Nature & Meaning — the sub-discipline defined by its method

Comparison is the central analytical tool of comparative politics. Unlike branches fixed by subject matter, it is defined by its method, not its substance.

“Comparative politics is the only field of sub-disciplines among the several into which the discipline of political science is usually divided that carries a methodological instead of a substantive level.”

Arend Lijphart

Alexis de Tocqueville: “without comparisons to make, the mind does not know how to proceed” — the discipline’s founding spirit.

Why compare (Kenneth Newton & Jan Van Deth)

• Deeper understanding of one’s own country by studying others.
• Detailed knowledge of other countries — their background, institutions and history.
• Valid generalisations about government and politics.

Definitions

Comparison as control

• Giovanni Sartori: comparison is a form of control, akin to experiment; since social science cannot run laboratories, comparison verifies propositions.
• Emile Durkheim: comparison keeps research from being merely descriptive. James Coleman: comparison is vital for scientific inquiry in the social sciences.

Todd Landman (Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics, 2000) — four purposes: contextual description, classification, hypothesis-testing, prediction.

Approach · Method · Technique — keep the three distinct

The ladder: approach = comparative analysis of political systems → method = historical / configurational → technique = regression or interviews.

Historical Evolution — from Aristotle to globalisation

The long arc of the discipline. Ancient (Aristotle — 150+ constitutions compared) → Renaissance (Machiavelli — realpolitik, actual practice) → Eurocentric institutionalism (Bryce, Finer, Friedrich — formal-legal, descriptive) → Behavioural turn (Post-1945 — Almond, Easton; process over form) → Contemporary (Neo-institutional, political economy, identity)

Foundations

• Aristotle (384–322 BCE): father of comparative politics; typology by who rules (one / few / many) and in whose interest. Good forms — monarchy, aristocracy, polity; corrupt — tyranny, oligarchy, democracy. Empirical observation fused with normative judgement.
• Polybius and Cicero: built on Aristotle; focus on formal-legal structures.
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527): compared principalities and republics; realpolitik over idealism.

Late 19th – early 20th c.: Eurocentric institutionalism

European focus; formal structures; descriptive not analytical; the non-West excluded. James Bryce (Modern Democracies, 1921), Herman Finer (Theory and Practice of Modern Governments, 1932), Carl J. Friedrich (1937), Roberto Michels (1915), Maurice Duverger (1950).

Post-1945 to the present

Two periodisations

Methods of Comparison

Mill’s Methods

• Method of Agreement: the common factor across cases where the same phenomenon occurs.
• Method of Difference: compare cases where the phenomenon does and does not occur, to isolate the cause.

Critique — Harry Eckstein: small-N reduces scientific rigour; sound generalisation needs a larger N.

Traditional Approaches

Rooted in early philosophical and legal analysis — formal institutions, normative questions, historical context.

Shared weakness: speculative or descriptive; thin on empirical grounding; neglects informal processes, individuals and culture.

Limitations of Traditional Approaches

Roy Macridis — five charges

Traditional comparative politics is non-comparative, descriptive (not analytical), parochial (single-culture, Eurocentric), static, and monographic.

Almond and Powell — five premises of criticism: parochialism and ethnocentrism; configurative analysis; formalism; static and Eurocentric (status quoism); lack of scientific vigour.

Modern Approaches — the turn to process, behaviour and the non-West

“Look beyond description to more theoretically relevant problems; look beyond the formal institutions of government to political processes and political functions; and look beyond the countries of Western Europe to the new nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

Sidney Verba

Psychological approach — named contributions

James David Barber: typology of presidential character. Herbert Simon: bounded rationality. Henri Tajfel: social identity theory. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba: political socialisation and civic culture.

Systems Approach — Easton’s input-output model

Developed by David Easton; drawn from biology and sociology (Talcott Parsons).

What a “system” is

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (General Systems Theory): “a set of elements standing in interaction.” O. R. Young: “a set of objects, together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes.”

The political system is “that behavior or set of interactions through which authoritative allocations are made and implemented for society.” — David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965)

The political system as a converter of demands into decisions. INPUTS (Demands + Supports) → POLITICAL SYSTEM (Conversion — authoritative allocation of values) → OUTPUTS (Decisions + Policies). FEEDBACK: outputs reshape future demands & supports.

Criticisms of Easton

• S. P. Verma: abstraction cut off from empirical politics. Eugene Meehan: conceptual framework over explanatory theory.
• Status quo bias (persistence over breakdown); Western-centric; present-centric (thin on history).

Merits

Strengthens comparative analysis; groundwork for a general functional theory. Davies and Lewis: “an original set of concepts for arranging at the level of theory and interpreting political phenomena in a new and helpful way.”

Three Derivatives of Systems Theory

A · Structural-functionalism (Gabriel Almond)

Almond’s political system

“The system of interactions to be found in all independent societies which perform the functions of integration and adaptation by means of the employment or threat of employment of more or less legitimate order-maintaining or transforming systems in the society.”

Critique: neglects interactions among structures; Western / American bias; input-heavy; status-quo. Giovanni Sartori: structural-functionalism is “a lame scholar that claims to walk on two feet, but actually on one foot and a bad foot at that.”

B · Cybernetics (Karl Deutsch)

Karl Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (1966): politics as communication and control (the term coined by Norbert Wiener). Core ideas — information, communication, channels, feedback (with load, lag, gain, lead). Deutsch studies the “nerves,” not the “bones or muscles,” of the body politic. Critique: over-mechanical; quantity over quality.

C · Morton Kaplan’s six models of the international system

• Balance of power — five or six essential actors; six rules of behaviour.
• Loose bipolar and tight bipolar — two superpowers; non-aligned states shrink in the tight form.
• Universal — a universal actor (e.g. the UN) integrates functions.
• Hierarchical — the universal actor absorbs the rest; directive or non-directive.
• Unit veto — every actor can destroy others; inherently unstable.

Later four: very loose bipolar, detente, unstable bloc, incomplete nuclear diffusion. Critique: assumes a linear loose → tight → universal → hierarchical drift; regional systems (OAU, Arab League) and non-alignment cut against it.

Systems Theory — the balance-sheet

S. N. Ray: systems theory “gives us an excellent opportunity for fusing micro-analytical studies with macro-analytical ones.”

Institutional Approach — old and new

Classical institutionalism

Subject: institutions and the distribution of power. Vocabulary: legalistic, normative. Marks: ethnocentrism (Western liberal democracies), normativity (liberal democracy as the universal ideal), exclusivity (the non-West left out). Lineage: Aristotle (158 constitutions) → Machiavelli → Montesquieu (separation of powers) → Tocqueville → Bryce → A. Lawrence Lowell → Moisei Ostrogorski.

Critical evaluation

David Easton (The Political System, 1953): “mere factualism,” thin theory. Roy C. Macridis (1955): non-comparative, parochial, static. Jean Blondel (defence): the factualism charge was misplaced given scarce data; institutions and legal frameworks remain essential.

New institutionalism (March & Olsen, 1984)

Institutions are not just structures but embody norms, values and power; they both constrain and are shaped by action; the relative autonomy of institutions; drawn from economics, sociology and organisational theory.

Six strands: Normative · Rational choice · Historical — path dependency · Sociological · Discursive · Feminist

Political Culture Approach

Political culture = the values, symbols and attitudes shaping how a society views politics (American liberty and patriotism; Japanese deference; French protest).

Almond and Verba — The Civic Culture (1963)

A five-country study (USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Mexico). Political culture: “a set of orientations toward political systems, the role of the self, and political processes.” Orientations: cognitive (knowledge), affective (feeling), evaluative (judgement).

Civic culture: a blend of all three — rational, informed and engaged citizens, allegiance tempered by tradition; a runaway participant culture risks tipping democracy into mobocracy.

Key scholars

• Lucian W. Pye: political culture as “a set of attitudes, beliefs, and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process” — a bridge between micro behaviour and macro institutions.
• Ronald Inglehart (World Values Survey; The Silent Revolution, 1977): post-materialist values; a cultural shift precedes institutional change.
• Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993): social capital and civic engagement decide the efficacy of institutions.

Criticisms

Ethnocentric and culturally deterministic (Western democracies as the model); neglects class, material conditions and institutional design (Marxist critics); static and ahistorical; and methodologically thin — Arend Lijphart on unreliable survey data, and the ecological fallacy of reading individuals off aggregates.

Political Socialisation — open and closed societies

Political socialisation is the process by which individuals acquire political norms, values and orientations. Easton and Dennis: “those developmental processes by which a person acquires political orientations and patterns of behaviour.” Allan R. Ball: the “establishment and development of attitudes and beliefs about the political system.”

Agents — primary: family, peer group, school; secondary: mass media, parties, voluntary bodies, government. Parsons (structural-functional): socialisation promotes cohesion and stability; Almond and Verba (behavioural): it shapes the extent of political involvement.

Contemporary shift: social media reshapes socialisation even inside closed societies — the Arab Spring and the Zapatista movement.

Interpretive Approach

Reads political life through meaning, culture and interpretation rather than purely empirical or structural factors. Clifford Geertz and Charles Taylor: culture and ideas shape political action; Geertz’s thick description situates behaviour in its cultural context.

• Constructivism: actors are shaped by their social constructions of reality.
• Peter Hall and Mark Blyth: ideas, beliefs and ideologies drive policy and political development.
• Richard Snyder: contextualised comparisons — events read within their own cultural, historical and ideological frames; well suited to non-Western societies.

Against rational choice’s self-interested actor, the interpretive approach sees behaviour driven by belief, emotion and norm. Post-structuralist influences: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Hayden White. Limits: hard to generalise; a risk of cultural relativism; cross-cultural interpretation is methodologically demanding.

Empirical Political Theory in Comparative Politics

Empirical political theory (EPT) abstracts political facts, generalises, states relationships between concepts, and tests hypotheses. Karl Popper: EPT sits on the deductive side — a theoretical proposition is tested against facts. Lijphart and Dahl: EPT is essential to understanding political systems and behaviour.

Functions: Prediction of trends · Cross-country comparison · Policy evaluation · Strengthening democracy · Method development · Empirical testing · Institutional analysis

King, Keohane and Verba (1994): the qualitative and quantitative traditions share one goal — logical inference. EPT’s replication power — comparing many cases across countries builds and enriches theory (e.g. the median voter theorem tested for real-world fit).

Significance of the Comparative Method

• Theory-building and testing: comparison develops and tests theory — e.g. Adam Przeworski on democratic consolidation in post-colonial states.
• Understanding diversity: separates what is unique to a context from what is common across contexts.
• Policy learning: surfaces best practice (e.g. comparing healthcare systems).
• Historical and cultural depth: shows how culture, history and social structure shape institutions.
• Wider horizon: Peter Mair — comparison widens the horizon of political science; Greenleaf sought a “moral criterion of political conduct.”

Landman’s functions — contextual description, classification, hypothesis-testing, prediction. Judith Bara: comparison lets researchers state characteristics with conviction and reach objectivity.