Discuss the main limitations of the comparative method to the study of Political Science. (UPSC CSE Mains 2022 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 2)
Comparative methods have been employed for both quantitative and qualitative studies of such diverse phenomena as language, political organisation, economic relations, religion, myth, kinship, marriage, and the family. Three strategies are used in comparative methodologies: illustrative comparison, complete or universe comparison, and sample based comparisons.
Limitations
- In other subfields of political science, researchers may commonly work within well-defined general research programmes that provide clear base-level assumptions for formulating testable theories. But in comparative politics, analysts usually do not draw on such well defined research programmes.
- Instead, they find theoretical inspiration in a wide variety of general orientations-strategic choice models, state-centric approaches, patron client models, theories of international dependency, and many more – that emphasise certain key causal factors but that lack the all encompassing generality that we normally associate with a Lakotosian research programme.
- Comparative Polities tend to suspend normative evaluation of the world in favour of describing the political world and explaining why it is the way it is. However, it is important to remember that comparativists do this not because they lack preferences or are unwilling to make normative judgements, but rather because as social scientists they are committed first to offering systematic explanations for the world as it is.
- So they try to draw a realistic rather than normative model. Comparativists may disagree about whether the acquired knowledge may help make the world a better place or help us make better moral judgements about politics, but they usually agree that the job of describing and explaining is big enough, and perhaps some of the deeper philosophical meanings of our findings can be left to the political theorists.
- So, for example, rather than evaluating whether democracy is good or not, comparativists spend a great deal of time trying to understand and identify the general conditions-social, economic, ideological, institutional, and international – under which democracies initially appear, become unstable, collapse into dictatorship, and sometimes re emerge as democracies.
- Furthermore, some times in the Comparative Politics it has been tried to draw parallel between two or more incomparable themes leading to vague conclusions. But the most troublesome weakness of comparative politics is the ambiguity of the area of study to be covered under.
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