What is the relevance of studying comparative politics?

There are at least two main reasons for studying comparative politics.  One has to do with gaining a better understanding of the world outside your own country. The other has to do with learning more about how politics works in general.

One reason to study comparative politics is to learn things about countries that are not your own.  Most of us know very little about the political systems of foreign countries.  We know something about our own system but we do not think that other countries’ systems are important.  This type of ethnocentrism limits us and makes it harder for us to understand other countries.  If we study comparative politics, we learn about other countries and come to understand them better.  This is important since we live in a world that is globalizing rapidly and where other countries’ politics can affect our own lives fairly easily.

A second reason to study comparative politics is to understand more about politics in general (which can also help us learn about our own political system.  When we study comparative politics, we learn something about how different political systems work.  From this, we can extrapolate rules about how well various aspects of various political systems work.  We can compare different systems and think about them sort of as if they were experiments that tell us what types of political institutions are good in what situations.  This can be of interest to us if we are just interested in politics in general.  It can also be of interest if we want to think about how to improve our own political system.

Thus, the study of comparative politics is useful if we want to learn more about foreign countries, more about politics in general, or more about our own country’s political system.