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Abstract
This article provides an overview and assessment of Comparative Politics in South Africa. In mapping the state of the sub-discipline, attention is paid to its prevalence in the curricula of universities, the extent to which comparison of political phenomena in more than one country features in completed master's dissertations and doctoral theses in the period 1950–2011 and whether South African comparativists publish in their Political Studies journal Politikon, which has been in existence for 40 years. The scope and direction of Comparative Politics and its methods have shifted dramatically over the years and so has the South African political landscape since the early 1990s. The manner in which these changes have affected the teaching and research interest of scholars, the curricula and the substantive focus of master's and doctoral studies is of particular interest here.
Notes
1 Within-country comparison is generally excluded. In this regard Rose (Citation1991, 449) emphasises that ‘The presence or absence of concepts applicable to a multiplicity of countries is the test whether a study can be considered comparative’.
2 Lees (Citation2006, 1098–1099) sets out a number of issues that single-country scholarship must address to make such studies more relevant to the discipline. These include: classifications that are designed to hold true across as many as possible observations and seeking to generate predictions that can be tested in later research.
3 In its formative years Comparative Politics (in the USA) referred to the study of individual political systems outside the US, often in isolation from other political systems and involving little or no comparison (Van Biezen and Caramani, Citation2006, 30).
4 The state of Comparative Politics in Britain, for example, was evaluated in 1990 and 2006. See Page (Citation1990) and Van Biezen and Caramani (Citation2006).
5 In 2010 African students represented 64.4% of the student body at Universities in the country (SAIRR 2012, 499).
6 In the Department of Politics at the University of Johannesburg the (permanent) staff student ratio for 2013 is approximately 1:360 (for undergraduate students).
7 The Political Science departments at a majority of South African universities make use of a number of contract teaching staff members, which makes it difficult to make comparisons. Some of these staff members are also involved in the teaching of Comparative Politics.
8 I did not come across any person who expressed an interest in Comparative Politics and who was not involved in the teaching of it.
9 The statistics may not be totally accurate, since universities have to register their completed masters and doctorates at the National Research Foundation (NRF). This registration seems to be particularly problematic for the period 2008–2011, with only 21 completed dissertations and theses registered, which seems much lower than previous years.
10 These are the studies by A. M. Faure in 1975 (his MA) and 1981 – his PhD – which is an investigation into the epistemological bases of Comparative Politics, and deals with issues such as the methodological basis of comparison, the nature and role of logic and comparison as a scientific method.
11 Since its establishment in 1974 and until 2005 two issues per year were published. This increased to three per year since 2006.
12 Over a period of 20 years (1968–1988) Britons wrote eight articles that can be classified as comparative in the British Journal of Political Science (Page Citation1990, 444).
13 Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei - were so-called independent homelands under the apartheid government.