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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes This approach has been criticised for being too narrow. It ignores the role of individuals who
constitute and operate the formal, as well as informal, structures and sub-structures of a political
system. It is because of this that behavioural approaches have overshadowed the significance
of this approach. Another difficulty is that the meaning and range of an institutional system
vary with the view of the scholar. “Those who have conceived governmental institutions,
offices and agencies have been inclined to teach and write about government accordingly,
organisation charts being suggestive of much of what they have done. Under this conception,
the study of politics becomes, at the extreme, the study of one narrow, specific fact about
another.” Finally, the students of this approach “have also tended to ignore international
politics. Since for long there were no world institutions analogous to the state or government,
there seemed to be nothing in this area for political scientists to talk about.”
4. Legal Approach: Finally, in the realm of traditional approaches, we may refer to the legal or
juridical approach. Here the study of politics is mixed up with legal processes and institutions.
Themes of law and justice are treated as not mere affairs of jurisprudence, rather political
scientists look at state as the maintainer of an effective and equitable system of law and order.
Matters relating to the organisation, jurisdiction and independence of judicial institutions,
therefore, become an essential concern of a political scientist. Analytical jurists from Cicero in
the ancient to Dicey in the modern periods have regarded state as primarily a corporation or a
juridical person and, in this way, viewed politics as a science of legal norms having nothing in
common with the science of the state as a social organism. Thus, this approach “treats the state
primarily as an organisation for the creation and enforcement of law.”
In this context, we may refer to the works of Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes of
the early modern period who propounded the doctrine of sovereignty. In the system of Hobbes,
the head of the state is the highest legal authority and his command is law that must be obeyed
either to avoid punishment following its infraction, or to keep the dreadful state of nature
away. The works of Bentham, John Austin, Savigny, Sir Henry Maine, and A.V. Dicey may also
be referred to in this connection. The result is that the study of politics is integrally bound up
with the legal processes of the country and the existence of a harmonious state of liberty and
equality is earmarked by the glorious name of the rule of law.
The legal approach, applied to the study of national as well as international politics, stands on
the assumption that law prescribes action to be taken in a given contingency and also forbids the
same in certain other situations; it even fixes the limits of permissible action. It also emphasises
the fact that where the citizens are law-abiding, the knowledge of law provides a very important
basis for predictions relating to political behaviour of the people. A distinguished student of this
approach like Jellinek advises us to treat organised society not as a mere social or political
phenomenon but as an ensemble of public law rights and obligations founded on a system of
pure logic or reason. It implies that the state as an organism of growth and development cannot
be understood without a consideration of those extra-legal and social forces which lie at the back
of the consideration and, for this reason, are responsible for many of its actions and mutual
reactions. It may, however, be pointed out that this approach has a very narrow perspective. Law
embraces only one aspect of a people’s life and, as such, it cannot cover the entire behaviour of
the political actors. As the idealists can be criticised for treating state as nothing else but a moral
entity, so the analytical jurists commit the mistake of reducing every aspect of a political system
to a juridical entity. “Determination of the content of law through legislative power is a political
act, ordinarily to be explained on the basis of something other, than a legal approach.”
The traditional approaches may be said to have four main varieties as discussed above. Their
outstanding feature is that value-laden system dominates. Normativism assigns to them a
peculiar and distinctive character. As a result of this, political theory is said to have become
abstract, hypothetical, speculative, even metaphysical. On the whole, normativism lays stress
on the significant discussion. It “looks to the establishment of a moral criterion of political
conduct and asks questions about the nature of the state and its ends, the limit of one’s obligations
to obey the commands, the basis and content of the individual’s rights and freedom, the form
of good life and so on.”

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