Describe the changing nature of Comparative Politics. Briefly explain the Political Economy approach to the study of Comparative Politics. (2018, 10 Marks)
Comparative politics is as old as Aristotle‘s survey of Greek constitutions, but its object and method have shifted repeatedly: from what constitutions say, to how power actually works, to why outcomes differ. The political economy approach is one product of that shift.
The changing nature of the discipline
- Classical and normative: Aristotle, Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville compared regimes to ask which was best and why.
- Traditional, to 1945: a legal-institutional study of a few Western constitutions. Roy C. Macridis (1955) judged it essentially non-comparative, descriptive, parochial, static and monographic.
- Behavioural, after 1945: decolonisation produced dozens of new states whose written constitutions told little about their real politics. David Easton‘s systems analysis and Gabriel A. Almond‘s structural-functionalism turned comparative government into comparative politics.
- Post-behavioural and neo-institutional, from the 1970s: values and relevance returned, and Theda Skocpol and her co-editors brought “the state back in” (1985).
- Present: middle-range theory, sub-national comparison (Kerala and Bihar), informal institutions, and a turn from democratic transition to backsliding; the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 puts the average person’s level of democracy back at 1978.
The discipline is now transdisciplinary, and its two main imports are political sociology and political economy.
The political economy approach
Friedrich Engels (Anti-Dühring, 1878) defined political economy as the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence.
- Focus: the economy–polity interface: macroeconomic and tariff policy, the role of bureaucracy, legislature and judiciary in framing it, and the domestic and international pressures behind it.
- Schools: liberal (Adam Smith‘s self-regulating market), Marxist and dependency (Karl Marx, Andre Gunder Frank: markets as extraction), Keynesian-welfare, public choice and new institutional (Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, Nobel 2024).
- Strength: it is quantitative and prescriptive, and explains divergence; Pranab Bardhan traces India’s high-subsidy, low-investment pattern to a stalemate among industrialists, rich farmers and professionals.
- Current relevance: India’s Production Linked Incentive schemes (₹2.40 lakh crore of investment by March 2026) and the US tariff wave of 2025 show the state–market boundary being redrawn by political choice.
- Limit: economic reductionism; caste, religion and identity escape it, so it must be combined with other approaches.
Conclusion
Comparative politics has moved from describing institutions to explaining outcomes, and political economy marks that move most clearly: it asks who gains from an arrangement, a question the formal-legal tradition never posed.