EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS

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WESTERN EASTERN EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTPOLITICS

• INTRODUCTION TO POLI/109

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What is Europe?

• Europe is a continent of the eastern hemisphere
  between Asia and the Atlantic Ocean

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Regions Europe as delineated by the UN
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EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
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WESTERN EUROPE

• The term Western Europe is usually associated,
  but not clearly delimited, with liberal,
  democracy, capitalism and also with the European
  Union. Most of the countries of this region share
  Western culture and many have economic,
  historical, and political ties with countries in
  North, South America and Ocenia. It commonly
  includes all high income European Countries that
  were not part of the Communist-bloc. They are
  basically the first world countries of the
  region.

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• Alternatively, Western Europe is also a
  less-known geographic subregion of Europe that is
  far more restrictive than traditional political
  and cultural reckonings as defined by the United
  Nations.

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Western European Countries

• The British Isles Ireland and the United Kingdom
  
• The Benelux countries Belgium, Netherlands and
  Luxembourg
• France
•  Monaco
• The Iberian peninsula Spain, Portugal,
  Andorra, and Gibraltar (a British Overseas
  Territory)
• The Italian peninsula Italy, San Marino, and
  Vatican City
• The Alps Austria, Liechtenstein, and
  Switzerland
• Germany
• The Nordic countries Denmark, Finland,
  Norway, Sweden and Iceland
• Greece
•  Malta
• (It commonly includes all high income
  European countries that were not part of the
  Communist-bloc-the first world countries of the
  region)

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Eastern Europe

• Belarus
• Bulgaria
• Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Moldova
• Poland
• Romania
• Russia
• Slovakia
• Ukraine

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A map of the Eastern Bloc 1948-1989
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• This course will include some EU member (UK,
  France, Germany, Bulgaria, Romania) and candidate
  (Turkey) countries.

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EU member countries

• There are 27 countries in EU. These countries are
  called Member States. EU grew from six member
  states in 1952 to 27 in January 2007.

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???

• So, the EU is composed of 27 member states. But
  what is the EU?
• A country?
• A regional organization?
• An international organization?
• A federation?
• A confederation?
• Many scholars, politicians and average European
  citizens have been trying to answer these
  questions.
• Donald Puchalas following interpretation is a
  good example to understand EU.

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Extension Of Blind Men, Elephants and
International Integration

• "Several blind men approached an elephant and
  each touched the animal in an effort to discover
  what the beast looked like. Each blind man,
  however, touched a different part of the large
  animal, and each concluded that the elephant had
  the appearance of the part he had touched. Hence,
  the blind man who felt the animal's trunk
  concluded that an elephant must be tall and
  slender, while the fellow who touched the beast's
  ear concluded that an elephant must be oblong and
  flat. Others of course reached different
  conclusions. The total result was that no man
  arrived at a very accurate description of the
  elephant. Yet each man had gained enough evidence
  from his own experience to disbelieve his fellows
  and to maintain a lively debate about the nature
  of the beast."
• Donald Puchala. Of Blind Men, Elephants and
  International Integration. Journal of Common
  Market Studies. Vol. 10, N. 3, March 1972. pp.
  267 284.

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• Puchala is pointing out that
• Nobody agrees on whether the European Union is a
  type of country or if it is a large and powerful
  international organization.
• This is partly why studying the European Union is
  so fascinating. It is something new that defies
  traditional labels like "country",
  "nation-state", or "international organization".
• This course is also going to explain the EU

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EU Countries by Accession dates
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Others
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Why Do We Study Politics?

• Politics.
• Political campaigns, voting in elections, and
  dramatic speeches, of streets full of
  demonstrators or military action, of subtle
  political influence by lobbyists, overt political
  manipulation by the political elite, or a long
  and painfully drawn out process of policy
  decision making
• Images such as legislatures, executives, courts,
  political parties, and interest groups
• Concepts such as power, influence, socialization,
  or recruitment with the concept of politics
• Harold Lasswell put the question succinctly in
  the title of his classic book Politics Who Gets
  What, When, How?
• Studying Politics may involve several things such
  as legislatures, voting, political parties, the
  role a minority group in a political system,
  power, how public policy is made and more

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• Some political scientists are trying to learn
  about justiceWhat is justice? How to get it?
• Others are concerned with how social policy is
  madeThey may study political structures that are
  involved in the policy making process.
• Others seek to understand why a given election is
  won by one political party rather than another
• Others may seek to understand why people vote for
  anyone in an election
• Some others study politics simply because
  political relationships seem to be important to
  our daily lives to find the good life

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Comparative Political AnalysisWhy should we
study comparative politics?

• Comparisons of political systems and Government
  structure can be traced back to the time of
  Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
• Aristotle is often referred to as the first
  real political scientist and comparativist
  because of his study of the many political
  systems that he found in the political world of
  his time.
• Aristotles comparisons of constitutions and
  power structures contributed many words to our
  political vocabulary today, words such as
  politics, democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy.

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• Many American political scientists tend to label
  as comparative politics anything that does not
  fit into one of the sub- disciplines of
  international relations, methodology, political
  theory, or American politics.
• For them, the sub-discipline of comparative
  politics would include politics in England,
  politics in France, politics in Russia,
  politics of Zimbabwe, or politics x where any
  nation other than the United States could be
  substituted for the X.
• American political scientists are not the only
  ones to have this perspective. If one were travel
  to France, the study of American politics would
  be found within the sub-discipline of comparative
  politics.

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• Studying politics in X more properly can be
  referred to as area studies.
• Comparative studies should be more than that
• Area studies, involving a detailed examination of
  politics within a specific geographical setting,
  certainly is a legitimate kind of inquiry, but
  not one that necessarily involves any explicit
  comparison.
• Marcidis and Brown many years ago criticized
  comparative politics at the time for not being
  truly comparative, for being almost completely
  concerned with single cases as Politics in X.
• Comparative politics should mean the actual
  method of comparison.
• Comparison involves terms of relativity, terms
  like bigger, stronger, freer, more stable, less
  democratic
• Comparative Politics than involves no more and
  less than a comparative study of politics- a
  search for similarities and differences between
  and among political phenomena, including
  political institutions (legislatures, political
  parties, or political interest groups), political
  behavior, (voting, demonstrating, or reading
  political pamphlets), or political ideas
  (liberalism, conservatism, or Marxism).

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What are we going to study?

• What the Governments Do Comparisons may be made
  between governments of different nations,
  governments in various stages of development (for
  example, developed nations versus
  underdeveloped nations, or government or policy
  over time (for example, the government of Poland
  in 1982 and the government of Poland in 2002).
• Political Behavior voting behavior, political
  stability, political elites, leaders in politics,
  party behavior
• Government Institutions legislatures,
  executives, courts, constitutions, legal systems,
  bureaucracies, political parties

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Problems in comparative political inquiry

• In any type of comparative political inquiry,
  there are certain analytical problems of which we
  should be aware that might make our work more
  difficult than it otherwise might be
• The first of these problems involves what we call
  the levels of analysis, and relates to the types
  of observations and measurements we are using and
  the types of conclusions that we can draw from
  those observations and measurements
• Ecological level (Aggregate) and Individual
  level.
• Ecological fallacy we take data a measurement
  or an observation from the broad and apply it
  incorrectly to an individual case.
• Individualistic fallacy This occurs when we make
  an individual level observation and incorrectly
  generalize from it to the aggregate level.

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Examples of Ecological fallacy and
Individualistic fallacy

• If we find on a national aggregate level that
  Republicans tend to vote more frequently than
  Democrats, that does not guarantee that every
  individual Republican that we might meet is going
  to vote and every individual Democrat that we
  might meet is not going to vote.
• If we find in our cross-national research that
  the population of Ghana has overall a lower level
  of education than does the population of the
  United States (two aggregate level observations),
  that does not mean that every citizen of Ghana is
  less educated than every citizen of the United
  States.
• It would be clearly incorrect to conclude from
  meeting one Oxford-educated Ph.D. from Ghana that
  all citizens Ghana have Ph.D. from Oxford, or
  that all Ph.D. recipients from Oxford come from
  Ghana.

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• The second of these problems involves making
  assumptions about the functions performed by
  political structures
• It is entirely possible that we will find in our
  research two institutions or patterns of behavior
  that look alike in two different settings but
  which perform entirely different functions in
  their respective settings
• We might study, for example, the House of Commons
  in Britain, and see that the legislature in that
  setting is most important in the process of
  selecting government leaders and in establishing
  governmental legitimacy. In another setting,
  however, a similarly structured legislature may
  not be at all significant in the creation of a
  government or in the establishment of legitimacy,
  and to assume that because the British House of
  Commons is significant in this regard that all
  legislatures are significant in this regard would
  be an example of an individualistic fallacy
  incorrectly generalizing from the individual
  (British) level to the aggregate (all
  legislatures) level.
• Although the major role of the American
  legislature may be that of passing laws, the
  major function of legislatures such as those that
  existed in East Germany prior to German
  unification in 1989-1990 was NOT passing laws.
  (In the East German case, the legislature met for
  only about two days a year and simply rubber
  stamped everything suggested to it by the
  Communist Party organization there. The primary
  function of the legislature in East Germany was
  that of being showcase. To demonstrate that East
  Germany had a democratically elected
  legislature.

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Conclusion

• When we undertake comparative political analysis,
  then, we need to keep our eyes open for errors
  that we can make by simply assuming too much.

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Bibliography

• http//www.carleton.ca/ces/EULearning/introduction
  /coloureurope.htm
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe (MAPS)
• Gregory S. Mahler, Comparative Politics, An
  Institutional and Cross-National Approach, 4th
  Edition