Comparative Politics

From the Faculty Committee for Comparative Politics

Updated May 2010.

Preliminary Exam for the Ph.D.

Beginning Fall 2010, the comprehensive written exam for the Comparative field will be designed as follows.

There shall be five sections, comprising at least two questions each. Students will be required to answer 1 question from Section 1 (Methodology and General Theory) and answer two additional questions. Answers for each question should be no more than 2500 words.

For the two additional questions, students have a choice of A and B options:

A: Answer two questions from Sections II-IV as written.

B: Pick two sections from II-IV from the comparative exam. Answer one of the questions as written, then answer Section V, which asks you to relate your personal research area to a second field from the exam. For example, a student might relate their research to the field of comparative political behavior and social politics (Section IV) for the answer to Section V, and then the student would answer one question as written from Sections II-III. Evidence may be drawn from one or more cases to answer questions in Sections II-V.

I General

This is Section I and includes questions on history and development of the field, classic works and major founding concerns, methodology and epistemology debates, competing paradigms that had characterized comparative politics, and theory building.

II Comparative Institutions and Government

This section includes questions on political institutions within Comparative Politics, among which are: identifying regime types (democracy versus non-democracy); comparative electoral systems, party systems, presidential versus parliamentary systems, comparative legislatures, constitutional engineering and democratic transitions.

III Comparative Political Economy

This section includes questions on political economy from analytical and substantive standpoints, among which are: property rights, policy-making, political transitions, resource use, credible promises or threats, and the political behaviors of the state, interest groups, parties, electorate, or regime types in the pursuit of economic development, debt reduction, employment, growth, investment, social welfare, social justice, or income distribution.

IV Comparative Political Behavior and Social Politics

This section includes questions about the major research traditions and current debates in political sociology, comparative behavior, and comparative political parties. Among these are culture and politics, comparative political parties and elites, social structures, comparative public opinion and behavior, social movements and protest, collective action, state-society relations, religion and politics, and gender politics.

V Research Agenda in Comparative Politics

Pick one of the subfields of comparative politics in Sections II-IV and write a coherently organized and analytically rich discussion of how your personal research agenda relates to that subfield.

A Final Note: Preliminary exams are about demonstrating breadth; dissertations are about demonstrating specialized knowledge. Good answers to prelim questions can illustrate critical points with examples emphasizing a single country or many world regions. But keep in mind that the main function of country-specific material is to buttress arguments based on the general literature. Accordingly, a student should be 1) well-versed in the key literature and 2) able to knowledgeably summarize and support the theories in the literature and/or a case(s) of their own choosing.

The process of grading preliminary exams encompasses two stages. In the first stage, comparative politics faculty members individually read and grade each exam. Grading of the preliminary examination comprises two aspects:

1. The quality of the individual questions.

2. The quality of the examination as a whole.

Each faculty member uses a 5-point scale, with 3 as a low pass and 5 as the highest score, to capture assessments of the answers to individual questions.

In the second stage, a committee of comparative politics faculty members meets to discuss and render a final decision on each exam. The preliminary assessments are averaged to provide an estimate of how the faculty as a committee assesses each answer. This average score provides a starting point for discussion of the individual answers and of the examination as a whole. After deliberation, the committee evaluates the overall quality of the exam and agrees on a final grade of high pass, pass, or fail.

Hence, it is possible for a student to obtain low passes on all three answers and pass the examination. However, it is equally possible for a student to obtain low passes on all three answers to have an examination that the committee considers to be a fail.