Comparative Politics: Nature, Scope and Approaches

Comparison is not a subject but a method, and its problems are methodological: too many variables, too few cases, and units that are not independent of one another.

This is chapter 35 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Comparative Politics in the Paper II syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

Nature and evolution

What comparison is for

Comparison performs four tasks: description of unfamiliar systems in a common vocabulary; classification into types, which is what Aristotle’s six-fold scheme did; hypothesis testing, since without experiments the only way to hold variables constant is to select cases; and prediction, the weakest of the four.

The distinction between comparative government and comparative politics is worth one line: the first compares formal institutions, the second compares the whole political process including parties, groups, culture and political economy.

Phases

• Traditional, to 1945. Formal-legal and institutional; configurative, meaning country-by-country description rather than genuine comparison; Eurocentric, covering Britain, France, Germany and the United States; and normative in temper. Bryce, Finer and Wheare.
• Behavioural, 1950s–60s. Driven by decolonisation, which added scores of new states the old categories could not describe, and by American funding for area studies. The Committee on Comparative Politics under Almond, from 1954, is the institutional centre. Its hallmarks: empirical, value-neutral in aspiration, quantitative, and oriented to function rather than institution.
• Post-behavioural, from 1970s. Return of the state as a category, in Skocpol’s Bringing the State Back In; the political-economy turn; dependency and world-systems theory from the periphery; and the rise of new institutionalism and rational choice.

The major approaches

Systems and structural-functionalism

David Easton‘s political system converts inputs, demands and support, into outputs, decisions and actions, which return through feedback. The virtue is that it is content-free: any polity can be described in these terms, which makes comparison across very different systems possible. The defect is that it treats persistence as the norm and has no account of revolution.

Gabriel Almond adds structure. Since different structures perform the same functions in different societies, one should compare functions rather than institutions. His scheme: three system functions, political socialisation and recruitment, and political communication; three process functions, interest articulation, interest aggregation and policy-making; and the output functions of rule-making, rule-application and rule-adjudication. His development framework adds structural differentiation and cultural secularisation as the markers of political development.

The critiques are standard: it smuggles in a Western end-state as the definition of development; functionalism explains a structure by its consequences, which is a weak form of explanation; and by treating stability as health it is conservative in effect.

Political economy and political sociology

The political economy perspective explains political outcomes by economic structure. Its Marxist variant runs through Chapter 36. Its non-Marxist variants include modernisation theory, which linked economic development to democracy through Lipset‘s finding that the more well-to-do a nation, the more likely it will sustain democracy, and later work on the resource curse and on the developmental state.

Dependency theory, from Prebisch, Frank, Cardoso and Dos Santos, inverts modernisation: underdevelopment is not a stage but a product, generated by the transfer of surplus from periphery to core through unequal exchange. Wallerstein‘s world-systems theory, asked in 2024, generalises this: since the sixteenth century there has been a single capitalist world-economy with a single division of labour and multiple states, structured into core, semi-periphery and periphery. The semi-periphery is the analytically distinctive element, since it stabilises the system by giving the periphery an example of mobility and the core a buffer. Individual states rise and fall within the structure but the structure persists. The critiques: economic determinism, neglect of internal class dynamics, and the difficulty of falsifying a claim pitched at that scale.

The political sociology perspective explains politics by social structure. Its central concepts are cleavage, in Lipset and Rokkan’s account of the four cleavages, centre against periphery, state against church, land against industry, owner against worker, that froze European party systems; political culture, in Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) with its parochial, subject and participant types; and political socialisation, the process by which political orientations are transmitted.

Interpretive and psychological approaches

The 2024 paper asked for the interpretive approach. Its premise, from Weber’s verstehen and Winch’s argument that social action is rule-following, is that political behaviour is constituted by the meanings actors attach to it, so measuring behaviour from outside describes the wrong object. Geertz’s thick description is its method: an account dense enough to convey what an act means to those performing it. Applied comparatively, it produces close ethnographic work on how democracy, corruption or citizenship are understood in particular societies, and it warns against assuming that an institution with the same name does the same work in different places. Its difficulty is generalisation: if meanings are local, comparison across them is hard to justify.

The 2025 paper asked for the psychological approach. Its claim is that political outcomes run through individual dispositions. Its strands: Lasswell‘s account of the political personality displacing private motives onto public objects; the authoritarian personality research of Adorno and colleagues (1950), which sought a syndrome of rigidity, submission to authority and hostility to out-groups, and the later F-scale controversy; political culture and socialisation research; and contemporary work on cognition, framing, motivated reasoning and affective polarisation. Its strength is that it addresses what institutional accounts cannot, why identical structures generate different behaviour. Its weakness is the aggregation problem: individual dispositions do not straightforwardly sum to institutional outcomes, and the early studies have well-known methodological defects.

Limitations of the comparative method

The 2023 paper asked directly about the difficulties a theorist faces in comparing states, so the list should be precise and each item explained rather than named.

• Small N, many variables. Lijphart’s formulation: the comparative method has too many variables and too few cases, so the number of plausible explanations exceeds the number of observations that could discriminate between them. Remedies: increase cases, reduce variables through theory, focus on comparable cases, or use the most similar and most different designs.
• Galton’s problem. Cases are not independent: institutions diffuse by imitation, conquest and conditionality, so a correlation across countries may reflect borrowing rather than a causal relation.
• Conceptual stretching. Sartori’s warning: extending a concept to more cases by thinning its content produces categories that travel widely and mean little. Democracy qualified into dozens of adjectival subtypes is the standard example.
• Ethnocentrism. Categories derived from Western experience, party system, civil society, secularisation, may not correspond to how politics is organised elsewhere. The post-colonial critique from Chapter 1 applies directly.
• Data. Comparability of statistics, differing definitions, and the political interest of governments in what they report.
• Value bias. Selection of what to compare, and of what counts as development or stability, embeds a normative position.
• Causation. Correlation across a handful of cases cannot establish causal direction, and endogeneity is pervasive: does wealth produce democracy, or democracy wealth?

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.

PDF