COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING: IT'S HARD TO TEACH AMERICANS ABOUT OTHER POLITICAL SYSTEMS 
BUT IT CAN BE DONE

 ALLEN SCHICK

PREPARED FOR APPAM CONFEDRENCE ON TEACHING: NOVEMBER 2, 2011

I had an easy ride during my first 25, years teaching a required politics course at the Maryland School of Public Policy. Without much experience in teaching public policy, the founders of the School (myself included) decreed that every student must take a suite of core courses, including one on American Political Institutions. In keeping with our determination to sharply differentiate public policy from public administration, we labeled the course "Political Analysis," but it was designed to focus on U.S. politics. American students, who had been repeatedly fed courses in civics, problems of democracy, and American government from early childhood through college, welcomed the opportunity to take an easy course during their difficult first semester at the School, and I welcomed the opportunity to come to class well-prepared, despite little more than an hour's preparation.

Truth be told, I muscled up the course with demanding writing assignments--typically six memos that had to hew to a prescribed topic and framework, as well as to the rules of grammar. Long after they graduated and were in successful careers, many alums polled by the School rated these writing assignments the most valuable part of their graduate education.

The easy times came to an end about 5 years ago because I was bored and students were not learning enough. I was investing less time and passion in reviewing student memos. My comments were fewer and the grades were higher. Well over half of my professional work was outside the United States, in advanced, emerging, and low-income countries. Having worked in approximately 50 countries and for most major multilateral organizations--the World Bank, OECD, IMF, United Nations, and various regional development banks-- I had acquired an interest in and knowledge of numerous political systems. Before visiting a country, I made it a habit to study its political history, culture and institutions, and to compare it to other countries with which I was familiar. Maryland, like many other public policy schools had a growing non-American student population who wanted to learn about America, but had a broad view that did not always place the United States at the center of world affairs.

My own "internationalization" branched in two directions: I stopped teaching about budgets and financial management and initiated a course "Pathways to Development" that examines the social and economic conditions that facilitate or retard modernization; and I introduced a core course on comparative political institutions as an alternative to the American politics course. Looking back at these moves, which occurred one year apart, I probably was going through a late life crisis, seeking to rebuild my intellectual capital by taking on new, more difficult assignments.

My ambitions encountered two big problems: I am not a "comparativist", and the vast comparative politics literature is ill-suited for public policy education. My "home room" is public management and finance; in my research, countries are the venues in which governments manage their activities and money. How they perform these tasks depends on political arrangements and administrative capacity, which is why I strive to understand how governance works in each country. In academia, experience is not a substitute for research, and knowing a little about a lot of countries is inferior to knowing a lot about a few. Over time, however, I have come to realize that lack of formal training in comparative politics can be an advantage, for it has opened me to a much broader literature than is usually studied in these courses. 

The second problem has been more troublesome. Before deciding how to organize my course, I reviewed dozens of syllabi and textbooks, and much of the contemporary literature on comparative politics. Almost all the syllabi touch the usual bases, with sessions on parties and elections, parliamentary and presidential systems, the judiciary and bureaucracy, and so on. They resemble courses on American politics, but are stretched onto a multi-country canvass and are laced with the pseudo-erudite typologies that comparativists delight in weaving to show that they have discovered insights that are unknown to others. Public policy, which one would expect to be a key focus of comparison, is absent from most syllabi, or given only a minor "end of the semester" niche. In fact, the last major textbook on comparative public policy--by Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams--was published in l990. Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, have a near monopoly on comparative politics books; both are addicted to jargon, vacuous constructs, and other exemplars of academic prowess that turn off public policy students. I gained first-hand knowledge of the inaptness of much of the comparative literature when, driven by conviction that the course needs a core textbook, I assigned Oxford's mammoth Handbook of Comparative Politics, only to find that gifted students have difficulty grasping the strange language this English-language book is written in or its relevance to their policy interests. 

Surprisingly, I have found policy relevance in some branches of sociology, and with advice from distinguished scholars (including Kent Weaver, Hugh Heclo, and Francis Fukuyama) have assembled a diverse set of assigned readings. But these assignments have been conventional features of the course. I still had to grapple with several issues: What should be the course's thematic core, how to incorporate a demanding writing component into the course, how to promote robust, structured discussion, and how to link politics and policy? These issues are considered in the remainder of the essay.

Themes Versus Topics. Most courses, in comparative politics and other subjects, string together various topics that are thought to comprise the field. My strong preference is for courses that have thematic cohesion, and thereby link rather than segregate topics. Students retain much more of what they have learned when the bits and pieces of a course fit together. Years later, they recall issues generated by the theme, even though they probably have forgotten whether country X has a one or two chamber parliament, or single member rather than multi-member electoral districts. Themes are filters that determine what should be emphasized in a course, and what should be left out or subordinated. The quest for thematic rigor dictated that some central comparative topics would be allocated less class time than in a conventional course. Parliamentary versus presidential regimes remains on the syllabus, but is studied in terms of differences in policy outcomes rather than in governmental structure.

Because one core theme inevitably excludes others, it is essential to select one that organizes topics into "usable knowledge" for public policy students. Without exploring other possibilities, I structured the course around the contemporary role of the state in providing public goods and services. This choice was dictated in part by my conviction, growing out of work in many countries, that the state matters in the performance of government and the quality of public services. 

Focusing on the state opened doors to interesting questions in public policy: Why are some states strong and others fragile? What are the qualities that make some states democratic, and do these materially influence the effectiveness of government? How do states secure and maintain legitimacy, and what are the implications for the pervasive decline of trust and confidence in political institutions? How have western societies reconciled expansion of collective action through the state with the rise of individualism? 

We returned to these questions throughout the course. For example, we struggled to make sense of two powerful, but seemingly contradictory, trends: the enormous increase in income transfers to families and households, and the withdrawal of citizen trust and confidence. Why, we inquired, are citizens in almost all advanced countries biting the governmental hand that is feeding them? We found multiple answers, but the question was of greater import, for it led us to carve out a significant amount of class time to explore the emergence of contemporary rivals that compete against the state for public regard, the right to set authoritative policies, and the capacity to deliver public services.

During the course, we focused on four alternatives to the state: markets, non-governmental/civil society organizations, meta-national institutions, and subnational governments. We assessed each in terms of legitimacy and provision of services. We assessed critical differences between empowering people as citizens through the state and as consumers through markets, and noted that both institutions thrived during the 20th century. Evidently, the growth of one has not crowded out the other. Lasswell famous definition of politics as "who gets, what, when, and how" helped clarify distributional differences between markets and the state.

The recent relabeling of non-governmental organizations as civil society organizations provoked lively discussion, as did questioning their sources of legitimacy. Some students vigorously claimed that these institutions have gained prominence as providers of basic goods and services because of the absence of the state or its failure to deliver adequate public services. The give-and-take got considerably more heated when we turned to NGOs/CSOs as political groups that seek to marginalize or delegitimize the state.

The class wrestled with the emerging notion of "international public goods" that are beyond the capacity of individual states, and thereby bestows legitimacy and role on meta-national institutions. I challenged students to identify a single national good that could not be internationalized. It was not much of a stretch to envision a future in which income redistribution, which now is the principal financial obligation of economically-advanced states, is transformed into a global responsibility that is handled by new international institutions.

The actual or potential shrinkage in the nation-state's effective role has been extended downward through decentralization schemes promoted that have significantly narrowed traditional differences between unitary and federal systems. We pondered why assigning revenues and expenditures to subnational units has become popular, even in small countries, and even when there has been little evidence of central government inadequacies.

With states increasingly sandwiched between global and local institutions, our selected course theme served us well in knitting various topics together and focusing discussion on policy implications. I tried to draw all the pieces together at the end of the course by turning to American exceptionalism and prodding students to consider how the United States has been affected by powerful trends beyond its borders. We thus concluded the course by focusing on the country that was had been the sole subject of the course displaced by comparative politics.

Writing as a rite of passage. Despite the shift to a comparative orientation, I was determined that graded writing assignments remain a central feature. By the numbers, I have certainly succeeded, for students submit a dozen writing assignments during the semester, almost one a week. In my view, however, the memo format, which had worked so well when students wrote on specified policy issues, was not a good fit for country-specific assignments. Students could present or analyze a discrete issue within the confines of a memo; they could not effectively cover a country within a memo's constricted frame.

The obvious alternative would be a term paper that would allow students to write in depth on a country's history, politics, and social conditions. But I long ago concluded that term papers are not an effective medium for honing a policy student's writing and analytic skills. Memos are a much more disciplined form of communication than term papers. In the latter, the writer wanders through a topic and selects matters of interest to herself; in the former, the writer focuses on what interests the intended reader. 

Term papers versus memos touches on a larger issue that has influenced my approach to public policy education, but has sometimes provoked sharp disagreements with colleagues. I view public policy as a profession, others regard it as one of a university's academic programs. This issue riled new public policy schools during their formative years 3-4 decades ago. Less is said about this dispute now, probably because the gulf is so wide and there is no easy way to resolve differences between the clashing approaches. Because they have the upper hand in the appointment and tenure process, academically-oriented faculty are winning the argument in most public policy schools. Yet, individual faculty can build a professional perspective into their courses, as I did in making memo-writing the largest grade component in my American politics course.

Having ruled out both memos and term papers, I needed a new writing instrument for comparative politics. I opted for two requirements: (l) four short papers (5-8 pages each) on a selected country, and (2) eight one-page meditations on assigned readings. Neither has been completely successful, and both have been compromised by the failure of some students to care that submitting text downloaded from internet sites is plagiarism. Yet both requirements have contributed to the course's substantive and writing objectives.

I have tried two types of short papers. One version covers two countries and is a joint product of two students; the other covers a single country and has a single author. The comparative approach has an obvious advantage, but it increases transaction costs for students. A bigger problem is students often divide the labor, with each student writing on one country and the two then packaging their respective contributions into a single paper. When this occurs, comparative analysis is lost, and it is better to have students submit separate papers.

All four papers are on the same country or countries. Students list 2-3 country preferences early in the semester, and my TA assigns each student one of his/her preferences. We typically have papers on 20-25 countries. Each paper has an assigned subject which coincides with a topic that is being discussed in class. For example, during the week that we discuss concepts of democracy, all student submit "democracy audit" of their assigned countries When the course takes up the challenges to the nation-state mentioned earlier, students assess challenges in their respective countries. Thus, the country papers are structured assignments that feed productively into class discussions.

The short papers exploit the fact that many graduate students have a strong interest, often reinforced by travel or work experience, in one or a few countries. In contrast to colleagues who prefer that students venture into new areas, I encourage them to select familiar countries. Students invest more in their papers and participate more eagerly in discussions when they feel a connection to the country.

The 8 meditations are on assigned readings and must be submitted no later than the day before the readings are scheduled for discussion. Course guidelines limit each meditation to one single-spaced page, but students sometimes exceed the limit. The meditations are graded by TAs without comment on a 0-2 scale, with fractional grades permitted within this range. I review all proposed 0 and 2 grades, as well as others referred to me by TAs. To earn a high grade, students must compare and analyze two or more readings.

The meditations reinforce the usual exhortation in course syllabi that students should be prepared to discuss scheduled readings. They definitely enrich discussions, but they haven't cured all students of the temptation to fill the page or the class with "off the top of the head" thoughts. Thus far, I have allowed students to choose the angle they want to meditate on. In future iterations of the course students will address assigned questions.

Some students have complained about the numerous writing assignments. I am comforted, however, that a handful of strong students who concurrently took my comparative and development courses successfully completed 23 assignments. On my watch, writing is a rite of passage, not a lost art.

Structuring Discussion: Assuring Relevance and Opening Minds. During my half century in university teaching, there has been a pronounced shift away from the lecture mode to discussion formats. Lecturing is the easier chore, for it requires only one person's efforts; useful discussion demands the orchestration of many voices into a coherent argument. More than most of us are willing to admit, classrooms often have been made into chatter boxes, with the instructor counting down the minutes until time is up. Adroit discussion leaders draw on many tricks of the trade to make it through the class by provoking students to say something, anything. Many of us, myself included, tend to measure the robustness of discussion in terms of the number or percentage of students who have participated not in terms of the relevance or quality of their interventions.

I fully believe that in most academic settings informed discussion trumps an erudite lecture. Taking notes is a poor substitute for thinking on your own and sharing your thoughts, doubts and questions with others. During my first week as a regular faculty member in September 1961, I entered a large lecture hall where 350 students, ready with open notebooks, awaited my words. Many were disoriented when I held a blank piece of paper and declared that no student would be permitted to leave at the end of the hour with more words on his paper than I had on mine. The shock treatment was not particularly effective, so I organized a special section for the 10-20 students who wanted to engage in serious discourse. 

My preference for sound discussion is deeply rooted in my own education as a yeshiva student more than 60 years ago (A yeshiva is a Jewish school, high school level or higher, that emphasizes the study of Talmud and related subjects.) The school day was extraordinarily long--sometimes 12 or more hours--but lecture consumed only two hours or less. The lecture itself combined deference and democracy .Teacher and students alike opened their copies of the Talmud to the same page, and the teacher drew on the text and assorted old and new commentaries to question or explain Rabbinic statements. The social distance between students and teacher was enormous, but students eagerly jumped into the discussion to challenge his arguments and conclusion, often without raising their hands or seeking permission to talk. When it came to matters under discussion, everyone in the classroom stood on equal ground, despite great gaps in age, knowledge, and religious status.

In one important sense, I have not been able to overcome my childhood experience. I still am perplexed when students raise or wave their hands to get my attention or authorization to talk. "I'm not a traffic cop," I jokingly explain to the class; evidently, neither I nor they have outgrown our early socialization.

After lecture, each yeshiva student spends hours engaged in discussion with a study partner, reviewing the past lecture or preparing for the next one, arguing over other texts or issues, and sometimes just chatting about whatever is on their minds. The fundamental premise of this form of education is that one does not truly comprehend something unless he can explain it to another person and resolve any questions or challenges. In other words, students learn by being teachers. The case for informed discussion rests on this premise.

Discussion that merely fills class time is of little pedagogical value, even when students enjoy it and rate the course favorably on the evaluations that have become standard practice in higher education. Discussion has to be purposeful, aiming for student interventions that enrich the class's comprehension of relevant issues. This does not mean that the instructor should steer students to preordained conclusions or discourage arguments that stray from the expected path. It does mean that students should participate in a collective endeavor that explores the topic at hand. Relevant accumulation of knowledge, built comment by comment is the common good of informed discussion and the accumulation. Although they are individual statements, student comments justify class time when they promote shared learning.

Open-ended discussions sometimes achieve this lofty objective. Often, however, instructors feel it necessary to impose a structure that channels discussion to a selected topic. Structure takes many forms, including close review of assigned readings, simulations and role-playing, case studies, questions that frame the discussion, and team assignments before or during class.

In teaching comparative politics, I have introduced a method that may warrant application in other courses. Before class, I compose a set of propositions, usually four but occasionally three or five, drawn principally from that session’s assigned readings. The propositions are prominently displayed on the chalkboard, and inform students when they enter the classroom how discussion will be organized. They know what is coming, have time to reflect on the propositions, and to compose their thoughts. Each proposition is a brief statement that has two parts: a finding or conclusion, and an inference drawn from that conclusion. While the inferences may seem to be obvious extensions of the findings, in most cases the discussion leads to their rejection or modification. Appendix 1 provides a sampling of the propositions constructed for my Fall 2010 course.

The purpose of the propositions is not to generate hypotheses for research, but to stimulate intelligent, bounded discussion. Divorced from their course settings, some may appear to be trite, but they do prod students to rethink their own views and to challenge common sense. I have selected two propositions, one dealing with the political process, the other with globalization, to illustrate how these statements have been used to spur informed discussion

Proposition 1: POLITICAL PARTIES INFLAME PARTISAN CONFLICT. THEREFORE, THE DECLINE IN PARTY MEMBERSHIP AND IDENTIFICATION IN DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES HAS DIMINISHED POLITICAL CONFLICT.

We first tackled the findings by comparing how groups and parties aggregate interests into policies. This led to comparison of different party systems, with students drawing on their country papers (described earlier) to reveal that party systems come in different varieties, owing in some countries to historical, ethnic or geographic cleavages and in others to voting rules. We then sought explanations for the pervasive decline in party identification, with some students falling back on Putnam's social capital argument that was assigned earlier in the course, and others insisting that new modes of communication enable political engagement outside the party framework. Turning to the inference portion of the proposition, kicked off discussion by wondering whether partisan conflict had actually abated. Discussion was so lively that we were not able to cover all of that day's propositions. 

Proposition 2: THE WELFARE STATE EMERGED IN OPEN ECONOMIES TO BUFFER CITIZENS AGAINST THE RISKS OF FREE TRADE. THEREFORE, AS GLOBALIZATION OPENS UP NATIONAL ECONOMIES, STATES WILL EXPAND SOCIAL PROTECTIONS.

The findings exposed students to one of the standard explanations in the economics literature of why certain countries took the lead in providing welfare protections to citizens. I invited them to offer alternative explanations, and some drew on earlier assigned readings pertaining to culture, and some on social cohesion in small nation-states. The inference portion of the proposition got many students wondering why news reports are filled with accounts of deep cuts in social benefits. More importantly, it enabled me to frame discussion within the efficiency versus compensation hypotheses presented in that session's assigned readings.

With approximately l00 propositions discussed in the course, it would be foolhardy to claim that each was an intellectual game-changer for students. Preparing four propositions for each session enabled me to terminate one and move on to another if it did not grab student interest. But I can claim that students effectively brought assigned readings and country papers into the discussion, stayed on track, rethought previously held views, and effectively connected dots from different parts of the course. I sometimes left the classroom on a high, especially when my TA reminded me of the contributions made by some of the shyest, most reticent students.

Students had one complaint arising out of their enthusiasm. Why wait until class to get that day's propositions; wouldn't it be better to distribute them in advance? Good question, but there is a risk that spontaneity will be lost and set pieces will displace genuine discussion.

Linking Politics and Policy. The professional versus academic issue mentioned earlier permeates all aspects of the comparative course, and provides a fitting conclusion to this essay. In my view, requiring a course on political processes and institutions is warranted in a public policy curriculum only if it helps prepare students to be effective public policy professionals. It is not enough to argue that when they start careers, students will work in a political environment. Most of what they studied about politics in school will be forgotten or irrelevant; and most of what they need to know will be picked up on the job.

What is relevant for public policy professionals is comprehension of how politics affect policies. Public policymakers should have broad understanding of how political circumstances spawn policy differences or convergence among countries. For example, if they are working on American health policy, analysts and managers should understand the political factors that drive the United States to spend more on health care than any other country but to achieve comparatively middling health outcomes, why Congress needed one thousand pages to legislate changes in the health system, why the country has both world class and woefully inadequate hospitals, why there are racial and income divides in medical care, why the country has so many medical specialists and so few general practitioners, why the federal agency responsible for Medicare and Medicaid is so meagerly-staffed while its expenditures are so high, why Medicare is exclusively a federal responsibility and Medicaid a joint federal-state responsibility. Each of these policy anomalies has political roots that a policy analyst or manager should be aware of.

Connecting politics and policy is easier said than done. The jargon-saturated political science literature is more distraction than guidance. As a teacher, I often fall into the trap of discussing politics for its own sake, and I sometimes wonder whether the Maryland School of Public Policy should banish politics from its core curriculum. Colleagues anchored in other academic disciplines insist that politics must have a prominent niche in the core. What they may not know, but I do, is that politics, whether American or comparative, must earn a seat at the table by preparing today's students to become tomorrow's analysts and managers.

                                                                                           APPENDIX 1

Selected Propositions in Comparative Politics

                *Many affluent countries have sophisticated management systems and practices. Therefore, less developed countries would accelerate development by adopting advanced practices.

                *In democracies, accountability is maintained through political processes. Therefore, public employees should be recruited on the basis of political affiliation.

                *Deficits are congenital in democracies because citizens want to pay less in taxes and to get more in benefits. Therefore, it is necessary to restrict the capacity of government to respond to citizen demands.

                 *China liberalized FDI to encourage investment in private enterprises. Therefore, economic liberalization will lead to China's political liberalization.

                 *Transnational NGOs claim legitimacy on the basis of global nationhood. Therefore, they undermine the state though they are dependent on it to implement international policies.

                 *Citizen participation is a hallmark of robust democracies. Therefore, more active participation by citizens strengthens democratic institutions.