12.1: Recurring Challenges

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe why states remain an important unit of analysis in the study of comparative politics.

Introduction

In this textbook, we introduced the study of comparative politics, a subfield within political science that seeks to advance understanding of political structures around the world in an organized, methodological, and clear way. While the state remains the key unit of analysis in comparative politics, it is not the only actor to consider. International and supranational organizations, subnational governments, and non-state actors all play key roles in understanding state behavior. Supranational organizations sometimes take on roles traditionally considered state responsibilities, such as medical provision. Through subnational governments, minority groups sometimes pressure a state for increased autonomy or full secession. Non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations, sometimes use political violence instrumentally to incentivize states to change their behavior.

Given this complexity, is there value in studying states comparatively? Might a scholar be better off focusing only on global trends? Or, might a scholar be better off focusing only on within-state analysis? Why compare between states?

The short answer is that the state, as our world organizes itself today, remains the central actor. States face pressures from above and pressures from below, but these pressures are nothing new. They reflect recurring challenges, and the study of comparative politics provides scholars with the tools to assess these challenges in a systematic manner.

Competing Pressures on the State: An Example

Varying responses to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate how states face pressures from above and below.

First considering pressures from above, COVID-19 was a global pandemic that exerted significant pressure on all states, yet individual state governments overwhelmingly managed their own responses to the virus. Even within the European Union (EU), where 27 member-states agreed to give up some of their national sovereignty in the hope of promoting peace and prosperity, states struggled to coordinate their pandemic-response policies. The European Commission, the EU's main executive body, lagged in providing a coherent policy at the supranational level (Goniewicz, et. al., 2020). Rather, the state remained the unit on which to compare pandemic policy responses, and it is the unit used in various analyses, such as an analysis illustrating a bivariate relationship between a state's Global Health Security Index Score and its pandemic death rates.

The state also faced pressures from below due to COVID-19. Subnational governments looked to their national governments for policy coordination, funding, and political leadership. In federal states, where national and subnational governments share power or sovereignty, the pandemic laid bare existing disparities within a state. India, for example, is a federal state with 28 states and eight union territories. When a pandemic wave washed over India in April and May 2021, some subnational units such as Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra were caught off guard by the swift rise in cases. Per the Lancet (2021), the subnational units were "quickly running out of medical oxygen, hospital space, and overwhelming the capacity of cremation sites." In contrast, subnational units such as Kerala and Odisha were better disposed, with the ability "to produce enough medical oxygen...to export it to other [subnational] states." The disparity and the needs for resources across the subnational units exerted pressure on the Indian state from below.

Globalization and Fragmentation

The idea of a state facing pressures from both above and below may at first seem contradictory, yet it is not a new phenomenon. 

In the early 1990s, right after the Cold War ended, Barber (1992) alluded to this duality of pressures in his work, Jihad vs. McWorld. He argued that two principles, globalism and tribalism, were occurring at the same time and sometimes in the same place. Globalism ("McWorld" in the book title) stems from a market imperative that drives integration and homogeneity. Tribalism ("jihad" in the book title, the Arabic word for struggle) represents the fracturing of societies. Neither globalism nor tribalism is necessarily a democratic force; globalism requires "order and tranquility" and tribalism is "grounded in exclusion." 

Globalization and fragmentation forces do not always explicitly appear in comparative studies that focus on the state as the unit of analysis. Previous chapters, however, illustrate their importance; as two of many examples, the force of globalization can directly impact comparative political economy while the force of fragmentation can directly impact political violence. In the following two sections, we will expliclty analyze how the forces of globalization and fragmentation impact the study of comparative politics.