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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes traditional approaches have a historical-descriptive and prescriptive character with a
dominating place for values and goals.
• The oldest approach to the study of politics is philosophical. It is also known by the name of
ethical approach.
• The philosophical approach is criticised for being speculative and abstract. It is said that
such an approach takes us far away from the world of reality. For this reason, it is accused
of being hypothetical.
• The distinguishing feature of this approach is focused on the past or on a selected period of
time as well as on a sequence of selected events within a particular phase so as to find out an
explanation of what institutions are, and are tending to be, more in the knowledge of what
they have been, and how they came to be, what they are than in the analysis of them as they
stand.”
• 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
and Locke; the capitalist system of the nineteenth century created Mill and Marx.
• A political activity mainly springs neither from instant desires, nor from general, principles,
but from the existing traditions of behaviour themselves.
• The historical approach has certain weaknesses. For instance, as James Bryce says, it is often
loaded with superficial resemblances.
• If political theory has a universal and respectable character, its reason should be traced in the
affirmation that it is rooted in historical traditions.
• “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.”
• 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.
• 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.
“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.”
• 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.
2.5 Keywords

1. Political System : It is a system of politics and government. It is usually compared
to the legal system, economic system. Cultural system, and
other social systems. It handles how religious questions should
be handled and what the government’s influence on its people
and economy should be.
2. Superficial resemblances : Apparent rather than actual or substantial.

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