Comparative Politics: Nature, Scope and Evolution

Comparative Politics: nature and major approaches; political economy and political sociology perspectives; limitations of the comparative method.

This article covers the nature, scope and changing character of the discipline, its traditional and modern phases, and the map of its major approaches. Companion notes carry each approach in depth — systems and structural-functionalism, political development and culture, interpretive and psychological approaches, political economy, political sociology — and a separate note carries the comparative method and its limitations.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Section A, Unit 1

Comparison is not a subject. It is a method, and everything difficult about comparative politics follows from that one fact.

Chemistry has a laboratory. It can hold every variable constant except the one it wants to test, run the experiment again, and watch what changes. Political science has nothing of the kind. It cannot re-run the French Revolution with a different harvest, or give India a presidential constitution in 1950 to see what would have happened. What it has instead is the world’s own variation — a hundred and ninety-odd states that have organised power differently — and a method for reading that variation as if it were an experiment somebody else already ran.

That is what comparative politics is for. Where the natural scientist manufactures variation, the comparativist finds it, and the discipline’s whole methodological literature is an argument about how much can honestly be inferred from variation nobody designed.

The field has changed shape twice. Until the Second World War it was the comparison of Western constitutions — a handful of European states and the United States, described one after another, largely in legal terms.

After 1945, decolonisation put fifty new states on the map that the old categories could not describe, and the behavioural revolution supplied a vocabulary that could. The subject stopped being comparative government and became comparative politics. Since the 1970s it has changed again, more quietly: the state returned as a category, economics and sociology were absorbed wholesale, and the ambition shrank from grand theory to testable propositions about smaller things.

What Comparison Is For

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Comparison as the substitute for the laboratory

• Comparison is at the heart of the analysis of any phenomenon. Meaning is established by contrast: a term such as strong state, federal or stable has no content until something is being contrasted with something else.
• The natural sciences enjoy laboratory conditions — controlled, repeatable, isolated. Political science has none of this, and the comparative method is its substitute for the experiment.
  • By selecting cases that resemble each other in most respects and differ in one, the comparativist approximates the control an experimentalist builds.
  • This is why the case-selection question is a methodological question and not a practical one — the cases are the research design.
• The point is often stated as though comparison were only about differences. It is not. Similarities carry as much information as differences, and a great deal of comparative work exists to establish that two systems widely believed to be unlike are in fact doing the same thing.

A discipline that cannot run experiments must borrow its controls from history — which is why case selection in comparative politics is not preparation for the argument, it is the argument.

The four tasks comparison performs

• Description. Rendering an unfamiliar system in a vocabulary that also fits familiar ones, so that the two can be spoken about together. Without a shared vocabulary, comparison never begins.
• Classification. Sorting cases into types — which is precisely what Aristotle’s six-fold scheme did, and what every typology of party systems, welfare regimes or authoritarianisms has done since.
• Explanation and hypothesis-testing. The core task. Since experiments are impossible, holding variables constant by selecting cases is the only available control, and cross-case variation is the only available test.
• Prediction. The weakest of the four, and the one comparative politics has most consistently failed at. No comparativist predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring or the speed of democratic backsliding after 2010.

Comparative government against comparative politics

• Government denotes institutions; politics denotes processes. That single distinction is what separates the two enterprises, and it is why the pre-1945 discipline is more accurately called comparative government than comparative politics.
• Comparative politics includes everything comparative government studied and adds to it the social, economic, cultural and psychological terrain on which formal institutions actually operate — plus the international environment that constrains them.

Levels and units of analysis

• National political systems — the classical unit, and still the default. Comparison of one country’s institutions against another’s.
• Sub-national systems — Indian states, Brazilian municipalities, Chinese provinces. The fastest-growing level of comparison, because it holds national history, colonial legacy and constitutional design constant while letting the variable of interest vary.
• Types of political system — democracies against autocracies, parliamentary against presidential, federal against unitary, majoritarian against consensual.
• Single elements of a political system — one party system, one electoral rule, one bureaucracy, one court — compared across many countries.

Three traditions within the field

• The study of single countries. Formally a case study rather than a comparison, but it becomes comparative the moment its findings are framed against a wider body of knowledge. Most area-studies scholarship sits here.
• The methodological tradition. Work about how comparison should be done rather than about any particular polity — Lijphart, Sartori, Przeworski and Teune belong here, and so does most of what is discussed under the limitations of the method.
• The analytical tradition. The combination of empirical substance and explicit method, which is what the discipline aspires to and what its best work achieves.

The Classical and Pre-Modern Ancestry

• Comparative politics is as old as political theory itself, and its founding text is a comparative one.
• Aristotle is regarded as the father of comparative politics. He and his school collected and analysed 158 constitutions of Greek and neighbouring states — of which only the Constitution of Athens survives — and from that empirical base built the six-fold classification of monarchy, aristocracy and polity against their perversions, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
  • The method is the important part: a typology derived from cases rather than deduced from first principles. This is empirical comparative politics in its first form.
  • Aristotle also produced the discipline’s first causal comparative propositions — that a large middle class stabilises a polity, and that inequality is the general cause of revolution.
• Polybius supplied the theory of anacyclosis, the cycle of constitutional forms, and the account of the Roman constitution as a mixed government whose stability came from combining monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements.
• Machiavelli compared republics and principalities across ancient and contemporary Italy and reached a proto-sociological conclusion — that the form of government appropriate to a society depends on the condition of that society, so that a corrupt people requires a prince where an uncorrupt one can sustain a republic.
• Montesquieu is the first systematic comparativist of the modern era. The Spirit of the Laws related forms of government to climate, geography, religion, commerce and manners, and his reading of the English constitution set the terms of the separation-of-powers debate for two centuries.
  • His admiration for England was shared across the French Enlightenment — Voltaire praised English liberty of person, property and opinion — and this Anglophile comparison is the origin of the field’s long Eurocentric bias.
  • The same comparative impulse appears in India: Rammohan Roy welcomed British rule on the ground that Britain was ahead of India in scientific temper, rule of law and tolerance — an early, and contested, use of comparison as a standard of judgment.
• Tocqueville’sDemocracy in America is the model of the comparative case study written for a foreign audience. His purpose was to understand France by studying America.
  • His findings — the warning against the tyranny of the majority, the importance of local self-government, decentralised administration and voluntary associations, and the striking claim that religion functioned as a political institution sustaining American democracy — are the ancestry of the political culture approach.
• James Bryce answered Tocqueville with The American Commonwealth, rejecting broad generalisation for concrete empirical detail, and in Modern Democracies compared six democracies — France, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand — across three continents. His preface named the field’s abiding obstacle: the lack of reliable factual knowledge about other systems of government.
• The two decisive nineteenth-century influences are not usually catalogued as comparativists at all.
  • Marx made the mode of production the explanatory variable, generating a comparative sociology of state forms and the ancestry of the entire political economy approach.
  • Weber built comparison out of ideal types — the three types of legitimate authority, the comparative sociology of religion, the analysis of bureaucracy — and supplied the method most non-Marxist comparative sociology still uses. Where Marx read capitalism as irrational and transient, Weber read it as rational and durable.

Traditional Comparative Politics, to 1945

What it studied and why

• Traditional comparative politics was very narrow in scope: it studied the constitutions of the Western world, because most of the rest of the world consisted of colonies with no independent political systems to compare.
• The Western states were at broadly similar levels of development, with societies, cultures and ways of life that did not differ dramatically. There was therefore little to compare except constitutions and forms of government.
• The method that followed was legal and institutional — the study of texts, statutes, formal organs and their stated powers. The approach did not observe value neutrality, quantification or systematic hypothesis-testing, and because it studied institutions rather than behaviour it was largely static.
• Its representative figures are Bryce, Dicey, Herman Finer, Carl Friedrich, K. C. Wheare and Ivor Jennings — constitutional lawyers and institutional scholars of the first rank, whose work remains valuable for what it was.
  • Dicey’s formulation of parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, and Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of the constitution, are permanent contributions.
  • Herman Finer’s Theory and Practice of Modern Government was the rare pre-war work that analysed institutions of several countries together in a comparative frame rather than one after another.

The indictment

• Roy Macridis’s critique is the standard statement of what was wrong, and its terms are worth having exactly. The traditional approach was:
  • Parochial — confined to Western Europe and the United States, and blind to everywhere else.
  • Configurative — country-by-country description, one chapter per state, with the comparison left to the reader.
  • Descriptive rather than explanatory or theory-building, with almost no contribution to empirical theory.
  • Formalistic and legalistic — concerned with what constitutions said rather than what governments did.
  • Static — unable to handle change, crisis, revolution or development.
  • Insensitive to theory-building, and therefore incapable of cumulating knowledge.
• Three limitations are usually listed in summary form:
  • Narrow in scope, excluding the political systems of non-Western countries.
  • Static, focused on the study of constitutions rather than politics.
  • Essentially non-comparative — since the only point of comparison was the constitution, and the studies rarely compared anything at all.
• The approach is therefore criticised as ethnocentric, parochial and limited. The strongest form of the charge is that it was not comparative politics but a series of parallel monographs bound in one volume.

What the traditional approach still gets right

• The institutional approach neglected the individual — so completely that the study of voting behaviour and political attitudes was left to sociologists during its ascendancy.
• It practically ignored international politics, leaving it to historians and international lawyers, and it neglected violence, movements, war and revolution because none of these are institutions.
• But institutions are a very important part of politics, and no account of politics that ignores them goes anywhere. In much of the developing world, constitution-making and institution-building are the order of the day, which makes institutional analysis directly relevant rather than antiquarian.
• The honest conclusion is that the institutional approach is inadequate by itself, and every other approach is incomplete without it — which is exactly what new institutionalism rediscovered in the 1970s.

The Behavioural Revolution and Modern Comparative Politics

Why the shift happened when it did

• Decolonisation is the primary cause. After 1945 scores of new states appeared in Asia and Africa whose politics the old categories could not describe. These states had written constitutions that bore little relation to how power actually worked — a gap between text and context, theory and practice.
• It became clear that studying constitutions and statutes was insufficient, and that the socio-cultural factors underneath formal institutions had to be understood if anything about these systems was to be explained.
• Liberal democracy had also been challenged from within Europe by communism, fascism and Nazism, throwing up constitutional arrangements at complete variance with liberal assumptions and exposing the older methodology as inadequate even for the West.
• The need to study developing areas coincided exactly with the behavioural movement. Behavioural techniques made the study of these societies possible; the need to study them motivated further methodological innovation. The two fed each other.

The intellectual origins of behaviouralism

• The origins run back to 1908, when two books appeared that shifted attention from institutions to informal processes.
  • Graham Wallas, in Human Nature in Politics, argued against the utilitarian assumption of the rational self-interested individual.
    • Drawing on the new psychology, he insisted that people do not behave rationally and that human nature is too complex for simple utilitarian propositions.
    • His analogy was commercial: political parties market themselves to the public much as advertisers market toothpaste, creating a false sense of both need and satisfaction.
    • His central message was that the political process can be understood only by analysing how people actually behave, not by speculating on how they should behave.
  • Arthur Bentley, in The Process of Government, pioneered the group approach, treating all politics and all government as the result of the activity of groups, and seeking new tools of investigation rather than description. His interest was in social activity — people actually doing something in the world.
• Charles E. Merriam founded what became the movement, attacking the discipline for its lack of scientific rigour.
  • He deprecated historians for ignoring psychological, sociological and economic factors in human affairs.
  • In his 1925 presidential address to the American Political Science Association he called on political scientists to make political behaviour an essential object of inquiry.
  • He urged a policy science built on the quantitative techniques already developed in psychology and sociology.
• The Chicago School under Merriam became the centre of the approach in the 1930s and 1940s, with Harold Lasswell as teacher and David Truman and Gabriel Almond among the students.
  • G. E. G. Catlin advanced the case for a value-free science of politics with power as the essence of politics.
  • Lasswell’s Politics: Who Gets What, When, How made the empirical study of power the discipline’s organising question.
• Several accelerants converged after 1945: the arrival of European émigré scholars carrying the Weberian tradition of political sociology; the wartime exodus of academics into administration, which changed their perception of how politics actually works; the rapid development of survey methodology; and very large funding from the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.
• Dahl’s verdict on the outcome is the standard one: within two decades the behavioural approach grew from the deviant and unpopular views of a minor sect into a major influence.

Easton’s eight intellectual foundations of behaviouralism

• Regularities — there are discoverable uniformities in political behaviour, expressible in theory-like statements that permit explanation and prediction.
• Verification — the validity of such statements must be testable in principle against observed behaviour.
• Techniques — the means of acquiring and interpreting data must be examined self-consciously, refined and validated.
• Quantification — precision requires measurement expressed in actual quantities.
• Values — ethical evaluation and empirical explanation are distinct enterprises; scientific inquiry must be value-free or value-neutral.
• Systematisation — theory and research must be closely interrelated, since research untutored by theory is trivial and theory unsupported by data is futile.
• Pure science — the understanding of political behaviour must precede its application to practical problems.
• Integration — political science must integrate with the other social sciences to strengthen the validity and generality of its results.

The Committee on Comparative Politics

• The institutional centre of the transformation was the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, established in 1954 and chaired by Gabriel Almond.
• Its most striking innovation was the attention it gave to large-scale comparison — democratic and non-democratic, developed and developing, Western and non-Western in a single frame, in place of the traditional focus on a handful of Western states.
• The state was replaced by the political system as the central category, precisely so that scholars could take account of the extra-legal, para-legal and social institutions that turned out to be decisive in non-Western politics.
• The focus moved from the legal powers of agencies to what they actually did, how they related to one another, and the roles they performed in making and executing policy — and out of this, structural functionalism emerged.
• The period is often called comparative politics’ golden age, though the label deserves scepticism: the field never reached a settled consensus, and the older contestation over what comparative politics even is survived intact.

The shift, summarised

Empirical Political Theory and What It Does

• Empirical political theory is theory built from and testable against observed political behaviour, as against normative theory, which asks what ought to be, and traditional or philosophical theory, which reasons from first principles about the good political order.
• Its content is a set of generalisations, propositions and models about how political systems actually behave, offered as explanations that could in principle be shown to be false.
• Within comparative politics it performs a specific and identifiable set of functions.
  • Conceptualisation. It supplies the shared vocabulary without which comparison is impossible — political system, legitimacy, cleavage, interest articulation, state capacity. Concepts are the instruments of comparison, and defective concepts spoil every measurement made with them.
  • Classification. It builds typologies that reduce an unmanageable number of cases to a manageable number of types — Almond’s system types, Lijphart’s majoritarian and consensus democracies, Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare capitalism, Sartori’s party-system typology.
  • Hypothesis formation. It converts intuitions into propositions specific enough to be tested — Lipset’s claim that the more well-to-do a nation, the more likely it is to sustain democracy, is the model of the form.
  • Explanation. It states relationships between variables and identifies mechanisms, moving beyond the description that traditional comparative politics never escaped.
  • Prediction, held modestly. Empirical theory generates expectations against which cases can be checked, and its failed predictions are as instructive as its successful ones.
  • Cumulation. Because propositions are stated in testable form, later research can confirm, refine or falsify them — which is how a body of knowledge grows rather than merely accumulating monographs. This is the single thing traditional comparative politics could not do.
  • Guiding case selection and data collection. Theory determines what counts as a relevant fact. Without it, comparison collects everything and explains nothing.
• Merton’s distinction is the corrective the field eventually accepted. Grand theory that tries to explain everything ends up explaining nothing; middle-range theory — bounded propositions about party systems, coalition formation, revolution or authoritarian survival — is where empirical political theory has actually delivered.
• The limits are real and belong beside the functions.
  • Empirical theory cannot settle questions of value, and cannot generate the normative standards by which regimes are judged.
  • Its claimed value-neutrality conceals the normative content of terms such as development, stability and modern.
  • Its preference for the measurable pushes inquiry towards what is easy to count rather than what matters.

Post-Behaviouralism and the Return of the State

The revolt

• Behaviouralism’s heyday was short. By the mid-1960s its critics were in open revolt.
  • Leo Strauss argued that the rise of behaviouralism was symptomatic of a crisis in political theory, caused by its failure to engage normative questions.
  • Sheldon Wolin, in Politics and Vision and in “Political Theory as a Vocation”, accused political scientists of abdicating their true vocation in their preoccupation with method.
  • Hempel and Popper attacked the underlying inductivism: a collection of all the facts would have to await the end of the world, and even all the facts up to now could never be collected, since they are infinite in number and variety.
  • Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shifted the philosophical ground by locating the significance of scientific method in problem-solving rather than methodological sophistication.
• The damage was self-inflicted in two specific ways. The emphasis on data and the downgrading of theory produced a tendency to study what could easily be measured rather than what was theoretically important, and a tendency to concentrate on the readily observable rather than the covert structural factors that actually drive change and stability.

Easton’s own recantation

• In his 1969 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Easton — the high priest of behaviouralism — announced a post-behavioural revolution. Merriam’s optimism of the 1920s had ended in a question mark.
• Its slogans were relevance and action. Easton pointed to the nuclear threat, racial conflict within the United States and the Vietnam War, and charged behavioural political scientists with taking refuge in an ivory tower while perfecting their methodology.
• The warning was blunt: political scientists who abandoned the historical role of intellectuals in protecting humane values would be reduced to mere technicians tinkering with society.
• Post-behaviouralism was not a repudiation but a correction — consolidating behaviouralism’s methodological gains and directing them at real problems, and reintroducing a concern for values into the behavioural approach itself.

Bringing the state back in

• The deeper problem with behaviouralism, and the one that eventually reversed it, was its attempt to replace the state with the system. Behaviouralists treated the state as an essentially contested concept whose ambiguity made scientific work impossible.
• But the notion of the state lies at the heart of political inquiry, and ignoring it turned out to be counter-productive. The most telling evidence is Indian: Rajni Kothari applied structural-functionalism to his classic study of Indian politics and abandoned it in his subsequent work.
• The 1970s inaugurated new institutionalism, which remains the dominant mode — to the point where the field’s own slogan became we are all institutionalists now.
  • Skocpol’s Bringing the State Back In re-established the state as a relevant actor in its own right, with autonomous interests, rather than an arena in which social forces contend.
  • March and Olsen established that institutions have a major determining effect on individual behaviour — that rules, norms and standard operating procedures shape preferences rather than merely aggregating them.
• Five trends have been discernible since the 1980s: renewed attention to the economic aspects of politics; increased interest in international influences on domestic institutions; a sharpened focus on interest groups; revived interest in state structures and their performance; and the study of nationalism and ethnic cleavage.
• Rational choice entered from economics in parallel, modelling political actors as utility-maximisers under institutional constraint, and generating the formal theory of coalitions, legislative behaviour and electoral competition.

The Changing Nature of Comparative Politics

• From the state to the system and back to the state. The behavioural revolution replaced the state with the political system to escape legalism; new institutionalism restored it, having learned that institutions are not reducible to the behaviour that occurs inside them.
• From grand theory to middle-range theory. The systems and structural-functional models attempted general theories of all political systems everywhere. In trying to explain everything they explained nothing, and the field retreated to bounded, testable, mid-level propositions.
• From the West to the world, and from the world to the sub-national. The universe of cases expanded from a handful of Western democracies to the whole globe; more recently the most productive comparisons have moved inside countries, comparing Indian states or Brazilian municipalities in order to hold national-level variables constant.
• From qualitative narrative to quantitative datasets — and back to mixed methods. The datasets grew, then the field discovered that correlations across a hundred countries could not establish mechanism, and process tracing and multi-method research were rehabilitated.
• From formal institutions to informal ones. Clientelism, patronage networks, informal norms, kinship, criminal governance and party machines are now central objects of comparison rather than deviations from an institutional ideal.
• From value-neutrality to acknowledged normative commitment. The post-behavioural correction, deepened by post-colonial and feminist critique, made the discipline more willing to state its own standpoint than to claim it had none.
• From modernisation optimism to the study of backsliding. The literature of the 1960s asked how new states become democracies. The literature since 2010 asks how established democracies stop being democracies — and the analytical burden has shifted from transition to erosion.
• From area studies to global comparison to a synthesis. Regional expertise was displaced by cross-national statistics and is now being reincorporated, on the recognition that datasets built without deep contextual knowledge measure the wrong things.
• The present mood is one of moderation — renouncing broad generalisation and concentrating on smaller, more manageable questions.
  • It deduces the particular from the general, reversing the behavioural paradigm’s movement from the general to the particular.
  • The field is in a period of refinement rather than innovation, revisiting older questions such as federalism and corporatism.
  • It does so in a world where liberal democracy’s triumph looks far less certain than it did after the collapse of communism.

The transdisciplinary character

• Modern comparative politics is transdisciplinary by necessity rather than fashion: the causes of political outcomes lie mostly outside politics narrowly defined, so the discipline has had to import the tools of the fields that study those causes.
• Sociology contributed cleavage theory, class analysis, the study of social movements, and the entire political sociology perspective — Marx, Weber, Lipset, Rokkan, Skocpol, Moore.
• Economics contributed the political economy perspective, rational choice, game theory, public choice and the institutional economics of development — Smith, Marx, Keynes, Buchanan, North, Acemoglu.
• Anthropology contributed functionalism itself, through Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and later contributed the interpretive turn through Geertz’s thick description.
• Psychology contributed political socialisation, personality research, and the contemporary work on cognition and polarisation — Wallas, Lasswell, Adorno.
• History contributed the comparative-historical method — Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is its exemplar — and the concept of path dependence.
• Statistics and, more recently, data science contributed the measurement apparatus, causal-inference design and the machine-classification of text and images.
• The risk is real and worth naming: each borrowing threatens the discipline’s independent identity.
  • Political sociology raised the fear that political science would be absorbed into sociology; political economy raises the same fear about economics.
  • New institutionalism’s answer is that political science retains its own object — authority, the state, and the institutional determination of collective decisions — however many tools it borrows to study it.

Measuring the Comparison: The Indicator Turn

• Systematic comparison requires numbers, and from the 1970s the field acquired an apparatus of indices that made cross-national and cross-temporal comparison routine.
• Polity, from 1974, scores regimes on a continuum from full autocracy to full democracy on the basis of executive recruitment, constraints on the executive and political competition.
• Freedom House, established in 1941, classifies countries as free, partly free and not free on political rights and civil liberties. Its transparency and expert-coding method have both been criticised.
• V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy), the most sophisticated of the current instruments, disaggregates democracy into electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian components, coded by thousands of country experts.
• The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index classifies states as full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes across five categories including electoral process, civil liberties and political culture.
• The barometers — Asian, Afro, Latinobarómetro, Eurobarometer — supply survey data on citizens’ own perceptions of governance and democracy, which is what political culture research needs and aggregate indices cannot provide.
• Development is measured alongside regime type, and the instruments are themselves comparative innovations.
  • The Human Development Index was devised by Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen, explicitly to shift development economics away from national income accounting.
  • It is a composite of life expectancy, education and income per capita, and its premise is that development is the enlargement of people’s choices, not the growth of output.
  • The Gender Inequality Index measures disparity through reproductive health, empowerment and labour-market participation, replacing the earlier Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure.
• Even the frivolous instruments make a serious point: The Economist’s Big Mac Index, introduced in 1986, measures purchasing power parity by the price of a single standardised commodity, and demonstrates how much comparative leverage a genuinely identical unit provides — which is precisely what political comparison never has.
• The indices are themselves contested objects, not neutral measuring rods. Coding rules embed a definition of democracy; expert coders carry national and ideological priors; and a country’s government has a direct political interest in its score. Every index is a theory of what democracy is, wearing a number.

The Indian Context

• India entered comparative politics as the discipline’s most awkward case, and has remained so.
• Lipset’s proposition that economic development sustains democracy predicted that India should not have been able to hold one.
  • A desperately poor, overwhelmingly rural, deeply divided and largely illiterate society nevertheless sustained competitive elections, alternation in power and civilian control of the military for three-quarters of a century.
  • India is the standing refutation of the strong form of modernisation theory, exactly as China is the refutation of its democratising corollary.
• Rajni Kothari is the founding figure of Indian comparative political analysis. Politics in India applied structural-functional categories to the Indian system and produced the Congress system — the model of a dominant party containing intra-party competition that substituted for inter-party competition.
  • That he abandoned the structural-functional apparatus in his later work is itself an important data point about the limits of imported frameworks, and it anticipated the discipline’s own move away from grand theory.
• The Lokniti programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies built the survey infrastructure that made Indian political behaviour comparable to that studied anywhere else, through the National Election Studies running from 1967.
  • Yogendra Yadav’s work on electoral behaviour established the participation gradient.
    • In India, unlike in most Western democracies, turnout rises as one moves down the social hierarchy — the poor, Dalits, Adivasis and women vote at higher rates than the privileged.
    • This inverts a relationship the comparative literature had treated as near-universal, and it is the clearest case of Indian data forcing a revision of general theory.
• A wider body of comparative scholarship on India has fed back into general theory rather than merely applying it.
  • Christophe Jaffrelot on Hindu nationalism and the political rise of the lower castes.
  • Paul Brass on ethnic and communal mobilisation, and on the production of communal violence.
  • André Béteille on caste, class and stratification.
  • Atul Kohli on state capacity, governability and democratic durability.
  • Pranab Bardhan on the political economy of the dominant proprietary classes.
• Gunnar Myrdal’s characterisation of India as a soft state — one whose laws are extensive but whose capacity to enforce them is weak, because policy is negotiated rather than implemented — remains one of the most-used comparative concepts generated from the Indian case.
• India also supplies the field’s best natural laboratory for sub-national comparison. Twenty-eight states share a constitution, a colonial past, a currency and a supreme court while differing enormously in literacy, welfare delivery, caste structure and party competition. Comparing Kerala with Bihar controls for almost everything a cross-national comparison cannot.
• The Census of 2027 will carry comprehensive caste enumeration for the first time since Independence, following the Cabinet decision of April 2025 and the notification of a 40-question schedule in August 2026. It will be India’s first fully digital census, with house-listing through 2026 and population enumeration in February 2027.
  • The comparative significance is considerable: it will produce, for the first time in ninety-five years, the aggregate data on which claims about caste and political representation have until now rested on estimate and inference.

Where the Field Stands Now

• Democratic backsliding has displaced democratic transition as the field’s central question. The literature of the 1960s and 1990s asked how authoritarian regimes become democracies; the literature since about 2010 asks how democracies degrade without a coup.
  • Levitsky and Way’s concept of competitive authoritarianism describes regimes that hold real, contested elections on a field so uneven that the incumbent’s defeat is improbable — a category the older democracy/autocracy binary could not accommodate.
  • Bermeo’s account of executive aggrandisement identifies the characteristic modern method: elected leaders weakening checks incrementally, each step legal in itself, with no single moment at which democracy can be said to have ended.
  • Levitsky and Ziblatt’s argument that democracies now die at the hands of elected governments rather than generals has become the field’s organising narrative.
• The measurement record for 2025–26 is the sharpest such data the discipline has ever had, and it is not encouraging.
  • The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, the tenth edition, finds that for the average world citizen democracy has regressed to 1978 levels, erasing the gains of the third wave.
    • A record 44 countries are autocratising simultaneously, containing 41% of the world’s population.
    • There are now 92 autocracies against 87 democracies; 74% of humanity lives in autocracies and only 7% in liberal democracies.
    • India is classified as an electoral autocracy and appears among the top ten autocratisers by magnitude of decline — a classification contested by Indian scholars and officials on both methodological and substantive grounds.
  • The EIU Democracy Index 2025 records the first stabilisation after eight consecutive years of decline, the global average edging up from 5.17 to 5.19.
    • It counts 26 full democracies covering just 6.6% of world population, 48 flawed democracies, 32 hybrid regimes and 61 authoritarian regimes.
    • The United States fell from 28th to 34th place, remaining in the flawed-democracy category on declining civil liberties scores.
  • That two of the field’s leading instruments disagree about the direction of travel in the same period is itself a finding — and a demonstration of how much the answer depends on what is being measured and how it is weighted.
• The causal-inference turn has reshaped method. Natural experiments, regression discontinuity designs, instrumental variables and field experiments have raised the standard of evidence for causal claims sharply.
  • The cost is a narrowing of ambition: designs that can identify a causal effect cleanly tend to be available only for small questions, so the discipline risks answering trivial questions rigorously while leaving the large ones to speculation.
  • The countervailing movement is the revival of area studies within comparative politics — deep contextual and linguistic knowledge reasserted as a precondition for measuring anything correctly, rather than an alternative to measurement.
• The sub-national turn continues to expand, for the methodological reason set out above: comparing units inside one state holds constant a great many variables that cross-national comparison cannot.
• Post-colonial and feminist critique has moved from the margins into the methodological mainstream, forcing the field to examine whether its core categories — party system, civil society, secularisation, state capacity — were built from Western experience and travel badly.

Conclusion

Comparative politics began as the comparison of Western constitutions and became, after 1945, the study of how power is actually organised everywhere. The behavioural revolution gave it a vocabulary general enough to describe unlike systems in common terms; post-behaviouralism and new institutionalism gave back the state, the values and the historical depth that the first revolution had discarded. What survives from both movements is the commitment to explanation over description, and the recognition that explanation without institutions is as empty as institutions without behaviour.

The discipline’s abiding difficulty has never been its subject matter but its method. It compares units it did not design, in numbers too small for its variables, using concepts formed in one civilisation and applied to all of them. That is why the limitations of the comparative method are not an appendix to the field but the field’s own standing self-criticism — and why the most useful comparative work is the work most explicit about what its comparison cannot show.