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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes be called the ‘sophisticated’ phase in the growth of the subject of comparative politics inasmuch
as these writers “were concerned with the various strategies of comparison: area studies,
configurative approach, institutional and functional comparisons, a problem-based orientation,
and with various methodological problems: conceptualisation, the establishment of agreed
categories for comparison, validity as a problem, cross-cultural difficulties and the availability of
data.”
The contributions of David Easton, Gabriel A. Almond, James C. Coleman, Karl Deutsch, G.B.
Powell, Harold Lasswell, Robert A. Dahl, Edward Shils, Harry Eckstein, David Apter, Lucian W.
Pye, Sidney Verba, Myron Weiner and a host of others may be included in the final phase. It may
rightly be described as the mark of an increasingly sophisticated phase in the growth of comparative
politics. The writers belonging to this phase have made use of interrelated set of concepts for the
sake of presenting their contributions on the basis of comparative analyses, though they have
provided a specialised vocabulary in their own ways. As Roberts says: “If Easton talks of inputs,
outputs, demands, gatekeepers, supports and stresses, environment, feedback, values, critical
ranges and political authorities; Almond offers a set of input and output functions; Deutsch
borrows a cybernetic language which applies to political systems the concept of feedback of
various types—autonomy, memory, load, lag, lead and gain, receptors, communication, selective
screening of information and so on. Almond’s aim of ‘universality’ sums up the purpose for the
choice of such languages — they are sufficiently general to be applicable to any political unit,
regardless of size, period, degree of development or other factors.”
The subject of comparative politics as developed, in the latest phase, has these main characteristics:
1. Analytical and Empirical Investigation: The analytical-cum- empirical method adopted by
the writers belonging to the latest phase “has definitely enlarged the field of our enquiry as it
has cleared up the mist in which many helpful distinctions within the framework of political
studies lay obscured.” Eckstein has referred to the late decades of the nineteenth century as a
period in which Political Science, influenced by a ‘primitive positivism’ “effected a divorce
between its normative and its descriptive concerns.” He further says that in the realm of
‘comparative government’, more and more writers “turned from a concern for the evaluation
of governmental forms to a pure description. By and large they retained the analytical categories
developed by their predecessors, but began to shape their meanings to fit descriptive rather
than normative purposes. Thus, for example, a pure ideal-type democracy, while it continued
to be a tool employed in normative political theory, no longer had utility for specialists in
comparative government, and the definition of democracy was loosened to permit inclusion
of a congeries of actual governmental forms and socio-political conditions.”
2. Study of the Infrastructure: The study of comparative politics is not confined to the formal
structures of government as was the trend with the traditional political scientists. Here a
student is concerned ‘with inquiry into matters of public concern, with the behaviour and acts
that may concern a society as a totality or which may ultimately be resolved by the exercise
of legitimate coercion.” Instead of remaining concerned with the formal structures of
government alone, he “has to be concerned with crystallised patterns of behaviour, with
‘practices’ since these are parts of the living structures of government.” If instead of
‘government’ the term ‘political system’ is used, naturally it becomes a part of the entire social
system and the ‘input-output’ process includes all those forces of the ‘environment’ that have
their effect on the decision-making process. Thus, the role of political parties and pressure
groups, for example, becomes as significant as the role of legislatures and executives in the
study of modern political systems. As Blondel says: “Structures of government exist; they
have to exist because this is the way in which tension is reduced and delayed and thereby
tension decreases and the polity is maintained. But structures change gradually and in a
complex fashion. Thus, if we are to understand how governmental systems operate, we have
to note that the ‘law’ (in the general sense of the rule of procedure) is an indispensable
element of the life of governmental systems; it makes political life possible and maintains
politics.”

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