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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes Comparative Politics — Old and New
From the start, comparing has been a particular way of connecting ideas derived from political
philosophy and political theory to empirical events and phenomena with primary emphasis on
power. The purpose is to determine what difference is brought about between the ways power is
deployed at different levels. Power is wielded by the state, it is exercised by the government. Thus,
different kinds of political systems exist and it becomes the function of a political theorist to
distinguish one from the other with a view to justify the excellence of one at the cost of the other.
This is the reason that Aristotle distinguished between true and perverted forms of state and
justified the excellence of the polity – a middle class rule. Lord Bryce studied the case of democracy
prevailing in many countries of the world and then admired Switzerland for being the ‘ancestral
home of democracy’. He gave a definitive view that democracy has no alternative. A. de Tocqueville
studied the operational form of American democracy and confidently affirmed that there existed
the model of a civil society.
Bryce, Laski, Finer, Barker, Jennings, Friedrich, Wheare, Siegfried, Duverger etc. belong to this
tradition. They are called ‘institutionalists’, because they kept their attention confined to the working
of political institutions like legislature, executive, bureaucracy, judiciary, federal systems, political
parties, elections etc. In a way they integrated their study of politics with the disciplines of
philosophy, history and law. As empiricists, they studied the institutions as they existed and
operated and on that basis they drew plausible conclusions that democracy was a system of order
with open ends. They did not take into their consideration the fact of social change and economic
growth and development that affected the operation of the political institutions and created a sort
of ‘configuring’. Thus, institutionalism “became inadequate to the test imposed by constitutional
engineering.”
A marked change occurred after 1960 when the new writers on this subject like Harry Eckstein,
David Apter, R. C. Macridis, Lucian W. Pye, S.P. Huntington, F.W. Riggs etc. realised that the
comparative study had thus far been comparative in name only. It had been a part of what may
loosely be called the study of some selected foreign governments in which the governmental
structures and the formal organisation of state institutions were treated in a descriptive, historical
or legalistic manner. Primary emphasis had been placed on written documents like constitutions
and the legal prescriptions for the allocation of political power. Macridis has thrown light on these
features of the old or traditional approach to comparative politics:
1. It is essentially non-comparative: The writers have their attention limited either to one country or
with parallel descriptions of the institutions of a number of countries. The student is led through
the constitutional foundations, the organisation of political power, and a description of the
ways in which such powers are exercised.
2. It is essentially descriptive: It may well be argued that description of the formal political institutions
is vital for the understanding of the political process and that, as such, it leads to comparative
study. If, we hardly ever have any comparison between the particular institutions described.
3. It is essentially parochial: The great number of studies on foreign political systems has been
addressed to the examination of Western European institutions. No systematic effort has been
made to identify the similarities and the differences among these countries except in purely
descriptive terms. No effort has been made to define in analytical terms the categories that
constitute an ‘area’ of study.
4. It is essentially static: It has ignored the dynamic factors that account for growth and change. It
has concentrated on what is called ‘political anatomy’. The writers have shown no interest in
the formulation of their theories in the light of which change could be comparatively studied.
5. It is essentially monographic: The most important studies of foreign systems have taken the form
of monographs that have concentrated on the study of the political institutions of one system
or on the discussion of a particular institution in one system.
Thus, Macridis asserts that such studies made by the comparativists subscribing to traditional
approaches “have been usually confined to the institutional framework of the country involved.

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