Page 39 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes
Shortcomings of Traditional Approaches
Focus on Western Political Systems
1. It dealt primarily with a single-culture configuration-Western world.
2. It dealt mainly with representative democratic systems as their aberrations.
3. It prevented a student from dealing systematically with Western as well as non-Western
systems.
4. Research was just superficial as it was founded on the study of isolated aspects of the
governmental process within specific countries.
Excessively formalistic in its approach
1. The analysis was focused on the formal institutions of government to the detriment of a
sophistincated awareness of the informal arrangements of society and of their role in the
formation of decisions and the exercise of power.
2. It proved to be relatively insensitive to the non-political determinants of political behaviour
and hence to the non-political bases of governmental institutions.
3. Comparison was made in terms of the formal constitutional aspects of Western systems
which are not necessarily the most fruitful concepts for a truly comparative study.
Descriptive rather than problem solving nature
1. Except for some studies of proportional representation, emergency legislation and electoral
systems, the field was insensitive to hypotheses and their verifications.
2. Even in the purely descriptive approach to political systems, it was relatively insensitive to
the methods of cultural anthropology, in which descriptions are fruitfully made in terms of
general concepts or integrating hypotheses.
3. Thus, description in comparative government did not readily lend itself to the testing of
hypotheses, to the compilation of significant data regarding a single political phenomenon-
or class of such phenomenon in a large number of societies.
4. Description without systematic orientation obstructed the discovery of hypotheses regarding
uniformities in political behaviour and prevented the formulation, on a comparative basis,
of a theory of political dynamics-change, revolution, conditions of stability etc.
Factors accounting for our increasing awareness in this regard
1. The prevalent dissatisfaction with the country-by-country approach in teaching and research.
The study of foreign governments is not in any sense of the word comparative study. It
results in making superficial similarities and differences between political systems.
2. The need to broaden our approach by including in our study non-Western systems and by
attempting to relate the contextual elements of any system with the political process.
3. The growing concern with policy-making and policy implementation. It is probably not
untrue to say that research is often related to the broad exigencies of policy-making. Its
global requirements have suggested the close inter-relationships of a number of factors that
were considered to be separate in the past and have shown the fallacy of
compartmentalisation-that is of area studies.
4. Comparative analysis is being increasingly a part and parcel of the growing concern with
the scientific approach to politics.
Source: R.C. Macridis: “A Survey of the Study of Comparative Government” in Jean Blondel (ed.):
Comparative Government (London: Macmillan, 1969).

The historical approach stands on the assumption that the stock of political theory comes out
of socio-economic crises and the reactions they have on the minds of the great thinkers. Thus,
historical evidence has an importance of its own. The conditions of ancient Greece created
Plato and Aristotle; likewise, the conditions of seventeenth century England produced Hobbes

34 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY