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Simulation in Teaching Comparative Politics: Playing French Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Stephen Clarkson
Stephen Clarkson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Many practitioners of political science are currently questioning the bona fides of comparative politics as a valid academic subdiscipline in their trade. At the same time, in trying to perform comparative politics in the classroom over a period of five years, I have found the standard, multi-country comparative politics course to be increasingly unsatisfactory as a component of the political science curriculum. Many factors combine to make it extremely difficult to generate an adequate university learning experience from this kind of course:

1. Superficial learning is inherent in multicountry comparative courses. Because of the pressure to deal with at least three political systems within the confines of a single course, relatively little time is devoted to each country. Moreover the bibliographical material varies wildly from country to country in its quantity, quality, methodology, and content. It can only be a rare instructor who is really competent, let alone expert, in the politics of all the fields he is expected to treat in his course.

Type
Notes de Recherche/Research Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 1970 , pp. 462 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1970

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References

1 This paper does not start with the traditional genuflexion to The Literature for the simple reason that this method was designed without my having read any of this material. My real debt of acknowledgment must go to the fifty students who created the simulation course with me, working out the theoretical and practical problems as they arose.

2 This article is a greatly compressed version of my paper, “Problems in Teaching Comparative Politics: Playing French Games,” 85 pages, mimeo., presented at the 1969 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. As the latter provides in very concrete detail information on the mechanics of the course we developed, I would be glad to send a copy on request to interested colleagues.

3 Let me baldly state my two basic premises on this most controversial issue of political science. While prediction is not the object of political study, thinking about the future is very much the proper domain of the political scientist both because of his ethical concern about the quality of human society and because of his interest in public policy and institutions. There is no essential difference between the activities of teaching and research. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. What is methodologically sound for teaching should be similarly appropriate for research, and vice versa: what is a valid research subject should be a teaching concern also.