Which are the major approaches of comparative politics? Explain in brief, the political economy approach to the study of comparative inquiry. (2015, 10 Marks)
An approach is a set of criteria for selecting the questions and data that matter. Comparative politics has passed through a traditional, largely normative phase and a modern, empirical phase, and each phase produced its own family of approaches.
The major approaches
| Phase | Approaches | Core concern |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional (to 1945) | Philosophical, historical, legal, institutional | What constitutions say; the best regime |
| Behavioural (1950s–60s) | Systems (David Easton), structural-functional (Gabriel A. Almond), political development, political culture | Functions and behaviour common to all political systems |
| Post-behavioural (1970s on) | Political sociology, political economy, new institutionalism, rational choice, comparative-historical | Social and economic roots of power; institutions as causes |
Roy C. Macridis (1955) faulted the traditional approaches as non-comparative, descriptive, parochial, static and monographic; the modern ones answered with comparability across unlike systems, though the grand theories of the 1960s later gave way to middle-range ones.
The political economy approach in brief
Meaning. In Anti-Dühring (1878), Friedrich Engels treated political economy as the science of how a society produces and exchanges its material means of life. As an approach, it studies how political choices shape economic outcomes and how economic structure shapes who holds power and how resources and values are distributed.
What it examines.
- Fiscal, trade and industrial policy, and the institutions that make it.
- Class and interest coalitions behind policy.
- International constraints: markets, debt and IMF conditionality, which narrow the policy space of indebted states.
- The state itself: whether it is captured by a class, autonomous of it, or a developmental actor in its own right.
Schools.
- Classical liberal and utilitarian (Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham).
- Marxist and dependency (Karl Marx, Andre Gunder Frank).
- Keynesian-welfare (John Maynard Keynes, Amartya Sen).
- Neoliberal (Friedrich A. Hayek).
- Public choice (James M. Buchanan).
- New institutional (Douglass C. North; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, Nobel 2024).
Illustration. Pranab Bardhan (1984) explains India’s high subsidies and low public investment as a bargain among industrialists, rich farmers and professionals. The Production Linked Incentive schemes, which drew ₹2.40 lakh crore of investment by March 2026, signal a return to East Asian-style industrial policy, while the World Inequality Report 2026 (India’s top 10% taking 58% of income) sharpens its question of who gains.
Assessment. The approach is quantitative and prescriptive, but it tends towards economic reductionism and slights identity, culture and normative questions. Caste or religion can outvote class.
Conclusion
No single approach exhausts comparative inquiry. Political economy supplies the question others neglect, who gains, and is most persuasive when joined with institutional and sociological analysis.