Suvremena komparativna politika: kako strukturirati znanje?
Contemporary comparative politics: how to structure the knowledge?

Summary/Abstract: In this article a survey of contemporary approaches to comparative politics is given. Comparative politics is defined as a discipline (branch) of political science, together with political theory, national politics and international relations, and sometimes public politics. In the article special attention is given to paradoxical fact that comparative politics, independently from its place in the structure of contemporary political science, in Croatian political studies was a neglected discipline for years. The article strives to explain reasons for such a condition through misapprehensions in understanding comparative politics, which emanated mostly from connecting comparative politics to international relations. Beside that, the article also points out a series of contextual obstacles which made it difficult to develop comparative politics as a separate discipline in Croatia. In the middle part of the article a detailed review of most relevant approaches to contemporary comparative politics is given. The first approach is directed towards creation of encompassing text-books of comparative politics containing reviews of theoretical and methodological foundations of the discipline, its main topics, and representative countries, groups of countries or regions. The other approach is limited to the review of methodological and thematic sphere of the discipline, without studies of individual countries in which the general approach would be particularly demonstrated. The third approach is based on selection of the main topic, key problem, or theoretical unit, such as democratic politics or nation-states, on which the whole methodological approach is later demonstrated. The fourth approach is particularly concentrated on reviewing theoretical approaches to comparative researches while methodological problems remain in the background. The fifth approach is opposite to the fourth one, since it is particularly concentrated on methodological problems of comparative politics, such as considerations of general strategies of comparative researches. The sixth approach is mostly distinguished from the previous ones and it is the most correctly called studies of national politics in comparative perspective. At the end, the seventh approach consists of a sort of additional theoretical-methodological “construction” of a to a certain degree whole and coherent guide-book for comparative politics from a series of special studies which emerged in various periods of time.

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