#2 POL 128

• It deals with an extensive study of different political systems with special emphasis on their institutions and functions

  comparative government
• It covers all that which comes under the study of the latter, along with the study of non-state politics

  comparative politics
•  It is a framework of ideas that establishes a general context of analysis.

  Paradigm
• It is a generalized statement summarizing the real or supposed actions of a set of variables, whether dependent, or independent, or intervening.

  Theory
• It is a way of organizing a theory for application to data.

  Method
• It links method to the relevant data.

  Technique
• It is a simplified way of describing relationships.

  Model
• It is a peculiar way of applying one or more combinations of the above type to a research problem.

  Strategy
• It converts strategy into an operational plan for field work or an experiment.

  Research design
• This approach to the study of comparative government emerged as a response to historicism of the 19th century.

  traditional
• He briefly points out that the approach has been essentially non comparative, descriptive, parochial, static and monographic.  

  Roy Macridis
• They have identified three major premises that have dominated the criticism of the approach to comparative government feature of the pre-World War II period. These premises are as follows: Its parochialism, Its configurative analysis, Its formalism.

  Almond Powell
• He points out the influence of abstract theory, formal legal studies and configuration studies that characterize the reaction against historicism in political studies.

  Harry Eckstein
• The author of Modern Political Regimes


  Roy Macridis
• Undemocratic Western systems and political systems of Asia, Africa and Latin America were studied by a handful of adventurist researchers.
• It has been very aptly pointed out that the empirical deficiency of traditional analysis was the adjoining drive for behaviourism. This is what Robert Dahl called ‘empirical theory’ in contemporary studies.
• In the language of Almond and Powell, the efforts at innovation were motivated by the search for more comprehensive scope, the search for realism, the search for precision and the search for theoretical order.
• Sidney Verba has adequately summed up the principles behind the ‘revolution’: ‘Look beyond description to more theoretically relevant problems; look beyond the formal institutions of government to political process and political functions;and look beyond the countries of Western Europe to the new nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America.’
• Under the influence of the behavioural reform, the institutional mode of analysis has been restored by the process mode.
• Behaviourists study the behaviour of people and groups rather than the structure, institutions, ideologies or events.
• the state was no more regarded as the central organizing concept, and attention was now paid to the empirical investigation of relations among human beings.
• According to Peter Merkl, author of Making of a Stormtrooper, the most momentous single factor for the current transformation of the study of comparative politics was the rising importance of the politics of developing areas.
• the traditional approach addressed itself mainly to Western political systems