SECTION - B 1. APPROACHES TO STUDY OF GOVT: Comparative historical, legal institutional, political economy and political sociology approaches. 2.

CLASSIFICATION OF POLITICAL SYSTEMS: Democratic and authoritarian, characteristics of political systems in third world. 3. TYPOLOGIES OF CONSTITUTIONS: Basic features of these constitutions and governments of USA, UK, Germany, France, china and South Africa. 1.Approaches to Comparative Government and Politics In the last chapter we saw that comparative politics is concerned with the study, analysis and explanations of significant regularities, similarities and differences in the working of political institutions, political processes and in political behaviour. It has also been mentioned that during the course of its history the comparative method has gone through various developments and changes both in the scope of its areas of study as well as approaches and tools used. Since Aristotle began the study of comparative politics, countless students have analysed the nature and quality of political regimes. They have looked at the way in which the functions of government are performed and relationships between rulers and ruled. They have also posed questions about the kind of rules that exist and actions that are taken. In recent years two major additions have been made in the study of comparative politics. One the students are also interested in the politics of the newer nation states in which an increasing part of the worlds population lives and try to include these states within the scope of generalisation about comparative politics. Second, students are not content merely with descriptions of political institutions and constitutional arrangements, more attention is now paid to non governmental and social organisations and to the political behaviour of individuals and groups.1 In this context the student today has many approaches to choose from. At the same time the various approaches and techniques have different implications for the process of theory building. Broadly the approaches are categorised into two: Traditional and Modern. Traditional Approaches Among the Traditional Approaches we can include: a) The Historical Approach Dream Dare Win

Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com b) The Formal-legal Approach c) The Configurative Approach d) The Problem Approach e) The Area Approach f)The Institutional Approach Of these approaches the most important and still considered relevant is the Institutional approach. However, for information sake we may make a mention of each of the above. The historical approach uses the knowledge of history and applies it to understand the political life. It is chronological and descriptive and seeks to explain linkages of political life with the changing situation. Thus on the basis of historical analysis new principles of political importance are developed. Aristotle, Montesgue, Hegal, Karl Marx, Henry Maine, Maclver, etc., in one way or the other relied substantially on history in their analysis. The historical approach has various limitations. To begin with the events of various ages have been entered in history by different authors in different ways. Also, laws formulated in experiences of the past are not necessarily applicable to situations at present or in future which are different and are likely to change. It is only partly correct that history repeats itself. Identical situations might not recur. Political life in our own times has special characteristics, identity, features, problems and issues. There is also the danger that in our efforts to understand the historical context of political life and learn from it, we might be carried away by our own preferences and biases. Yet historical approach is important in the sense that the past serves as a window to the long process of evolution. Therefore inspite of its limitations it has not been complete discarded even now. The other traditional approaches in one way or the other one to an extent reflect or the other form of Institutional Approach, some times giving importance to legal aspects and some times to functional.

The Institutional Approach The institutional approach is one of the oldest methods of analysing politics. Comparative politics for long has been dominated by this approach. In this approach the formal institutions of government like legislature, executive and judiciary provide the subject matter of comparison in terms of their constitution, powers, functions, role and mutual relations. Less official organisations, like pressure groups, are given little attention. Institutional comparison involves a relatively Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com detailed description of the institution under analysis followed by an attempt to clarify which details are similar or different. There are several ways of comparing political institutions. We can compare the institutions of a particular political system with each other at a given time. Different aspects of these institutions can also be compared. Painting on a broader canvas, we can compare the political institutions of one country with those of another, comparing them as sets or even systems of institutions.2 It should come as no great surprise that the detailed examination of the institutional ramifications of government was characteristic of the early efforts of political scientists. The approach had utility because it both permitted the study of easily observable and recordable phenomenon and precluded the use of subjectively derived data. However, the style was descriptive rather than analytical. The constitutions and formal organisations of government were examined in legal and historical terms, while informal relationships were unstudied. Earlier, the institutional approach was also strongly culture-bound, confined largely to the study of governments in the USA and Europe.3 Therefore, in Post-World War Second years it started being criticised. The main criticisms of traditional approaches including that of Institutional approach can be described as under: a) Essentially Non-Comparative In the traditional approaches the study of comparative government generally deals either with

one country or with parallel descriptions of the institutions of a number of countries. The student is told of the constitutional foundations, the organisation of political power, and a description of ways in which such powers are exercised. In each case problem areas are discussed with reference to the country's institutional structure. The interest of the student is concentrated primarily on an analysis of the structure of the state, the location of sovereignty, the electoral provisions and the distribution of electorate into political parties.4 These studies thus are generally studies of foreign governments, or parallel descriptions of institutions or constitutions not exactly the comparative studies. b) Essentially Descriptive While description of the formal political institutions is vital for the understanding of the political process this does not lead to solution of problems through comparison. For instance the historical approach centres on the study of origins and growth of certain institutions. It is assumed that parallel historical accounts of the evolution of similar institutions will indicate similarities and differences. The approach followed is almost identical with that used by the historian. There is no effort to evolve an analytical scheme within which an antecedent factor is related in terms other than chronological to a particular event or development. In the legalistic approach the student is exposed primarily to the study of the "powers" of the various branches of government and legal prescriptions. This is almost exclusively the study of what can be done or what cannot be done by various governmental agencies with reference to Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com legal and constitutional provisions. It does not seek the forces that shape the legal forms, nor does it attempt to establish the casual relationships that account for another or from one period to another. These approaches are not sensitive to non-political determinants of political behaviour and the informal bases of government institutions. Description without systematic orientation becomes an obstacle in the discovery of hypothesis regarding the uniformities in political behaviour and prevent formulation of theory about change, revolution, conditions of stability, etc., on comparative basis. The description, thus, is without the use of any explicit conceptual framework.

c) Primarily Western-Oriented The traditional approaches address primarily to Western Political systems. Accessibility of the countries studied, relative case of overcoming language barriers and the availability of official documents and other source material, as well as cultural affinities accounted for this fact. Within western culture configuration, comparative study dealt mainly with representative democracies treating non-democratic systems as aberrations. This prevented the students from dealing systematically not only with non-democratic western political systems, but also with colonial systems, underdeveloped areas and culturally distinct societies which exhibit superficially the characteristics of the representative process, for example, India, Japan, etc. d) Non-Scientific The traditional approach was not systematic or scientific. No effort was made to relate the contextual elements of any system with political process. The tendency was to subordinate empirical investigations of political forms and processes to normative standards. It failed to provide for policy solution in the manner that indicated the nature of comparative study involved. The studies made were a dissection of the distribution of powers in terms of their legal setting and left out of the picture altogether the problem of change and the study of those factors - political or other that account for change. Models or theory thus do not exist. The above mentioned criticisms of traditional approaches, were made primarily in view of the emergence of new nations as a result of the process of decolonisation that started in the 1940s, a desire by many social scientists to make social sciences really scientific and to provide solutions to the problems by studying them in an inter-disciplinary and comparative manner. Some observers also see in this criticism attempts to make political science ideology free so that students were not attracted to ideologies other than liberal democratic which had been consolidated in Western Europe and North America. The criticism, however, could not reject the traditional approaches as irrelevant or completely inappropriate. The traditional approaches particularly the Institutional approach are still used either independently or in association with the modern approaches. Political scientists, still, in spite of recent developments, concentrate on examining the major political institutions of the state such as the executive, legislature, the civil service, the judiciary and local government, and from these examinations valuable insights as to their organisation can be drawn, proposals for reform discussed, and general conclusions Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win

www.jeywin.com offered.5 Because political behaviour invariably occurs in institutional settings, the student of comparative politics cannot afford to ignore these primary units of analysis. A great deal of political behaviour can be accounted for by viewing it as a result of institutional factors within the political structure. Institutions are the apparatus through which the power process functions in society organised as a state. It is not the institutional approach, per se which leads to mere gathering and filing of formal empirical data. Rather it is the too narrow application of that approach which has led to its rejection by many political scientists. The institutional approach can be and is now being supplemented by other tools and concepts. It is now being realised that institutions cannot exist physically apart from the persons who operate (hem. Through this the approach is being turned away from a formal, legalistic approach to a consideration of political dynamics and the deeper meaning of the political process. The institutional approach, in spite of being traditional, thus can be fruitfully blended with other approaches to provide a rounded analysis of political phenomena. Modern Approaches It has been pointed out above that comparative politics was for long dominated by the institutional approach. The formal institutions of the government - legislature, executive and judiciary - provided the subject matter with little attention given to less official organisations such as the pressure groups or mass media, or to the wider social content within which government operates. The style was descriptive rather than analytical. The Constitutions and formal organisations of government were examined in legal and historical terms, while informal relationships went unstudied. The institutional approach was also strongly culture-bound, confined largely to the study of governments in the USA and Europe. The focus and emphasis of the approach was, however, slightly altered beginning in the 1930s. The idealism that characterised earlier writings was rudely shattered by the war, the Great Depression, and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. The developments in the world during and after the World War II further awakened political scientists to the limitations of their parochial and ethno-centric approaches. Apart from the emergence of new states in Latin America, Asia and Africa, the states were now operating within an environment that contained such previously unknowns as the atom bomb, the cold war, NATO, National Liberation movements and the like. These were all variables that comparative politics now needed to take into account. The growing importance of the Third World in international politics accentuated the need for alternative frameworks. The emphasis of comparative politics thus turned towards the examination of more concrete phenomena and

towards inductive empiricism. The discipline became both more scientific and more comparative. What resulted was a behavioural Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com revolution within comparative politics, in turn resulting in the development of new approach. The new approach had three broad characteristics. 1. Most noticeably, it focused on dynamic and on-going processes and called for the rediscovery of the impact of policy decisions. 2. It drew itself closer to other social sciences, sociology and social psychology in particular, in order to account for the various multi dimensional phenomena linked to politics. 3. It embodied and in turn led to a theoretical reorientation of the whole field. Overall, the focus shifted away from the state and to society. No longer was mere notice of state institutions and their legal obligations sufficient. The study of politics became the study of system. The political system as a whole needed to be considered, its processes, its policies and its environments - in other words, its functions as well as its structures - all needed to be taken into account.6 The new approach thus claimed to be analytical and empirical, concerned with understanding the infra-structure, covering study of the developing studies, adopting interdisciplinary approach and attempting to be value free. However, it is important to note that while the so-called traditional mode has been considered inadequate since the late 1950s, there exists no single paradigm or approach that has replaced it. The important approaches are: (1) The System Analysis Approach, (2) The Structural Functional Approach (3) The Political Economy Approach. System Analysis Approach (Input-Output Model) As has been mentioned earlier, the behavioural approach emerged in the 1950s and 1960s (particularly in USA) as a reaction against the institutional tradition. The central assumption of

the behaviourists was in Eulau's word that, "the root is man." Institutions, the behaviouralists felt, provide no more than the framework within which political actors play the political game. Hence, the behavioural approach represented a shift in the unit of political analysis from institutions to individuals from structures to process, from government to politics.7 Much of the groundwork for this new approach was laid by Ervin Laszlo and David Easton. More specific in his utilisation of the systems approach was Easton. In perspective terms the systems approach was launched in Easton's books A Framework for Political Analysis and A System Analysis of Political Life. Firstly, Easton provided a new coherent perspective for comparative politics - the framework of the political system as an input output system. Secondly, he suggested a special theory about the conditions for the persistence of political systems. A system is a pattern of related elements that are interdependent. Political system, according to Easton, is that system of interactions in any society through which binding or authoritative allocations are made. Here politics is defined as the authoritative allocation of values. The political system, then, is a wide concept, embracing all the factors which affect political Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com decisions, not just the formal institutions of government. A political system is (1) distinguishable from the environment in which it exists and open to influence from it; (2) its internal structures and processes are determined by the nature of its interaction with its surrounding environment, and (3) its ability to persist is dependent upon the flow and availability of feedback from the environment back to decision makers and other political actors. Thus, what is important is the degree and nature of social interaction between individuals and groups. Political structures and their exact characteristics are only of secondary importance. According to Easton, there are "certain basic activities and processes characteristic of all political systems even though the structural forms through which they manifest themselves may and do vary considerably in each place and each age.8 These activities are Input and Output functions. The political system takes inputs from society, consisting of demands for particular policies and expressions of support for the regime, and converts them into outputs - authoritative policies and decisions. These outputs then feedback to society so as to affect the next cycle of inputs. The

flow of inputs to the political system is regulated by 'gatekeepers' such as interest groups and parties, which collectively bias the system in favour of certain demands and against others. But the system also needs supports in the form of taxes, participation and compliance if it is to endure. Beyond positive or negative feelings towards incumbent decision makers, the institutions of the system also need some level of diffuse support if they are to be effective. For this support to be sustained, outputs must bear some relationship to inputs.9 What is, therefore, to be compared is the essential variables of political systems which include nature of inputs; the variable conditions under which they will constitute stressful disturbance on the system; the environment and systematic conditions that generate such stressful conditions; the typical ways in which systems have sought to cope with stress; the role of information feedback; and the part that output plays in these conversions and coping processes. The value of Easton's model lay in the contribution it made to moving political science away from an exclusive concern with government institutions and towards the relationship between government and society. However, the model is subject to several criticisms. In conceptual categories the system theory leads analysis to force all phenomena into the framework of a system. This approach can lead to a practice of featuring things into the boxes to which they do not belong. Second, systems analysis is not very useful in building up hypothesis and propositions. Whatever hypotheses and propositions are built up by this approach are abstract in nature and therefore, they are not subject to empirical verification. For instance Easton's definition of politics and political system are very broad. It is difficult to distinguish between the abstract and concrete systems. Further, the systems analysis provides too broad a framework to take note of the complete psychological aspects. In view of these reasons systems analysis by itself is not much popular now. An important off shoot from general systems theories, structural functional approach however remains popular. Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com Structural-Functional Analysis

The structural functional approach was probably the dominant trend within structural comparative analysis today. Functionalism grew out of anthropological as well as cultural studies, which broadened the study of politics to include so-called stateless societies. Functionalism as a general methodology is sociology was based on the hypothesis that the operation of a variety of behaviour structures led to or resulted in the same outcomes or functions. The scholar would first try to identify invariant functions, presumably present in all social systems. Second he/she should proceed to analyse how structures could very from one polity to another but result in the same omnipresent or invariant functions. In political science, the approach was first developed by Gabriel Almond and G Bingham Powell Jr. They built on the general premises laid by Laszlo and Easton. They argued that all political systems exist in both a domestic and international environment. The system receives inputs of demands and supports from these environments, converts them and returns them back to the environment through its outputs. Political systems vary with regard to their internal functioning : conversion of processes which consist of the transformation of demands and support (inputs) into authoritative decisions to be implemented (outputs). The structural functional approach is based on two key concepts - structures and functions. Structures refer to those arrangements within a given system which perform the functions. A single function may be performed by a combination of structures and similarly a structure may perform various functions. Functions deal with objective consequences. They may be perceived as objectives, processes or results from various points of view and for various purposes. The functional approach takes society for an on-going system having its structures performing definite functions. Political systems may vary in institutional arrangements, but to survive and operate effectively must perform some essential functions. According to Almond the input functions through which a system interacts with its environment include political socialisation and recruitment, interest articulation, interest aggregation and political communication. Output functions are made up of rule making, rule application and rule adjudication.10 Within this framework, there are four characteristics that all political systems have in common and can thus be compared on: 1. All political systems, including the simplest ones, have political structures. They may thus be compared to one another according to the degree and form of structural specialisation. 2. The same functions are performed in all political systems, though these functions may be performed by different kinds of structures and with different frequencies. Systems may be compared on the basis of their functions, the frequency of such functions, and the kinds of structures performing them. Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam

www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com 3. All political structures, no matter how specialised and regardless of whether found in primitive or modern societies, are multi functional. Political systems may be compared according to the specificity of function of structure. 4. All political systems are "mixed" in a cultural sense. There are no all-modern or all-primitive societies based on their respective degrees of rationality or traditionally. Comparison can be made by focusing on the dominance of one aspect over another. Within this vein, the systems approach sought to develop a systematic theory through which the discrepancies between the developed and the developing countries could be explained. Consistent with the basic tenets, structural-functionalism pointed to the comparative lack of structural differentiation and the paucity of functional complexity on the part of some states visa-vis others. "Political development", "Modernisation," order and stability - these and the many other phenomena associated with the "new states" were all analysed and examined within the contents of structural functionalism11 Some political analysts pointing out the usefulness of structural-functional approach suggest that this approach can (1) make us sensitive to the complexity of interrelationships among social and political phenomena in our analysis; (2) draw attention to the whole social system as a setting for political phenomena; (3) forces consideration of the functions served by political groups, especially latent functions. Structural functional analysis also provides a number of frameworks for political inquiry which political scientists can employ in their empirical investigations.12 Criticism After gaining popularity in the 1960s and the 1970s Structural-Functional approach also has come under severe criticisms. There were two broad categories of problems with the StructuralFunctional approach. To begin with, there were a number of significant ambiguities and shortcomings within the theoretical underpinnings of structural-functional itself. Specifically, the structural-functionalist approach was criticised on grounds of its inherent conservative bias, its conceptual of function, flows in its internal logic - particularly the tautological nature of its central premise - and its limited applicability. The approach's assumption of constant and regularised interaction between a political system and its environment overlooks (or at best minimise) the possibility of change and ignores the potential for societal or political conflict. In short, the approach assumes the maintenance of the status quo under most if not all

circumstances. More importantly, the resort to jargon prompted a number of observers to question the approach on substantive grounds : "Old story in new terminology." One observer suggested, "What Almond has to say could have been said without using this system approach and it would have been said more clearly." Lastly the structural-functionalist approach suffered from a not too subtle ethnocentrism. The paradigm's concern with a structurally differentiated and secular political system, with regular interaction between the political system and its environment and with a processual flow of input Dream Dare Win Courtesy : Saidai Manithaneyam www.jeywin.com Dream Dare Win www.jeywin.com and output make it far more readily applicable to the democratic systems of the West then to authoritarian and dictatorial ones. Besides these internal shortcomings, structural functionalism began confronting challenges from another emerging (or rather, re emerging paradigm in the late 1970s and 1980s). Scholars began taking a second look at the state and its significance as a focus of study. In the Third World as well as in the West, it was increasingly thought, the nature of politics could be better conceptualised by refocusing on the state." Jean Blondel's "An Introduction to Comparative Government" made norms the crucial element, as they pattern how government behaves and what it accomplishes, comprising three crucial aspects: Participation, means of government and purpose of government. Of course neo-statists are also not without their critics. Nevertheless they are trying to establish that the state can advantageously be accorded analytical priority.