Unfortunately, because of its pioneering role in the development of modern Political Science, Americans studying their own political system usually do so without making comparisons with other countries. Sometimes they say comparisons are not useful because of the uniqueness of the American system! Ironically, they seem to ignore the fact that one cannot know whether a system is unique without making comparisons. I believe the American system is quite exceptional for reasons that can only be understood after making comparisons.

Despite their belief in the uniqueness of the American system, many American political scientists believe that political principles drawn from the American experience are exportable as though they reflected universals of political wisdom. However, precisely because of its uniqueness, many generalizations based on the parochial analysis of American governance have limited applicability in other countries.

This applies empirically to technical assistance programs, especially in Public Administration, where rules and practices based on the American experience have been exported to developing countries, often with unexpected and unfortunate results. It also applies to international Political Science because so many political scientists around the world have studied in America and, if not, have at least read many American books. Political Science concepts need, I think, to be globalized, which means establishing generic concepts within which the concepts that are uniquely (or particularly) relevant to the American case can be understood as the special concepts they are.

Area Studies. We do not generate global concepts by means of area studies, a term reserved for the study of OTHERS, those who are different from oneself. Thus if an American studies Nigerians, that is area studies. Perhaps if Nigerians studied American politics they could also call that area studies. However, when Nigerians study their own country, or Americans do their own country, what do we call that? Certainly not "area studies!" We cannot say "indigenous" without suggesting a particular subject of area studies, the peoples who lived there first before settlers or conquerors appropriated their land. Nor can we use "local" because this word already refers to sub-systems within a polity.

Comparative Politics. Using the concept of endogenous politics can help us clarify what we mean by comparative politics. At the conference of the American Political Science association to be held in Atlanta, Sept. 2-5, 1999, 45 divisions will offer panels, among whom five will focus on "Comparative Politics," meaning in effect "non-endogenous" politics -- i.e., the politics of countries outside the U.S. The five categories include a general heading for Comparative Politics, followed by sessions that focus on "Developing Nations," "Communist and Post-Communist Countries," "Western Europe," and "Advanced Industrial Societies." The last rubric might include the U.S. However, U.S. is not explicitly mentioned in any of the 18 panel titles announced in the preliminary program for the Atlanta conference. "Europe and North America" occurs in one title, "global" in three and "welfare" or "welfare reform" in four of the titles.

Among the IPSA research groups, 7 use the word, 'comparative', in their titles, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of all IPSA groups actually involve intra-regional comparisons, making the inclusion of this word in their titles redundant. Moreover, none of the groups have an endogenous focus on any one country without benefit of comparisons. Thus a group on French politics, Russian politics, or Egyptian politics will surely use comparisons to establish the particularities of their country focus. This suggests to me that any glossary of key concepts in Political Science needs to make a distinction between endogenous studies that can be carried out in any one country without reference to others, and studies that take into account different political systems. Of course, area oriented groups explicitly focus on polities found within a geographic region, but in principle all of them involve comparisons. Endogenous studies by local people and area studies by outsiders can and should be merged in the IPSA context, viewing both as segments of what we may call global studies.

Executive Power. When one looks at the groups that focus on sectors of government, one may be struck by the absence of groups interested in executive power -- the role of presidents, prime ministers, and cabinets. The only exception is SOG (RG27) but its focus is primarily on links between the executive, cabinet, and top levels of the bureaucracy in pluralistic democracies. However, the executive power in these societies is also linked to the representative functions of "politics" as expressed in legislatures, political parties, and electoral systems. Thus chief executive provide bridges between institutionalized polyarchic power (the representative function) and the management of public administration through hierarchic (bureaucratic) power. One reason for this notabile gap may well be some conceptual problems rooted in historical accidents.

For Americans, under the influence of their separation-of-powers Constitution, executive power rests in the presidency, and there are, indeed, many studies of the presidency by American political scientists. However, because of the insularity of endogenous studies in the U.S., virtually all their treatises on the American presidency are parochially non-comparative. However, the fact that virtually all industrialized democracies except the U.S. have parliamentary systems in which the executive power lodges in the parliament and its Cabinet as a ruling committee, makes comparative presidential studies seem irrelevant. (To distinguish beteween these two quite different institutions, I shall capitalize Cabinet whenever the word is used to represent a governing body lodged within a parliament, by contrast with cabinet, uncapitalized, to represent presidential appointees who manage administrative departments.)

Actually, the comparative analysis of presidentialism would make a lot of sense provided all countries with separation-of-powers constitutions could be copmpared. However, this would involve comparing the U.S. with virtually all Latin American countries, and a few in Asia, Africa, and post-Communist countries. I believe such comparisons would be illuminating, but they violate the assumption that "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries cannot be compared with each other. Moreover, area specialists on Latin America -- who know the most about different presidentialist regimes -- resist making systematic comparisons with the U.S. system. Other area specialists who study Asia, Africa, and post-communist regimes, tend to argue that cultural and geographic differences are so important that any comparative study of presidentialist regimes, on the basis of their institutional form, would be unrewarding within their zones of attention. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the APSA preliminary program for the Atlanta conference includes a panel on Comparing Presidential Systems in the listing for "Comparative Politics."

The executive power in parliamentary systems should also be studied comparatively under the heading of Cabinet government. I believe there are important differences in the way such Cabinets work, and they need to be studied very seriously. However, any research group on "Cabinets" would confront two conceptual obstacles.

The most obvious arises from the fact that this word is used in presidentialist regimes to refer to the presidential entourage, the top political appointees of the president who head executive departments. Unlike Cabinets, they are not a committee of the legislature, but an institutionally separate part of the executive branch. Historically, in the pre-parliamentary context of British monarchic power, it was correct to see the cabinet as a council of ministers accountable to the chief executive. However, when Parliament eventually triumphed over the King, the British Cabinet -- and in due course all other Parliamentary Cabinets -- became committees of Parliament accountable to the assembly, not the King or President, for their offices.

This led to the emergence of a new concept of Cabinet government that has become the norm in all industrialized democracies (except the U.S.) It needs to be studied comparatively, but it should not be confused with the very different structure that preceded it in England, and was replicated in the U.S. No doubt there are some obvious analogies between the two basically different kinds of exeutive system, but their fundamental dynamics are so different that comparisons between Cabinet Government and Presidential cabinets can only make sense when seen in the broader context of how the executive power is exercised in different kinds of polities.

No doubt cabinet members do need to mobilize support in Congress for their programs to succeed, but the ultimate decision to discharge or retain them in office is the President's. Moreover, the success of a cabinet member depends significantly on how well she or he can manage and coordinate the various bureaus and other units clustered in a department. Since each department is, inherently, a rival of other departments with many conflicts of interest, cabinet meetings are more likely to become arenas for conflict rather than a consensus-building forum. There is no special incentive for cabinet members to coordinate with other departments, a function that has evolved in the American case, outside the cabinet, through an increasingly powerful executive Office of the President. By contrast, of course, since Parliaments can discharge their Cabinets by a no-confidence vote, there is every incentive for members to present a united front and coordinate their diverse activities in order to stay in power.

A second source of confusion arises from the fact that even the most authoritarian and despotic regimes also have ruling groups called a "cabinet" -- I shall use quotation marks to characterize these so-called cabinets. Even more than in presidentialist democracies, such groups advise the chief executive and administer government departments, but they do not constitute a "Government." Their power, as a group, is notably less than that of Presidential cabinets -- and far less than that of Cabinets. However, in military regimes dominated by a military junta, members of the junta may take cabinet posts, creating the illusion that a "cabinet" is governing, whereas in fact it is only a facade for the ruling junta. Of course, the same principle applies to one-party states where the party's Secretary General or the Politburo controls the "cabinet." This means, of course, that in some countries the Executive Power has virtually no links with polyarchic (representative) institutions, or if they exist on paper, they are purely nominal in status. Research on chief executives, therefore, needs to take into account the extent to which it is or is not responsible to organs of representative governance.

No doubt there are other reasons why the executive power has not become a focus of comparative studies in the IPSA context. However, when one considers that there are groups focusing on legislatures, judiciaries, and electoral systems it seems strange that the balanced study of executive power it is actually organized throughout the world has been understudied. Moreover, although the main instrument for executing public policy in every country is a bureacracy consisting of appointed officials (civil servants and military officers), there is no IPSA group dedicated to studying them. Admittedly there is an IPSA group on bureaucracy in developing countries, and another on armed forces in general. However, it seems unlikely that either of them can generate a holistic understanding of the bureaucratic institution, viewed both as an administrative agency of governance and as, itself, a potent source of political power.