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Unit 1: Nature and Scope of Comparative Politics

It is the study of the subject of politics from the standpoint of ‘power’ that has widened the scope Notes
of comparative politics so as to include a study of the infra-structure of the political systems. It
is on account of this that politics “cannot be studied properly without identifying the ruling class,
or the governing and non-governing elites, and measuring their respective roles. Politics also
functions, by and large, within groups, though as we have seen earlier, however important in
themselves the group may be, neither the individual nor the society can be left out.” The subject
of ‘authority’ becomes the handmaid of power. The rulers in a democratic system try to justify
their authority by means of having the title of ‘consensus’, those of a totalitarian system resort to
the naked use of power for achieving the superficial title of legitimacy. Thus, it becomes a
celebrated principle of comparative politics: “Where consensus is weak, coercion tends to be
strong, and vice versa.”
It is on account of these important connotations that the term ‘politics’ has come to have its
peculiar definition in the realm of comparative politics. Here politics has been made free from
the shackles of normative dimensions and restated in empirical terms. The result is that it is not
merely a study of the state and government, it is a study of the ‘exercise of power’. As Curtis
says: “Politics is organised dispute about power and its use, involving choice among competing
values, ideas, persons, interests and demands. The study of politics is concerned with the
description and analysis of the manner in which power is obtained, exercised, and controlled, the
purpose for which it is used, the manner in which decisions are made, the factors which influence
the making of those decisions, and the context in which those decisions, and the context in which
those decisions take place.”
1.2 Development of Comparative Politics

The study of comparative politics became highly significant in the 1950’s when a good number
of leading American political scientists sought to ‘transform the field of politics’ by taking the
study of this subject ‘from foreign to comparative political phenomenon’ and ‘from the study of
the governments to the study of the political systems’. In broad terms, the transformation which
“has taken place has been from a field which would most appropriately be labelled ‘foreign
governments’ to one which might most adequately be called comparative political systems.”
However, the historical development of this subject may be roughly put into three phases —
unsophisticated, sophisticated, and increasingly sophisticated.
The contributions made to the study of politics by great figures like Aristotle, Machiavelli, de
Tocqueville, Bryce, Ostrogorski and Weber belong to the first phase who simply utilised the
comparative method for the primary purpose of understanding better the working of the political
organisations. These writers employed, what was called, the comparative method that “aimed
through the study of existing politics or those which had existed in the past to assemble a definite
body of material from which the investigator by selection, comparison, and elimination may
discover the ideal types and progressive forces of political history.” John Stuart Mill undertook
to show that the comparative method “may assume several forms, the ‘most perfect’ of which is
the process of difference by which two politics, identical in every particular except one, are
compared with a view to discovering the effect of the differing factor.” Lord James Bryce preferred
comparative method and designated it as scientific by adding: “That which entitles it to be called
scientific is that it reaches general conclusions by tracing similar results to similar causes,
eliminating those disturbing influences which, present in one country and absent in another,
make the results in the examined cases different in some points while similar in others.”
The contributions of some important recent writers like Samuel H. Beer, M. Hass, Bernard Ulam
and Roy C. Macridis may be included in the second phase who made use of the comparative
method with a good amount of self-consciousness and also with a deliberate mood to present a
more useful study of different political institutions. As a matter of fact, the writers belonging to
this category, unlike political thinkers and writers belonging to the first, applied the instruments
of institutional comparisons in a quite rigorous manner to present a better (in the sense of
realistic) study of the governments what they desired to address as ‘political systems’. This may

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