Comparative Government & Politics: What is Comparative Politics?

Welcome to Comparative Government and Politics. This first lesson is going to be an introduction to comparative politics. The big question that we're going to answer—uh, we're going to answer it simply, and we're also going to answer it a bit more complexly—is what is comparative politics?

Comparative politics, simply speaking, is the study and the comparison of domestic politics across countries. Now, politics in general, generally speaking, is the struggle in any group for power, and with that power, one or more people have the ability to make decisions for the larger group. We can think about a few examples, like in an office setting, right? There's office politics. We can think about it in the government, as we're probably going to talk about largely in this course, or we can talk about it in more of an informal setting, like on a soccer team: How come I didn't get to play goalie when he got to play goalie? Or how come his kid got the start on the team and my kid didn't get the start on the team? All of that is politics. All right. So in our politics definition, we talked about the struggle in any group for power, but what does power mean? Power is the ability to influence others or impose one's will on them. So we have power; we have politics. We can now merge these two concepts. So in politics, we have a competition for public power, and power is the ability to extend one's will over people or over, I guess, things. And we can contrast now comparative politics with international relations, which is another subfield of political science. International relations is the relations, or relations between countries, compared to politics—again, the study and comparison of domestic politics across countries. So comparative politics, we're looking within countries and comparing those insides; international relations, we don't really care so much about the insides, even though it can explain some things. We care more about the relations between or among countries. There is some overlapping in international relations compared to politics; for instance, some, some things within a state or a country can explain relations among countries. Um, but let's, let's not go there right now.

In the most general form, we can think about international relations as just relations between countries. So we're dealing with three categories of thought in political science and comparative politics: analytical concepts, methods, and ideals. So let's go to analytical concepts. All right, fancy words here. What do they mean? Well, analytical concepts are assumptions and theories that guide our research. We're talking about cause and effect between some variables, variables, or between one thing happening and another thing happening. What causes that? One big concept that we use to evaluate comparative politics, and we'll talk about this later in our lecture here, is institutions. Institutions are organizations or activities that are self-perpetuating and valued simply for their own sake. Institutions lay out rules, norms, and structures. One of my professors, when I was doing my doctoral work, defined institutions as simply the rules of the game, right? They provide rules or ways of doing things that a lot of people understand, and they do those things as a way of organizing society. All right, so let's go to methods now. What are methods? Methods are ways to study and to test those theories. Methods are tools that try to seek out explanations for why specific political events occur. And third, ideals. Ideals are beliefs and values about what we want to get out of politics, the outcomes that we seek. We can compare existing politics through ideals with a state of affairs that we prefer down the road. One big ideal at the center of politics that we love to negotiate is the balance between the ideal of freedom versus equality. Start thinking about, in this first lecture, what is more important to you in a society? Would you like ultimate freedom, where maybe they were not as financially equal, or do you prefer more of a completely equal society, financially speaking, or, uh, with income equality, but maybe the state has to restrict your freedom in some sense? Think about which, you know, you might think about this for a long time, or you might, the answer might come to you pretty quickly, but what is more important to you?

So where does comparative politics fit in? Comparative politics, as I mentioned before, like international relations, is a subfield that compares this pursuit of power across countries. We use the methods of comparative politics to make arguments of cause and effect. We ask questions like: Why are some countries democratic? Why are others authoritarian? Why is power more evenly distributed in some countries and more concentrated in others? We can compare cases of South Korea, which is democratic, versus North Korea, which is autocratic. So while we have ideals as well, and I personally prefer absolute freedom, we should separate those ideals from the concepts and methods that we're talking about here when we're trying to answer these questions that I just posed there. So comparative politics can inform, but it also can possibly challenge or even change our ideals down the road. It can give alternatives; it can question our assumptions about how societies should be governed or organized. So while we're doing this kind of introduction of comparative politics—what is comparative politics?—we're talking about the methods of comparative politics, but the methods of comparative politics help us to do comparative politics. Well, what does it mean to do comparative politics? Doing comparative politics means how we go about comparing governments, societies, cultures, institutions, and the like. There are specific methods of doing this comparison. So the comparative method, we could say, is a way to compare cases and raw conclusions and derive conclusions. We can seek out conclusions and generalizations that could be valid in other cases as well. So if we're looking at one country, say Sierra Leone, and we noticed some phenomenon that's going on in Sierra Leone in this one case study, maybe we can draw out some conclusions about Sierra Leone that might be applied to other countries, say Uruguay. Um, let's say, in addition, that we want to answer why democracy has failed to develop in some countries, or why North Korea is still communist and repressive—why hasn't it collapsed yet? Again, we could look at a single case study; we can look at one country and form a hypothesis about why a country is the way it is. Um, here we're going to look at the differences between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is where we're studying one case or a few cases, and we're generating a hypothesis from that one case. The difficulty with doing this is that we can't really test that theory that we get from that one case, but it's a good starting point. On the other hand, we can talk about deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is where we're starting with a puzzle, and we generate some hypothesis about cause and effect, and then we can test this hypothesis of this theory against a few or many other cases. So to review just a little bit here: inductive is where we're starting with evidence to uncover a hypothesis, and deductive reasoning is where we're starting with a hypothesis, and we're seeking out evidence.

Similarly, we can look at the difference between correlation versus causation, and this is a crucial difference that you're not only going to see in comparative politics, but you're also going to see in other social sciences and also in the natural sciences, sometimes called the hard sciences. Correlation is simply an association between variables, and they're not necessarily caught—not one doesn't necessarily cause the other—whereas in causation, we're talking about cause and effect between, uh, one or many variables. So there are a few limitations in doing comparative politics, as there are in many other social sciences. The first limitation is that it is difficult to control variables. Variables in the social sciences operate in the real world, and the real world in society and dealing with individuals who act on their own subjective preferences at every moment of every day, and there are—how many people in the world are there?—close to seven billion people in the world today. That's a whole lot of changing settings. So there's all sorts of different settings; they're often changing, uh, we're talking about different geography, different economies, cultures, uh, resources, and political structures. So it is extremely difficult to control, uh, or to maintain, or to ma—to keep steadiness of all of these differences. The second limitation is that many variables are simply interconnected, and these variables can interact with one another, and when variables interact with one another, it's difficult to see how one variable can, uh, affect the dependent variable. We're trying to determine what causes one another or what. So if variable A changes and you see a, a change also in variable B, it could be that variable A isn't necessarily associated with variable B; it could be just associated with this other variable that we don't really know. So this, where variables are interconnected and interact with one another, is called multi-causality. The third limitation is that information is necessarily limited, uh, when we're dealing with the social sciences. Information is always limited, but in particular when we're talking about comparative politics—how many countries are there? What, 206 right now? We can point to. So there's really not a lot of cases that we can draw from to look at regularities among domestic politics and countries. So we're limited to, um, really just barely over 200 countries in the world; therefore, the number, the samples, or the population that we're dealing with is very small. The fourth limitation is that there are limited, uh, access; there is limited access to the cases that we do have information. The information that we have through these 206 cases is not easily acquired; it costs money; it takes time; and there's often very difficult access to information, in particular for dealing with governments who want to maintain some sort of secrecy and don't want to give you straight answers on particular phenomenon of politics, then your access is very limited. So doing interviews, doing field work is difficult because, again, you need that time and that money. Government archives—you need to get access to; international travel—again, costs money, costs time, and oftentimes there are language barriers to doing this research. The fifth limitation is that the focus of comparative politics is often very skewed early on, and really to this day, a lot of the work, most of the work, is concentrated on Europe. It seems to be the more exciting region, you know, a very exciting region, you know, we talk about East Asia as well. So, you know, there are some parts of the world that simply are not very interesting to comparative politics, uh, scholars, and so why would you want to do research on something that's not very interesting? Uh, so the focus is skewed; most of the work is on Europe or more exciting regions in the world, and there's also, there also tends to be the specialization in one area or region, uh, and so if you are a specialist, say, in, uh, sub-Saharan Africa, then you may not be as geared into the developments in the rest of the world enough to be able to compare those cases against what your specialization is. So it's great that we have specialization, so we can really focus on the languages and the cultures and the institutions and the political structures of particular regions, but by doing so, it also takes you away from other regions of the world. So focus is often skewed when doing this research. The sixth limitation is bias, and one of the important biases that we should pay attention to in comparative politics is, uh, called selection bias. For instance, uh, when we are selecting our cases, say, uh, if we are trying to evaluate the relationship between inequality and revolutions, well, if we're looking at revolutions that had occurred, uh, where there were, there was any vast income inequality in the society, we can look at cases like Mexico, France, Russia, China, um, in Iran again, but we might be not choosing some interesting cases where there was vast income inequality, but they didn't have a revolution, like in Brazil or South Africa or in India or Nigeria. So selection bias is where we're only choosing one half of that coin and saying, Aha, there's a relationship, and we're forgetting about the second half of that. So we need to be sure to include these latter cases, um, otherwise there just might not be a cause-and-effect relationship after all. The last limitation, um, that we're going to focus on here, them—so there's plenty more limitations—is trying to decipher which is the cause and which is the effect of two variables or many variables. So what if, for instance, countries with low rates of female literacy are less likely to be democratic? Which causes which? So this, trying to figure out whether female literacy causes the decline in democracy or the decline in democracy causes the low rates of female literacy—this trying to figure out which causes which is called endogeneity. So do we see in these instances, uh, authoritarians depressing and suppressing women's rights, or does limited female literacy simply limit public participation? So it's difficult to find out which cause is which in these instances.

A science is comparative politics scientific? Can it be? So let's look at the progress of political science and comparative politics from the more descriptive to, over time, being more scientific, and what we mean by that. Uh, Aristotle, the first figure that we're going to look at, he did comparative research on existing political systems, which we're going to call regimes in this co—in this, uh, course. He analyzed constitutions of 158 Greek city-states and asked the question: Why are some despotic and others not? And through his research, he developed the modern, uh, practice of statecraft. You may come across that term in international relations as well, in foreign policy. In other words, statecraft is how to govern, right? The art of governing, and this was an empirical science of politics for the people who lead countries, and he developed this in his book *Politics*. Now, after Aristotle, politics remained firmly within philosophy, with an emphasis on how politics should be rather than how it actually is, until Niccolò Machiavelli came along and had a comparative approach of different political systems. He came about generalizations about the successes and failures of these political systems and looked at how statesmen and leaders applied those successes and failures to, uh, try to avoid these same mistakes going forward along the lines of this art of statecraft that Aristotle developed. He sought to develop and seek out pragmatism in government, to put diplomacy, military strategy, and power wielding. He is often considered the first modern political scientist, and he developed a lot of these principles in his book *The Prince*. The next two we're going to look at are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. These two guys are often talked about simultaneously together to talk about their assumptions about how government took root in the first place. They used empirical observation to shape their ideals of particular governmental systems. First, we'll talk about Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes was a social contract theorist. He theorized that people surrender some liberties in favor of order, and that order comes about through the state or government. Uh, down the road, we will, uh, distinguish the two—the government from state—but for right now, don't worry about that too much. Hobbes advocated a powerful state in his book *Leviathan*. John Locke, on the other hand, was a also a social contract theorist, but really focused on private property as being essential to individual freedom and prosperity. He theorized about life, liberty, and property—that each individual owns his life, that he is, uh, that his rights are that he should be left in a state of liberty without aggression from other people, and that through that his, he owns his life and his labor—that property is a natural extension of that life and labor. He advocated, in contrast to Hobbes, a weak state in his book *Two Treatises of Government*. The next two people we'll talk about are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Baron de Montesquieu. You may have heard about these theorists in maybe some of your studies, uh, on the Constitution of the United States and even the French Revolution. These two thinkers weigh heavily on the development of the constitution in many Western states. These two thinkers study the separation of power as well as civil liberties, and, uh, we'll talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died even before the French Revolution but had a great influence on the ideas that took root in the French Revolution. He posited that citizens' rights are inalienable and cannot be taken away by the states, so they exist prior to the state existing. He, um, was really influential in the development of civil rights in the civil rights movement, and he was also a social contract theorist, and he developed a lot of these ideas in his book *The Social Contract*. Montesquieu—this is where the US Constitution derives these ideas of the separation of powers—that there should be that powers of the government should be separated within the, the larger political structure of government, uh, and he developed this idea of separation of powers in his book *The Spirit of Laws*. All of these books, by the way, will be linked in the, uh, lecture notes that I'll have with this video.

Two other thinkers, uh, often not, uh, thought about together, but we'll think about them together here, um, but you know, generally speaking, we can think about Karl Marx and Max Weber as both having analyzed the nature of political and economic organization and power. Karl Marx, to begin with, had a theory of economic development and inequality, and he had a firm emphasis on class and, uh, an individual's belonging to a particular class as determining his politics and his, uh, his really social standing. He, two important works of his, uh, were, um, his and Frederick Engels were *Das Kapital* and *The Communist Manifesto*, uh, and through these works he predicted the eventual collapse of capitalism upon itself, and after this collapse of capitalism upon itself, you would see eventually down the road a stateless communist society taking its place. Max Weber was a theorist and a commentator on bureaucracy, on forms of authority, as well as the impact of culture on economic and political development, and he developed these forms in *Economy and Society*. So these are a lot—some of the figures that, uh, really develops the political science, but also comparative politics through the years. So by the beginning of the 1900s, political science was a distinct field of study; however, uh, it was still very descriptive and less what you might call today as sciencey or scientific. It was largely atheoretical and largely concentrated on Europe, as I was mentioning before—we were talking about comparative politics as being skewed to a particular focus on Europe—and in the beginning of the 1900s there was really no method of going about doing comparative politics. However, the turning point came with two world wars and a cold war coming about mid-century. In the early stages of the Cold War, since right after World War II in the late 1940s, there was a growing movement toward making studying human behavior more rigorous, and this took root in sociology and economics and politics and really just the social sciences. The world wars made people question whether scholars really knew anything about world affairs. After all, the two deadliest wars in world history occurred, and this is right when we thought we were studying political science, but it turns out we don't really know anything at all—maybe we do, maybe we don't. So the nuclear Cold War, in addition, made understanding comparative politics extremely necessary. After all, if we don't understand how the world works, we might just not make it through, because it's really necessary for survival to make it through, you know, this nuclear Cold War. And lastly, technological innovation was huge in developing political science into more of a science. So computers gave way to this idea that social problems can be solved through technological expertise and statistical analysis and really a managerial class—whether it can or can't be—this question really cannot be answered yet, but it certainly gave way to this idea that it could be. So by mid-century, the development of political science and really comparative politics here as a subfield revolved around the ideas, ideals of capitalism and democracy and, uh, the development of politics, uh, it came incrementally, so it came through stages. The scholars revolved around particular ideas, uh, and, and saw those ideas through until they didn't see them as useful anymore or they merged them with other new ideas to really develop this a science of politics. The first really important idea after the world wars and in the development of political science was modernization theory, and modernization theory posited that as societies develop, they become capitalist democracies, eventually ultimately converging around a set of shared values and characteristics. So the idea was that the U.S. and the West were the furthest along in the path of quote-unquote modernization. Some, however, were diverted by nefarious forces like communism—unlike the Soviet Union or North Korea or Cuba—um, or fascism, like in Italy or Germany. But by and large, this was how countries developed; they would necessarily follow these steps through development through into being capitalist democracies. Well, by the late 1950s and the 1960s, modernization theorists began expanding their cases, uh, this included doing more field research and including statistical methods into their analysis, so making it more robust and rigorous. There was more data to go around to use to, to figure out how things work. So the, the focus shifted away from studying institutions and more toward individual political behavior, and this merged into what we might call the behavioral revolution in the 1970s, and this wasn't just in comparative politics, this was also in economics and in other social science fields. So the behavioral revolution generated theories and generalizations about human behavior, and if we understand how human behavior operates, we might be able to predict things about politics and political institutions and how governments might act and how social movements might behave. So to rehash modernization and behavioralism—these are two different things. Modernization theory is a set of hypotheses about how countries develop; behavioralism was a set of methods on how to approach politics, and they didn't necessarily come about at the same time. One kind of merges into another, but they, they, they can work, uh, hand in hand. However, both were attempts to study politics more systematically and scientifically. So as the 1970s tread along, new theories and more sophisticated methods developed; however, authoritarianism and political violence still existed, and they failed to give way to the predictions of modernization theory. Some say there was too much emphasis on methodology over understanding; others said there was too much ideological bias—that there was too much focus on the Western model of modernization—that really political scientists and policymakers were trying to remake the world in the West's image. So accordingly, there were many lines of conflict and division within the comparative politics field that scholars were bickering about. So there was a lack of consensus, and we're going to talk about two big conflicts within the field of comparative politics in the next section here. All right.

So two big conflicts in the field of comparative politics. Uh, the first was methodology, and this still exists today. What do I mean by this? Well, you know, the big question was how best to gather and analyze data, and we're divided between qualitative methods and quantitative methods. Qualitative means basically quality; we're describing things. So if we're describing things, we're generating data from interviews, from observations, from archival data in research and documentary research. We're doing deep investigations of one or a few cases, and these qualitative methods or investigations are typically inductive, meaning we begin with case studies and then generate theory from those few cases. The problem with qualitative methods, quantitative people usually say, is that the variables are not rigorously defined, and there's a small sample size. Oftentimes you can only describe so many cases at once. So the quantitative method people, or the quants, they like to call themselves, they like to use a wider array of cases; they also use statistical analysis and mathematical models, often derived from the economics profession, and quantitative studies are usually deductive, meaning they start with a theory, and then they take a whole bunch of error—they took a whole bunch of often variables or cases—and they test them with a whole bunch of data. So they test the theory with a whole bunch of data. The problem with this is that the qualitative people say is that the quant people can overly focus on variables that can be numerically expressed and thereby leaving out other variables that might be described with, you know, words. So, uh, there tends to be an over quantification in quantitative studies without necessarily understanding the nuance of particular cases. So qualitative has its shortcomings; quantitative has its shortcomings. So is it somewhere in the middle? Well, somewhere in the middle it involves mixed methods, so you do a little bit of qualitative, you do a little bit of quantitative, but again, it doesn't necessarily make it better. So here are shortcomings of both, strengths of both, but the conflict over this methodology still exists. This second conflict within comparative politics is over the assumptions of human behavior within theory explaining the data. One big question is: Are humans rational, meaning do they weigh costs and benefits in decision making? Do they, in other words, in economic speak, maximize utility? If yes, then we can use something called rational choice theory or game theory, and through game theory we can study rules and games by which politics are played and how humans act on their subjective preferences. So these, you know, RCT—rational choice theory—can help us understand voting patterns, in choosing political parties and supporting a revolution or maybe not, or joining a social movement or maybe not, like Black Lives Matter. Um, rational choice theory can also help us explain political phenomena better and even possibly predict what might happen in the future. However, the critics of rational choice theory or game theory, uh, say that it ignores a lot of historical complexity, uh, the unintended consequences of human action, and also cultural factors that might influence behavior. So we have these two large conflicts, and there are other quibbles that scholars bicker about, but ultimately what we're trying to do with comparative politics is to better people's lives and to try to figure out the best way of studying politics to help each other be better citizens and leaders. So I want to finish this lecture by talking about two key ideas that are crucial for understanding comparative politics. The first is a key concept called political institutions, which we talked about before. Now, institutions again embody the rules, norms, and values that give meaning to human activity. So we can think of democracy as being an institution. Democracy is part of our collective id—identity as being Americans and Westerners. Institutions can also demand, uh, similar allegiance to, to things like ethnic groups or religions, and you know, when we think about institutions as these sorts of things, we can understand that there's really no single set of institutions that holds power over all the people around all of the world. There are differences in institutions; some overlap, but in the end, we must understand these differences among institutions that bind people together. We can think of, again, the World Trade Center as being an institution. The World Trade Center, um, exemplified American values, American culture, and even capitalism. The Pentagon is a symbol and an institution; it symbolizes American exceptionalism, but even it could symbolize, um, American dominance over the rest of the world, in particular, and in particular regions of the world, like the Middle East. The city of Jerusalem is an institution; it's an institution of multiple religions as the home of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. So, uh, we can think of national institutions, cultural institutions, religious institutions, um, and when we're thinking about these different types of institutions, we can think about two distinctions. The first is formal institutions. Formal institutions are those institutions that are officially sanctioned rules, and these rules are clearly known. Formal institutions often can involve physical structures, again, like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. And we can differ formal institutions with informal institutions. Informal institutions are unwritten; they are unofficial; however, they're often, if not more so—how—more powerful, still very powerful, even more so powerful than formal institutions. Why? Because a lot of times with informal institutions, we don't know that we're violating those institutions or we don't know they exist until we violate them. One example is that often we walk on the right side of the sidewalk; you don't really know that you do that until you start walking down the left part of the sidewalk, or if you're in a mall, you're walking down the left side and you're running into people. So informal institutions are often more, uh, powerful than formal institutions because oftentimes we don't even know they exist, uh, and when we're talking about power in institutions, we often talk about how well established they are within a society, how entrenched they are in society. And how entrenched an institution is in society is how sticky it is, right? This is, you know, it's the formal term that we talk about institutional stickiness, but it's an actual term; it's not just, you know, something clever that I just thought up off a whim here, uh, so institutional stickiness is how well entrenched an institution is in society, and often a characteristic of stickiness of institutional stickiness is that when an institution is threatened, it is defended. So, uh, one institution of, uh, American political culture, whether we like it…

Or not, is the Confederate flag, particularly in the South, it means different things to different people. Um, but whenever people try to get rid of it, it is defended. Whether it's defended well or not is another question. The fact remains that it has a certain institutional stickiness. After all, the Civil War ended in 1865, the Confederacy ended in 1865, and we still see it around. Um, so politics, whether it's in the United States, in Germany, or Uganda, is full of institutions. They're full of formal institutions as well as informal institutions. We can think of the army, police, the legislature, courts; these are all institutions. And institutions exist because, again, they provide rules and order. We can obey institutions because often they're in our own self-interest, but we also obey institutions because they are seen as legitimate ways of conducting politics. For example, taxation is an institution. We obey taxes; we pay our taxes because we don't want to go to jail. Well, we also pay them because it's institutionalized; because, uh, often when taxation is well entrenched, we pay because it is legitimized. And when we don't, we don't pay taxes as a society, the political institutions that are in our society tend not to be legitimized very well, and tax evasion tends to be rampant. Another institution are elections. You know, we know that really, you know, your individual vote really does not matter all that much. However, why do we vote? Because it's very well institutionalized in our society. And elections, we can tell if they're institutionalized or not if they have a certain stickiness or not, is not so much when there's a winner to an election, but when the loser to an election respects the outcome of the election. Well, we didn't see that too much in the last presidential election in 2016, when Hillary, uh, Clinton lost to Donald Trump. You know, or crying foul, there was even this Russia hoax, that was this Russian thing, the propaganda that was yada yada, we all know the story. Um, but you could say that in that particular election, um, the outcome of that election was not very well legitimized.

So political institutions are important because they influence politics; how they are constructed affects how politics is conducted. All right, the second item I want to talk about, uh, as we end this lecture is, uh, the key ideal of weighing freedom and equality. So people struggle for power; we know this just in society and politics; that's just what happens. Okay, but what are people struggling for? If a certain group of people gets power, what do they want to achieve? Well, how do we know? Well, ideals; ideals answer those questions of what they're struggling for and what they want to achieve. And one of the biggest ideological ideas is the balance between freedom and equality. Freedom, we can define as an individual's ability to act independently without fear of restriction or punishment by the state or other individuals or groups in society. Now that's not the only definition of freedom, but we can just use that definition right now. Equality can be defined as the material standard of living shared by individuals within a community, society, or country. So we're talking about not equality on the law per se, but income inequality, material equality. Well, are these two items, concepts, ideals mutually exclusive? Are they zero-sum? Is it that with greater personal freedom, uh, comes less equality? Well, here's the reasoning. I mean, there could be greater personal freedom, therefore a smaller role for the state, limits on government powers to redistribute income, and but we we could also have a state in which there might be greater freedom, but there also could be greater equality, material equality. The state could actually play a role in making people more unequal. But the common assumption within politics, at least, uh, in in current politics, is that the greater freedom that we have, uh, the greater inequality there's going to be. Uh, some say that inequality may undermine freedom if there's too many people, if they, you know, too many people feel like the political system doesn't care about their financial needs. In the United States, there's a high degree of economic inequality for a developed democracy in the world. The question could be in the United States that we could examine is, is American inequality undermining democratic institutions in the United States? Is it going to lead to some sort of political violence? Um, whether political violence does occur again doesn't necessarily mean that inequality caused that. And so these are questions that we can look at. Conversely, demands for greater income inequal or equality may lead a government to take away some private property and personal wealth in the name of redistribution, for the greater good, quote unquote. One extreme case was the Soviet Union; the communist state held all economic power and controlled people's lives. So one question that we can we can just continue to ask ourselves is, does an increase in one necessarily mean a decrease in the other, freedom versus equality? Maybe, maybe not. Some say that they can't be truly free until the state guarantees a minimum level of income. Uh, also what freedom and equality mean to people can change over time and can change culture to culture. So think about these closing questions I'm going to give you right now as you continue to the next lecture and as I actually, uh, get to making the next lecture, um, and, uh, really just just think about these things in your everyday life, because you know, I'm pondering various questions about questions about politics, you know, really 24/7. So that's kind of my life there, but, uh, the closing questions that I'm going to post to you are: How much should any individual or group be allowed to influence others or impose their will on them? Who should be empowered to make decisions about freedom and equality? And should power be centralized or decentralized, public or private?