Political science asks questions of who gets what, when, and why. None of these answers typically relate to individuals, as politics per se influences groups of people. Accordingly, people organize to engage in politics. Social movements, interest groups, and in particular political parties don’t just aim to influence their own members, or have a goal for themselves, but aim to create rules for everyone around them.

Most research in political science is focused on the study of democracies, in particular Western states. Most models of electoral accountability are based on the idea of competition around political programs. This is of course a very idealistic, and most likely, very limited view on political organizations. We know that politics takes place below policy issues and public rules. individual ambitions, networks of patronage and transactionary politics occur in and even shape all political systems. To a certain extent, they produce more commonality than the wide range of institutionalization we find in comparative politics.

While its sister course deals with the light side of political parties, communication, and electoral rules, this course deals with less formal organizations, political manipulation and selec-tion. Delving inside political organizations we focus on how to work with the occult side of politics.

Learning Objectives
• Understanding role of institutions and organizations
• Comparative Approach to Politics
• Analytical thinking

Formalia

This course introduces you to the political science of political organizations. To understand variation and commonalities, we apply a comparative approach. Broadening our perspective across the globe, we will, together, analyze parties in very different cultural and historical con-texts. In this course we will learn the logic of typologies, comparative approaches and game theory to find a common analytical framework to identify the makings of different political systems, the relevant organizations they entail, how they work, and how they differ from oth-ers.

Literature:

Each session has three types of reading assignments:

Basic readings are required readings. We discuss these papers in the session, so I need you be prepared. They form the theoretical basis. These papers are typically entry-level chapters from textbooks or edited volumes that introduce the session. They inform a literature review as re-quired in the other course, but are not part of it.

Case readings are required for the session presenter. If the session does not have a presenter, I might discuss them in more detail. They are comparison against which you should evaluate your selected case.

Further readings are helpful seed papers from which to start the literature overview. They are additional introductions.



Your Case:

In this course, we will stay on the descriptive side. We read papers on the basics, introducing important concepts such as organizational form and institutions. We want to directly apply this lens to other cases. Moving beyond the “usual suspects” of the EU and US, we aim to find out if these concepts matter in other contexts, too.


Possible Cases:
• European Union
• United States
• China
• Iran
• Sub Saharan Africa or any single country
• Arabic States (Syria, Iraq, Egypt)
• Turkey
• India
• Pakistan
• Argentinia/Brazil
• Venezuela/Cuba
• New Zealand (Party System Change)

Each of you will choose a country they are interested or familiar with, and step by step, map organizations in these contexts. You will learn to understand and summarize papers together, and then apply this knowledge to papers assigned only to you. Over the course of the semes-ter, you will hand in your notes and do presentations. Presentations are oral presentations but require slides. I need your self-explanatory slides at the day before the presentation.

We will assign the presentation topic in the first session. Your presentation is always the topic of the course, applied to your case, compared to the empirical paper we read in class.

Make sure you plan your presence accordingly. If you can’t present on a given day, I need to know this as soon as possible, but at least one week in advance, unless you are ill. In the latter case, you can do the presentation in the week after.
Final Paper:

As your final paper, I want you to do a literature overview. You apply a course topic of a specific session to your case, for example, “Patronage in India”. The literature provided by the extended readings of the session can be a starting point for either a literature review or a case study. You an either use a topic from this course or from the parallel course.

A literature overview focuses on breadth. It requires you to collect, skim and summarize a large body of literature. It is evaluated by completeness. It is an extension of an annotated bibliography (AB), and exists not as a paper, but as a table. In contrast to an AB it should con-tain every candidate to be included, whether you read it or not. The idea is that you identify 20 papers you would use for a literature review, but still account for the rest. You may reuse this in other contexts. Of the 20 papers you select to be included the full citation, the central message, the function it would have in your literature review and a brief evaluation should be provided. It also contains an evaluation based on your first impression, journal ranking and other information (see session 2).