Talk:Comparative government

A few comments as a B.A. In Political Science focused in Comparative Politics as well as in International Relations focused in Diplomacy, International Law and organizations.

First a comment on Wikipedia structure.

If you do a search for comparative politics there are 2 different possibilities for results. If you use capital "C" Comparative and little "p" politics you get the Comparative Politics page. If you use capital "C" Comparative and capital "P" politics you get the Comparative government page. This is an internal issue of wikipedia and I do not know how to correct it but I believe that it should be corrected.

Onto the article itself.

Whoever has worked on this article has obviously put a lot of time into. It is admirable the amount of effort that has obviously gone into it.

It has a lot of inaccuracies and ommisions of basic information. It is also not easily accesable to the lay person reading it. An example of inaccuracy is found in the title itself. The area of study is known in the study of poltiical science as comparative politics and only sometimes refered to as comparative government not the other way around. Does that make comparative government wrong? No, just not the most used term and thus probably not the best term to use for an encyclopedia.

A serious ommistion that I have already corrected was in the 3 areas of government. Previously listed were the executive, the legislative and the beurocratic elite. There are 4 areas of government the executive, the legislative the judicial and the beurocratic elite. Leaving out the judicial is to leave out a major area of government in an encyclopedic entry that is about comparing governments.

Addressing the charge of inaccesability to the lay person. The 4 areas of government were not originally called 4 areas of government. They were called 4 areas of policy making. While this is absolutely true the average lay person does not have the same vernacular definition of policy making that those who study this field will have. Therefor it would be more appropriate to label it 4 areas of government and put the discussion of policy making as a "subheading" later in the encyclopedic entry.

Just my opinions but they are based on making the information accurate, complete and accesable to the lay person. I do not in any way mean them as an attack on those that have put so much effort into this entry.

Dave 19:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Entire Article Should Be Revised
Other than the information at the top of the article, there is a lot of unnecessary information here and a lot of important information is missing. Though obviously a lot of effort went into listing the typical branches of government and some of the characteristics it is not entirely clear to me that such a list belongs here. Additionally the field of comparative politics is cast pretty narrowly, not all comparativists focus on brink and mortar political institutions. I recommend reorganizing this along the lines of the International relations article, including sections on the history, theory, and important concepts of the sub-field. The information on the government branches should be integrated into the appropriate articles.

--Demiansmark 08:24, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

I entirely agree with the above comment. I am going to delete the branches of government information. The information exists elswhere and makes this article a bore as it has only an introduction about comparative politics/govtTommo 87 14:08, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Rewriting the article
Hi! I agree with all of the above comments, and so I'm trying to rewrite the article. I will retain most of the information of the previous article, but I will also add more info, reorganize it, try to add more sources and to make it more rigorous. I believe the focus of the article should be shifted from forms of government to the comparative method. I will also rename the page as "Comparative politics", which is more appropriate (and that means making a correction on the "Politics" template as well). I have a B.A. in Political Science and I'm working on a Master's in International Relations, so I'm afraid that in my efforts to use rigorous language I might risk being incomprehensible to the lay person. I'll try to be balanced but I would appreciate any comments, help and suggestions. At the moment I'm still working on my sandbox, so if you are interested on seeing how it's coming you can view it there.

Thank you very much! SFinamore 19:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks promissing. You might one to create a separete Comparative Foreign Policy header (so you don't have to explain what it is between brackets). C mon 20:08, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That's a good idea, and eventually that's what it should be like. We should probably do the same thing for Comparative Government as well, instead of just renaming the page. By the way, it seems that there is already a page named "Comparative politics", but it redirects here to Comparative Government. Does anyone know how to undo that redirect? SFinamore 10:34, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Normally undoing a redirect would be rather simple, you just move the page and make sure that the redirects are okay. But since Comparative politics was an article once, (you can check its history here), we would either need an administrator to do this (going via Requested moves) or do it in a more clunky way (just copying texts and making this a redirect). But we will get there once we have an article. C mon 11:10, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Merge with 'Comparative politics'
This article should be merged with Comparative politics as a focus within that wider field. – SJL 15:41, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Urgent merge with 'Comparative politics'
I also believe this article has no sense at all by itself. It should be a chapter of the Comparative Politics Section —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.191.30.131 (talk) 18:01, 5 February 2009 (UTC)