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POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built, one topic a day. The method is simple: read the capsule, write the same day, and don’t break the chain. Running alongside it are PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault, which puts 560 previous-year questions in front of you over these fifty days — roughly eleven a day.
Day 27 — Comparative Politics
Comparative politics is the one sub-discipline of political science defined by its method rather than its subject matter, and today’s capsule works through that method and the schools built on it. It opens with the nature and meaning of comparison, the approach–method–technique distinction, and the historical arc from Aristotle’s 158 constitutions through nineteenth-century Eurocentric institutionalism to the post-1945 turn to process and behaviour. From there it sets out the major approaches in sequence — traditional and its limitations, the systems approach and its derivatives (Almond’s structural-functionalism, Deutsch’s cybernetics, Kaplan’s models of the international system), old and new institutionalism, and the political economy, political sociology, political culture, socialisation and interpretive approaches. The final third turns to empirical political theory, the significance and limitations of the comparative method, and two standing challenges — Eurocentrism and globalisation. Between 2016 and 2025, this unit carried ten 10-markers and one 20-marker, with political economy and the comparative method and its limits the highest-frequency themes.
Write before the evening:
- Examine the significance of the comparative method in political analysis. Discuss its limitations. (UPSC 2019, 20m)
- Critically examine the Marxist aspect of political economy approach to the study of comparative politics. (UPSC 2016, 10m)
- Discuss the political socialization of open and closed societies. (UPSC 2025, 10m)
If you go blank on any point above, it is covered in full in the Foundation and OGP class notes and handouts — revise it there, then write.
