Explain the Political-Sociological Approach in the field of comparative politics and discuss its limitations. (2017, 10 Marks)
The political-sociological approach studies the interface of politics and society: how social structure, cleavages, groups and movements shape the exercise of power, and how the state reshapes society in turn. It rose after the Second World War, when legal-institutional study could not explain how power actually worked in post-colonial states.
Foundations
- Karl Marx gave it the premise that the state has a social base; Max Weber corrected his monocausal view with three axes of stratification — class, status and party — and three types of authority.
- Seymour Martin Lipset (Political Man, 1960) set the post-war agenda: the social conditions of democracy and the class bases of voting.
- Giovanni Sartori (“From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology”, 1969) separated a reductionist “sociology of politics”, where society explains everything, from true political sociology, where causation runs both ways.
What it studies
- Social bases of power: how caste, class, race, religion and gender shape participation and representation.
- Informal processes: interest groups, public opinion and social movements, which often matter more than formal organs.
- State formation and cleavages: Barrington Moore traced democracy and dictatorship to agrarian class relations; Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967) derived party systems from social cleavages.
Three frameworks
- Pluralist: Robert A. Dahl (Who Governs?, 1961) found power dispersed among competing groups.
- Elitist: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels’s iron law of oligarchy hold that organised minorities rule; in modern conditions elites are those with leadership and organisational capacity.
- Marxist: the propertied class sets the political agenda, the state serving capital.
In India, Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) showed that caste gets politicised rather than politics becoming casteist, and the caste count in Census 2027 will give the approach its largest dataset in nearly a century.
Limitations
- Over-socialisation: politics is read off from society, so the state loses its autonomy — the gap Theda Skocpol’s call to “bring the state back in” filled.
- Disciplinary anxiety: political science risked being submerged in sociology.
- Neglect of institutions: identical social structures yield different politics under different electoral rules.
- Neglect of economics, later taken up by political economy.
- Little prescriptive value: it explains failure better than it guides policy.
- Static bias and incomparable categories: it explains stability better than rapid change, and “caste”, “ethnicity” and “class” do not mean the same thing across societies.
Conclusion
Political sociology explains why the same institutions behave differently in different societies, which no institutional account can. Used alone it dissolves politics into society; paired with institutional and political-economy analysis, it remains indispensable to comparative politics.