Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students enroll in a course whose title is something like “Principles of Comparative Politics” or “Introduction to Comparative Government.” These are bread-and-butter courses for any modern political science department, but they aren’t the flashy or sexy ones. Students who study government and political science normally come to these courses with an interest in current events or great debates. Those looking for a deep dive into U.S. politics will take a course like “Introduction to American Politics.” Students who are interested in war and peace or climate or globalization will gravitate to “Introduction to International Relations.” Those more interested in the philosophical roots of politics will choose classes with names like “Introduction to Political Theory” or “Foundations of Political Philosophy.” Few college students are intrinsically interested in comparing things.
As a result, comparative politics — the field in which I work, and which is concerned with the internal politics of countries around the world — has a reputation for being rather dry. Introductory courses in comparative politics are often about building vocabulary and learning concepts rather than current events, historical precedents, or deep philosophical debates. Students encounter equations and formulas and read analyses of the political systems of countries they will never visit. They learn about research designs and how to test hypotheses. These are the parts of academic political science that drain politics of all passion and principle.
It is understandable that comparative politics has this reputation. What is more interesting to you right now: unitary executive theory and the U.S. Constitution, or how prime ministers are selected in Australia? What student really cares that Fiji, Israel, and the Netherlands each have only one electoral district from which all legislators are elected, rather than 435 districts that each elect one legislator, as in the U.S. House of Representatives? So what that Argentina has a federal system of government, but Finland does not? What does it matter that Germany and Japan were late colonizers, or that Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia are multiethnic, multireligious states? Did you even know that these are the topics that a comparative politics course covers?
In normal times, students like to argue, and they like controversy. But Spring 2025 was no normal time, especially for the American university and for students who want to learn about politics. The second Trump administration treats universities as hotbeds of radicalism and anti-Americanism, and has used its control over federal research funds as a cudgel to threaten administrators and punish researchers. Everything is fraught, and anyone teaching anything controversial is on high alert. Should we talk about what’s going on in the current administration? Should we talk about what’s going on in Ukraine? In Gaza? Among our students? With our friends and our loved ones? Students are just as nervous as we are, and just as hesitant to share their views and to speak their minds, especially those who are not U.S. citizens.
This is the context in which I taught introductory comparative politics to my own undergraduate students this spring. It was an ordinary class taught under extraordinary circumstances, both for my university and for my country. By the end, the experience had changed me, both as a teacher and as a citizen.
The first thing that every comparative politics instructor must decide is how to teach it. Some approach the task by selecting perhaps a dozen countries to be the major focus of the course, with the goal of guiding students through the nature of politics in each of them. Others approach introductory comparative politics from a more abstract perspective, introducing students to patterns across countries in the world such as the number of political parties in the legislature, the presence or absence of civil war, and the durability of political systems over time. Yet another way to go is to start with some concepts — representation, democracy, totalitarianism, public goods, insurgency, the state — and then explain how they help to make sense of countries’ political experiences. These different approaches all have strengths and weaknesses. What they share is the idea that to learn about politics, one must think conceptually, abstractly, and comparatively. Whereas anyone teaching about U.S. politics can take it for granted that American students know more or less what the American presidency is, a course in comparative politics starts by asking, what exactly is a president? Is the French presidency the same kind of position as the South Korean presidency? (The answer is no.)
As it happens, Spring 2025 was my first time teaching introductory comparative politics to undergraduate students. Although I have nearly 20 years of experience in the classroom, my courses have always been for more specialized audiences, or for more advanced students. As I planned out my first foray into introductory-level teaching, I followed my instincts and the path of least resistance by focusing primarily on concepts. We would start by defining what a state is, and then what democracy means, and on from there to talk about representation, electoral systems, violence, and other key themes. I would illustrate the points using examples from around the world.
This concepts-first approach, though, raised a thorny problem. When, and how much, should I talk about the United States? On the one hand, I really didn’t feel like teaching about the current state of U.S. politics, and I was pretty sure that the students would be glad for a break from the subject too. On the other hand, a course full of mostly American college students would run more smoothly if I used the United States as a running example to illustrate some concepts. It’s much easier to explain district magnitude — a central concept in the field of electoral system design — to Americans by explaining that each of the 435 congressional districts in the House of Representatives elects exactly one member to Congress. We say, therefore, that congressional elections in the U.S. have a district magnitude of 1. In many other countries’ legislative elections, each district may send two or more candidates to the legislature, so we say that the district magnitude in these elections is greater than 1.
The concept of district magnitude is rather dry, at least for anyone who isn’t interested in electoral systems. Other concepts might be far more contentious. At a time in which race, ethnicity, and gender identity are the subject of intense scrutiny, would the students want me to bring up identity politics in the United States during our class on political identities? What about the Black Lives Matter protests for our class on social movements and protest? How about authoritarianism and the breakdown of democratic regimes? The problem is clear: where to draw the line between the concepts where illustrative examples from the U.S. would be helpful, and where they might prove distracting, even distressing? Might I risk needlessly politicizing the classroom?
Mindful of these kinds of concerns, and uncertain about the political environment to come, I decided to focus the course on every country of the world except for the United States. I would explain to the students that because our class was about comparative politics, our focus would exclusively be on politics in countries around the world, and that our goal was to learn about politics in general terms rather than all the details of any one political system. I would reserve just one class meeting — the last one of the semester — for a discussion of the United States. Even then, I would not speak much about the current administration. Instead, I would talk about how politics in the United States fit within the broad scope of what we had covered. I titled this last class Democracy in America, a nod to one of the first modern scholars of comparative politics.
I decided all of this long before the spring semester began. President Trump was inaugurated on January 20. Our first class met at 10am on January 22.
The following months were challenging for many Americans, and certainly for many of my students. The federal government announced a freeze on over $1 billion in research funds for my university, and I lost a major research grant. An international student whom I have mentored for years lost his student status and was forced to leave the country. The scandals in Washington were too many to follow. We all learned about the economic impacts of tariffs, their ridiculous planning and shambolic execution. My friends and I joked about the operational security of our group chat. An acquaintance on the treadmill next to me at the gym pointed to the overhead TV, where CNBC was covering the markets, and said, they’re fucking with my money. People were sent to El Salvador in defiance of court orders. Others died in overcrowded ICE facilities. Still others have disappeared.
I did not mention any of this to my students. Instead, we learned about the state, electoral systems, authoritarianism, social movements, representation, globalization, and all of the other topics that one would expect in any comparative politics class. I joked about which subfield of political science is most important. We covered clientelism in Japan, district magnitude in Israel, insurgency in Vietnam, nationalism in Scotland, federalism in Belgium, democratization in South Africa, the territorial state in Thailand, semi-presidentialism in France, gender quotas in Argentina, protest in China and Egypt, party systems in Ghana and Ecuador, social capital in Italy, property rights in Kenya, and the recent federal elections in Germany, Canada, and Australia. Because I mostly study politics in Southeast Asia, they heard more about Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore than they would in most introductory comparative politics classes. But otherwise, it was a normal comparative politics course. Here and there, on minor topics, I would mention the United States — but I always prefaced it with something like “you know I don’t like to talk about the U.S. in this class, but…”
The strategy was prudent. Had I placed the United States at the center of comparative politics, students would have come to expect that we cover current events throughout the course. That’s not what I wanted to do. I also didn’t want to share my opinions, nor did I want students to feel like they should share theirs. Although I could tell that many of my students were struggling to process the changing political climate in Washington and on campus, I could also tell that they appreciated the ability to think about something else for seventy-five minutes, twice a week.
I only mentioned the last class, Democracy in America, a couple of times before it took place. During the last week of class, I told the students that nothing that I said during that class would be on the final exam. That meant — and I told them this — that they could skip it if they weren’t interested in hearing me talk about democracy in the United States, or if they just wanted to sleep in. I also made sure that the students knew that they could ask any question they wanted to, about anything at all, from my favorite foods and sports to whatever else was on their mind.
The last class went well. Nothing particularly memorable happened, and there was no real controversy. Most of the students attended even though they didn’t have to. I talked about serious stuff for just a couple of minutes, then more abstractly, then we had some laughs. I thanked them for being my first introduction to comparative politics class ever, and they clapped, and then that was it. I have nothing to report about the class meeting itself that is interesting.
Although that last class meeting was unremarkable, I spent an enormous amount of time planning what I would say that day. I thought about it idly all semester, and then very seriously in the last two weeks. My thinking changed quite noticeably between January and May, in ways that reflect something profound, at least to me, about the role of the university in public life and my role as a teacher.
In January, my expectation was that I would spend the first couple minutes of Democracy in America talking about whatever incendiary or idiotic things the current administration had done recently, then I would talk about how we should think about the United States using the concepts we had discussed all semester. For example: we can understand why we have a two-party system even though we are an immensely diverse society: because the U.S. Constitution created a presidential form of government with plurality voting in single-member districts, which produces an executive-focused two-party system that almost no one prefers over a multiparty alternative. We know why social movements are hard to start: because collective action problems abound, and people respond to incentives. (We also know how and why some social movements win.) We can appreciate why the American Civil War was fought differently in Virginia than it was in Missouri: because of the different character of insurgent warfare and the technology of combat in the Western theater. We can explain how other countries have achieved greater descriptive representation than the United States has: by using proportional representation in elections (best for ideology and class), quotas (most common for gender), and reservations (for ethnicity). We also know that descriptive representation isn’t the same as substantive representation, in the U.S. or anywhere else. We know why nothing holds the Constitution together but power: because nothing holds any constitution together but power.
By May, my thinking about what to cover about Democracy in America had changed. I didn’t just want to guide the students through how we might apply our concepts to the United States. I wanted them to think about what we were doing in that class in a more profound way. My comparative politics course was teaching them to think about the world in a certain way, cultivating a habit of mind when considering how people in the countries of the world govern themselves. And, in turn, to apply that way of thinking to the United States as well.
Here is what I mean. The United States is one case of a collection of people who have organized to govern themselves under a set of rules that many people do not like, but which most people follow anyway. Comparative politics says, we can study the United States using the same tools we use to study anywhere else. I am fond of saying that the United States really is exceptional, because there is no other country in the world quite like it, but there’s no magic to that understanding of American exceptionalism. We can only understand the United States by seeing how other countries — other collections of people — organize themselves differently. This is the power of comparison.
Developing the habits of mind of the comparativist encourages students to step back from day-to-day politics and policy debates. Learning comparative politics does not mean evaluating policy choices or deciding what governments should or should not do. Doing comparative politics is not about picking the right constitution or avoiding some outcome. We can understand the Argentine presidency and its effects on Argentine politics without endorsing or opposing the Argentine Constitution or President Javier Milei’s policies. As I am fond of saying to students who want to know my views on various political systems around the world, I don’t know what the right or the wrong way to organize politics is, but I do have ideas about what the consequences of various ways of organizing people are.
At root, comparative politics is about understanding how collections of people govern themselves. We understand that by noticing patterns of behavior that repeat over time and are similar in different national contexts, and developing theories about why those patterns exist. We subject those theories to scientific scrutiny, although with a healthy dose of skepticism about what we can learn from what we observe. When we are wrong, we change our minds. When we don’t know, we say so.
The habits of mind required to study comparative politics this way include curiosity, criticism, judgment, statistical and scientific literacy, tolerance for difference, and an appreciation of history. They are equally useful for understanding the United States. To think about U.S. politics, for a comparativist, is to think about how one collection of people have organized to govern themselves, which is the same problem that every other country in the world must solve too.
Organizing people means creating order. Comparativists take the problem of political order seriously: where it comes from, why it breaks down, how it can vary. As an analytical matter, political rules like constitutions and laws are interesting because they are created and implemented by the very people that they constrain. And as political scientists are fond of saying, our institutions are not self-enforcing. The fact that stable political orders can emerge at all is a remarkable thing, but a course in comparative politics emphasizes that no political order is permanent. The starting point is not that the United States political system is uniquely good or uniquely bad. It is that the United States has a political order, which is but one instance of a problem of order that all modern states must solve. That order, that way of organizing a collective of people to govern themselves, is unique to this country, but it will not endure forever.
If I were just cultivating the habits of mind required to do good social science, I could have stopped there. That’s pretty good, after all. The values of judgment, scientific literacy, and appreciation of history that I listed above are nothing other than the core values of a liberal education. If my students had learned to think this way in addition to knowing these things, I would call that a great success. But there is one more implication to this way of thinking, something that was clearer to me in May 2025 than it ever had been previously.
As a teacher in a university in the United States, the United States is also exceptional to me. I am a citizen of the United States and no other country, and I have a civic commitment to the United States that I do not have to any other country. That I am a citizen of the United States is the result of a series of accidents of history, but it is no less real just because of those accidents. When I teach mostly American students in an American university about politics around the world, I am — like it or not, for better or for worse — giving meaning to American exceptionalism for students living in the United States. And contrary to the view that American exceptionalism implies some sort of ineffable uniqueness, special national character, or divinely guided superiority, I think American exceptionalism makes more sense as part of our common humanity.
Teachers like me are reluctant to acknowledge this, because we have an instinct to keep our values out of the classroom. It should not matter what I think about politics; if students think that they cannot speak freely in my course because of my values or political positions, then I have failed at my job. But there are some values that are so fundamental to the entire enterprise of comparative politics that I cannot compromise on them. Open, critical inquiry. Acknowledgment of difference. A commitment to the individual as a right-bearing entity. And a refusal to concede that power determines truth.
These are the premises upon which my course on comparative politics builds. Take away any one of them, and the enterprise fails. As a comparativist, I know that in many countries in the world, these principles cannot be upheld in the classroom. In those countries, comparative politics is impossible. Spring 2025 is the first time that I seriously considered that my role as a teacher in the United States might be to tell students that the American political order has rested on a set of values and commitments that make comparative politics possible here too. Of course, those same values and commitments also enable us to understand the United States itself. As always, the lessons of comparative politics generalize to the United States. So, during my one class on Democracy in America, I told them so.