Answer in about 150 words: Criticism of the institutional approach in comparative political analysis has come up in successive waves. Comment. (2026, 10 Marks)
The institutional approach — the legal-formal study of constitutions, legislatures, executives and courts practised by James Bryce, A. V. Dicey, Herman Finer and Carl J. Friedrich — defined comparative government until the 1940s. Its critics did not arrive together. Each new school attacked it from its own vantage point, and the approach survived by absorbing what each wave got right.
Wave one: the behavioural revolt
- Graham Wallas (Human Nature in Politics, 1908) and Arthur F. Bentley (The Process of Government, 1908) moved attention from formal organs to irrational behaviour and group pressure.
- After 1945, Roy C. Macridis (The Study of Comparative Government, 1955) indicted it as non-comparative, descriptive, parochial, static and monographic, while David Easton (The Political System, 1953) attacked its “hyperfactualism” — facts piled up without theory.
- Decolonisation exposed the gap: borrowed constitutions in Asia and Africa said little about how power actually worked.
Wave two: systems and functionalism
Easton and Gabriel A. Almond replaced the state with the political system and compared by function rather than structure, so that a parliament and a council of elders became comparable.
Wave three: political economy
Marxist and dependency scholars treated institutions as superstructure masking class power; Hamza Alavi’s “overdeveloped” post-colonial state showed that formal organs inherited from colonial rule served dominant classes, not constitutional texts.
Wave four: rational choice
Anthony Downs (An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957) and William H. Riker reduced institutions to aggregates of utility-maximising choices — methodological individualism that left rules with no independent weight.
Wave five: interpretive and feminist critiques
Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes recast institutions as contingent products of beliefs and traditions; feminist institutionalists showed that “neutral” rules are gendered.
The institutionalist reply
James G. March and Johan P. Olsen (“The New Institutionalism”, 1984) and Theda Skocpol’s lead essay in Bringing the State Back In (1985) answered by widening “institution” to include informal norms that shape preferences rather than merely constrain them. The 2024 economics Nobel to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for showing how institutions shape prosperity marks the comeback. In India, Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav (Rethinking Public Institutions in India, 2017) put institutional capacity back at the centre; the Election Commission’s autonomy rests on convention as much as Article 324, which is why the 2023 law that changed how commissioners are selected became a debate about institutional independence.
Conclusion
Every wave rejected formalism, not institutions. The critics corrected the institutional approach rather than replacing it, and each wave left a lasting tool — behaviour, function, class, choice and meaning — that new institutionalism now combines.