Page 19 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes 1.4 Summary

• The term ’comparative politics’ is of recent origin and came into vogue in the fifties of the
present century and is indicative of the expanding horizon of political science.
• One of the main reason which encouraged the development of new approach for the study
of politics was dissatisfaction with the traditional descriptive approach to the subject.
• “Comparative politics is comparative analysis of the various forms of government and
diverse political institutions.”
• Politics is a continuous, timeless, ever-changing and universal activity having its key
manifestation in the making of a decision to face and solve a ‘predicament’.
• Political activity as “an activity in which human beings, related to one another as members
of a civil association, think and speak about the arrangements and the conditions of their
association from the point of view of their desirability, make proposals about changes in
these arrangements and conditions, try to persuade others of the desirability of the proposed
changes and act in such a manner as to promote the changes.
• In the field of comparative politics, the term ‘politics’ has three connotations—political
activity, political process and political power.
• The reduction of tensions or the resolution of conflicts naturally takes place through the
operation of permanent mechanisms of tension reduction.
• If politics means the authoritative allocation of ‘values’, some measure of conflict is bound
to arise between ‘values’ as desired by the people and ‘values’ as held by the men in power.
Thus arise conflicts that demand their solution and what leads to efforts in this regard
constitutes political activity.
• Politics ceases where secession, and indeed civil war begins, as, at that point, there is no
longer an authoritative allocation of values, but two sides allocating their values differently”.
• The common point is that political activity stops at the point of ‘political rest.’ “So, just as
a situation of political rest does not start up any political activity, it also closes down a cycle
of political activity.”
• The set of procedures whereby the private associations existing in a state seek to influence
the government, or participate in policy formation by the government or become the
government, is the ‘political process’.
• It is needed that the study of the government (as an element of the state) should be made
vis-a-vis the ‘governments’ of non-state associations that operate in a way so as to influence
the government of the country and also be influenced by it in some way or another.
• The whole operation of government thus takes the form of a two-way operation, or, perhaps
more appropriately, of a machine which receives signals and transforms these signals into
others.”
• The scope of comparative politics includes the subject of ‘political power’. The term ‘power’
has been defined by different writers in different ways. For instance, while. Carl J. Friedrich
describes it as ‘a certain kind of human relationship’, Tawney regards it as ‘the capacity of
an individual, or a group of individuals, to modify the conduct of other individuals or
groups in the manner in which he desires.
• Politics thus connotes a special case in the exercise of power—an exercise in the attempt to
change the conduct of others in one’s own direction. To define the term precisely, one can
say that power “is taken to denote the whole spectrum of those external influences that, by
being brought to bear upon an individual, can make him move in a required direction.”
• Politics “cannot be studied properly without identifying the ruling class, or the governing
and non-governing elites, and measuring their respective roles.

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