Understanding Political Systems: A Comment on Methods of Comparative Research

Abstract

There is little reliable knowledge of the world’s political systems because most observers share the views, assumptions, and prejudices of the actors: United States political scientists write about the American system, English and Scottish lawyers about the government of the United Kingdom, and Frenchmen about France. When these learned authors write about a system which is foreign to them, they normally fail to understand it because they fail to discover the different assumptions underlying that foreign system.

Keywords: Koopmans, Political, Systems, Methods, Comparative, Research