences of political actors.

12. Institutionalist Approaches • Major Critics The change processes in China and the former Soviet Union have suggested that, though the pre-existing socioeconomic structures and political institutions are similar, the transition processes and their outcomes are quite different. Taiwan and South Korea with different institutional settings have largely followed the same pattern of political change and resulted in the same transition outcome.

13. Political Economy Approaches • Major Authors Stephan Haggard, Robert R. Kaufman, Steven B. Webb, Omar G. Encarnacion, Nancy Bermeo, Jeffrey Frieden, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, John D. Stephens

14. Political Economy Approaches • Major Arguments Focus on the interplay between politics and the market in the process of democratic transition, and the sequencing of “dual transitions” from authoritarian rule to consolidated democracy. One of the underlying assumptions was the correlation between economic crisis and regime change.

15. Political Economy Approaches • Major Critics Economic crisis as an explanatory variable seems too deterministic in a sense that it may lead to regime transformation in some countries but do not always lead to regime transformation in some other countries. Even in a country, crisis may lead to transformation in one period of time but may erode it in another period of time.