Comparative Government
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1971.tb01926.x |
| Date | 01 March 1971 |
| Published date | 01 March 1971 |
| Author | Stanley Rothman |
| Subject Matter | Article |
COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT1
STANLEY ROTHMAN
Smith College
IN
the past
two
decades the study of comparative politics, in the United States at least, has been
strongly Uuenced,
if
not fundamentally transformed, by
borro-
from sociology, Intellectu-
ally,
a
key role
was
played by the
mass
migration of German scholars to the United States in the
1930’s
and
1940’~~
and the introduction to the American intellectual community
of
the work
of
Max
Weber. Weber
is
probably read more widely by sociologists and political scientists in the
United States today than in any European country, including Germany.
Of equal significance, however, have
been
the writings
of
Talcott Parsons and his students.
Political scientists such as Gabriel Almond, David Apter, and Joseph LaPalombara,
to
mention
just a few, have adopted and adapted the approach of Parsons for their
own
purposes. Parsons
himself was profoundly influenced by Weber, and played no small role in bringing him to the
attention
of
American sociologists.
To the ‘functionalist’ revolution has been added
a
native American product; i.e. a strong
emphasis on the behavioural study
of
politics which derives vaguely from Bentley, but which
grows out
of
a long American tradition
of
empirical analysis. Thus, the work of
Karl
Deutsch,
S.
M.
Lipset and
others
has placed
great
stress
on the
use
of comparative public opinion data as
well
as
various
indices
of
social and economic development in
an
attempt to develop better tools
for
the comparative study of politics.2
The application of ‘American technology’ to the study
of
other nations
has,
in part, been
a
function of al3wnce. American scholars have been blessed
(1)
with substantial research grants
and armies of willing graduate students. Of
course,
advanced industrial societies
are
ideal for
such studies merely because
of
the availability of vast quantities of statistical
data,
and even in
socalled ‘developing’ countries, the emphasis
on
planning has led to
an
accumulation of
materials which was simply not available earlier.
What
have these developments wrought? First, the detailed ddption of formal institutions
so
characteristic
of
earlier scholarship
has
been downplayed in favour
of
attempts to
describe
‘real’ political behaviour. Scholars have
been
less interested in the formal structure of the
BritishParliament,say, thantryingto
understandthepatternsofauthorityandinfluencc
by which
it is characterized. Indeed they have
been
less interested
in
political inatitutionapersethan in such
areas
as
political culture, political socialization, and the study of interest groups.
Analyses
of the
social
background
and career patterns of legislators have become far more important than dis-
CUSeiOnS of the formal rules by which parliaments function. The country and comparative studies
published by Little Brown in the United States, including the volume on England by Richard
Rose,areoutstandingexamples
ofthis trend. Rosespends
onechaptcr(entitled’PolicyProcesses’)
of forty paw on the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and parliament in
a
book of some
255
pages,
and, description
of
formal structures occupies only a
part
of that
space.,
In
addition, political scientists have developed
a
new and fairly abstruse vocabulary. They
talk in terms of role and function,
or
modernization and differentiation, rather than
using
the
traditional terms which have characterized the writings of non-Marxist political scientists,
at least in the past.
*
COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT.
By
9.
E.
FINER.
(London:
AllenLane.
ThePenguinPress.
1970.
Pp.
615.70s.)
1
The picture is obviously somewhat more complicated. Deutsch, after all, is
a
European by
birth
and an important theorist, and Almond has not been uninterested in gathering public
opinion data or in drawing upon other ‘quantitative’ materials.
3
Richard
Rose,
Politics
in
&gland
(Boston, Little Brown,
1964).
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