What are the difficulties faced by a political theorist in comparing the States? (2023, 10 Marks)
Comparison is political science’s substitute for the laboratory: since states cannot be experimented upon, the theorist must find variation that history produced. Arend Lijphart (Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method, 1971) captured the core difficulty as many variables, small N: too many possible causes and too few comparable states to decide between them. The difficulties are methodological, conceptual and practical.
Methodological difficulties
- Uniqueness of context: each state carries its own history, culture, colonial experience and social structure, so a general theory that fits all is hard to build; comparisons without deep historical knowledge mislead.
- Small N and causality: with a handful of cases, several explanations fit equally well, and correlation cannot fix causal direction.
- Galton’s problem: states are not independent cases. Institutions diffuse through imitation and colonial imposition, so similar Westminster-style parliaments in former British colonies may record borrowing rather than a causal law.
- Change over time: regimes, leaders and public moods shift quickly, so a comparison made in one decade may not hold in the next.
- Complexity: the same institution works differently in different settings.
Conceptual difficulties
- Conceptual stretching: Giovanni Sartori (1970) warned that extending concepts such as democracy or civil society to more cases thins their meaning until they distinguish nothing; hence what David Collier and Steven Levitsky (1997) called “democracy with adjectives”, from illiberal to electoral democracy.
- Ethnocentrism: most categories (party system, secularism, interest group) come from Western experience, so difference is read as deficiency. Partha Chatterjee‘s idea of political society shows how new categories must be built from non-Western material.
- Value bias: the observer’s own culture shapes what looks rational or democratic.
Practical difficulties
- Data: information may be incomplete, outdated, politically filtered or defined differently, as with closed systems like North Korea, so open societies end up over-studied and their findings over-generalised.
- Contested measurement: the yardstick shapes the verdict. V-Dem‘s Democracy Report 2026 classes India an electoral autocracy (106th of 179), while the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (2022) faulted such indices for subjective expert coding.
- Language and access: primary sources and surveys in many languages are costly and slow.
Easing the difficulties
Theorists respond with careful case selection, as in the most similar systems design, with process tracing, and with sub-national comparison: Kerala and Bihar share one constitution yet diverge sharply in literacy and health, making differences genuinely informative.
Conclusion
These difficulties do not invalidate comparison; they set the conditions under which every comparative claim is made. Stated openly and handled by careful design, they make comparison more modest but also more reliable.