Write on the Systems Approach. (2022, 10 Marks)
The systems approach treats political life as a system — interacting elements, bounded off from an environment, that survive by exchanging inputs and outputs with it. It is holistic: the part is read through its place in the whole, much as an ecologist reads a species through its ecosystem. It was behaviouralism’s bid for a grand theory: one value-free vocabulary for any polity, Westminster cabinet or one-party state.
Origins
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian biologist, built general systems theory (outlined 1950; General System Theory, 1968) around principles common to organisms, machines and societies — open systems, boundary, equilibrium, feedback. Its aim was to unify knowledge: laws shared across disciplines would spare each from rediscovering them, and sub-systems would be treated as organic parts of a larger whole.
- Talcott Parsons (The Social System, 1951) carried it into sociology: society as interdependent sub-systems, the polity specialising in goal-attainment.
Three Applications
Two derivatives grew from the parent idea: an input-output model that follows what the environment feeds into decision-making and what decisions return, and a structural-functional model that asks which structure performs which function.
- David Easton (The Political System, 1953; A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965) defined the political system by the authoritative allocation of values: a conversion machine turning demands and supports into outputs, kept alive by feedback. He separated specific support, earned by particular outputs, from diffuse support, a reservoir of legitimacy that carries a regime through unpopular decisions. India’s farm laws show the loop: enacted in September 2020, they met a year of protest, and Parliament repealed them in November 2021 — demand, output, feedback, revised output.
- Gabriel A. Almond, with James S. Coleman (1960) and G. Bingham Powell (1966), opened Easton’s black box, recasting inputs and outputs as functions — socialisation, interest articulation and aggregation, communication, rule-making, application and adjudication — performed by different structures in different societies.
- Morton A. Kaplan (System and Process in International Politics, 1957) took it to the international level: six models, from balance of power to unit veto, each with essential rules.
- Karl W. Deutsch (The Nerves of Government, 1963) added a cybernetic variant, treating government as a steering system run on communication and information flows.
Significance
- Comparison without Western institutional yardsticks: a Politburo and a cabinet both allocate values authoritatively.
- Informal actors enter the frame; Easton’s gatekeepers anticipate later work on agenda control.
- Its vocabulary endures. Rajni Kothari’s Politics in India (1970) used the functional lens to analyse the Congress system he first sketched in 1964, where factions inside the dominant party did an opposition’s work and opposition parties acted as parties of pressure.
Limits
- Conservative bias: persistence counts as health, revolution as breakdown — for Marxists, a status-quoist Cold War science.
- The black box hides where power sits, leaving conversion, the political core, unexplained.
- Replacing “state” with “system” erased the state as actor, a loss Theda Skocpol later repaired by bringing the state back in.
- Kaplan’s models classify rather than explain, lacking inputs, outputs and feedback.
- Mechanical imagery: people are not parts of a machine; choice, meaning and conflict drop out of a model built for self-regulating equipment.
- Kothari himself abandoned the frame when it could not see agrarian dominance or the crisis of the 1970s.
Conclusion
The systems approach is a map, not an explanation. It made a genuinely global comparative politics possible and still lends the discipline its vocabulary, but cannot say why outcomes occur or whether a system deserves to persist. Its central question, persistence, has returned in the study of democratic backsliding — the question has outlived the model.