Elucidate the transdisciplinary nature of modern comparative politics and identify the contributions of political sociologists towards this goal. (200 words) (2012, 15 Marks)
Modern comparative politics is transdisciplinary by necessity rather than fashion: the causes of political outcomes lie largely outside formal institutions, so after 1945 the field imported the tools of the disciplines that study those causes. David Easton (1962) listed integration with the other social sciences among the eight foundation stones of behaviouralism, and political sociology was the first and deepest of these borrowings.
The transdisciplinary character
| Discipline | What it gave comparative politics |
|---|---|
| Sociology | Class, cleavage, elites, social movements |
| Economics | Political economy, rational choice (Anthony Downs, 1957), institutional economics (Douglass C. North) |
| Anthropology | Functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, reworked by Gabriel A. Almond; Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” |
| Psychology | Socialisation, personality, political culture (Harold D. Lasswell; Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, 1963) |
| History | Comparative-historical method, path dependence |
| Statistics | Surveys, cross-national datasets, causal-inference designs |
The gain is an explanation of why identical institutions behave differently in different societies: federalism held India together but could not hold Yugoslavia. The cost is a blurred disciplinary identity, since each borrowing threatens to absorb politics into another field.
Contributions of political sociologists
- The social base of the state: Karl Marx showed that governments express constellations of social forces; Max Weber added that hierarchy has three axes (class, status and party) and classified authority as traditional, charismatic or rational-legal.
- Elite analysis: Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels, whose iron law of oligarchy (Political Parties, 1911) came from studying the German Social Democrats, made the composition of rulers a comparative variable.
- Social requisites and cleavages: Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man (1960) linked development and class to democracy, and his work with Stein Rokkan (1967) traced European party systems to four cleavages: centre–periphery, church–state, land–industry and owner–worker.
- Historical sociology: Barrington Moore (1966) derived democracy, fascism and communism from agrarian class relations (no bourgeois, no democracy); Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979) compared France, Russia and China, while Charles Tilly (1975) argued that war made the state, and the state made war.
- Two-way causation: Giovanni Sartori (1969) separated a reductive sociology of politics from true political sociology, in which institutions also reshape society.
- Indian contributions: M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste and sanskritisation, Rajni Kothari’s Caste in Indian Politics (1970) on the politicisation of caste, and Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph’s caste associations in The Modernity of Tradition (1967). The Census 2027, carrying the first full caste count in the census since 1931, will give this tradition its first full dataset in nearly a century.
Conclusion
Political sociologists turned comparative politics from a study of constitutions into a study of the interface between state and society. The fear that politics would dissolve into sociology provoked Skocpol’s call (1985) to bring the state back in; the best comparative work now combines both perspectives.