The Comparative Politics Game Show: Using Games to Teach Comparative Politics Theories 1 V ICTOR A SAL ,S TEVE S. S IN ,N OLAN P. F AHRENKOPF , AND X IAOYE S HE University at Albany (SUNY) Undergraduates often struggle with theoretical perspectives in political science. Often students can get a better handle on theories if they are able to relate them to something tangible in their experience. Lichbach and Zuckerman lay out cultural, rational actor, and structural perspec- tives as a way to think more systematically about comparative politics but often students struggle with these meta-theories and the different ways they encourage us to think theoretically about comparative politics. In this paper, we discuss a set of exercises that enable students to get a better handle on cultural, rational actor, and structural perspectives on comparative politics by making them “lab rats in their own experiments.” We group these exercises together and treat them as a Comparative Politics Game Show. In this paper, we describe the different exercises and how they were used and our view of the utility of this approach for teaching comparative politics theory. Keywords: comparative politics, theory, simulations, games, pedagogy In many universities across the United States, lectures in combination with assigned readings from textbooks remain the centerpiece of instruction for almost all introductory courses irrespective of the department “where students passively absorb pre-processed information and then (attempt) to regurgitate it in response” (McCarthy and Anderson 2000). Students who are introduced to new material through such passive methods only gain superficial knowledge at best (Jaques 1991) because they are not forced to engage the course material in a way that they can make the knowledge they gained truly their own. One of the most difficult challenges of teaching an introductory course on comparative politics (CP) is conveying to an audience of 200-plus students—an overwhelming majority of whom are freshman and have never had any prior for- mal exposure to CP and the fundamentals of relevant CP theories in such a way that is both engaging to the students and provides a conduit to understanding the core concepts and the intricacies of these theories. Learning theories is a dif- ficult task for the students in a large classroom setting because these theories are not only foreign to most of the students taking the 100-level courses, but they also tend to be abstract and do not readily translate to the “real world” as 1 An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 70th Annual Midwest Political Science Association Confer- ence (Simulations and Political Science Education Panel of Teaching Political Science Section [57-2]) held at the Palmer House, Chicago, Il, April 12–April 15, 2012. Please send comments and suggestions to Victor Asal at vasa- l@albany.edu. Asal, Victor et al. (2013) The Comparative Politics Game Show: Using Games to Teach Comparative Politics Theories. International Studies Perspectives, doi: 10.1111/insp.12010 Ó 2013 International Studies Association International Studies Perspectives (2013), 1–12.