Comparative politics

Assignment
Name : Jijin R Jayan
Course – B.A (H) Political
rd nd
science , 3 semester 2 year
Roll number :450
Subject : Contribution of
Sidney Verba and Gabriel
Almond in the field of
Comparative politics
Introduction
Comparative politics is concerned with the
understanding and explaining domestic
politics in comparative perspective. It is one
of the important subjects in political science
along with Political theory and International
relations. It deals with political
structures(institutions like parliament ,
army etc.) , behaviour of actors (individually
and collectively) and processes (decision
making process of parliament, political
parties , army etc ). Comparative politics
can compare everything related to politics
and area and scope of comparative politics
is very large. Comparative politics has an
empirical approach where as political
theory is highly normative in nature.Political
theory instructs how the things should work
where as Comparative politics is the
analysis of real life phenomena

How it was evolved ?

Comparative politics is developed as a sub
discipline in the united states in the post
second world war era. American's
themselves felt that there was need for
deep knowledge of countries . At first the
scope was limited to European counties as
they considered it as the perfect in the
world . But the political scientists were
failed to acknowledge the rise of Hitler in
Germany and Mussolini in Italy. In the post
second world war era significant changes
happened in the discipline of Comparative
politics and it was influenced by the
behavioural revolution led by David Easton.
According to Jean blondel before 1914
comparative politics has successfully taken
two main forms: the initial phase employed
normative approach and the second phase
adopted constitutional and legalistic
approach till first world war. Unfortunately
both these were failed to give comparative
politics its special status. A new phase
started from 1914 when the discipline
became a separate study of politics. The
decade of the 1950s was outlined by
behaviouralism,1960s with developmental
models ,dependency approach and the
recent ones as new institutionalism ,rather
choice theory

Sidney Verba and Gabriel

Almond
Sidney Verba (1932 -2019)
Sidney Verba was a famous American
political scientist . He was famous for his
works about American and Comparative
politics. He worked as a professor in
Harvard university and also as a librarian
and director of Harvard university library.
He was educated Harvard university and
Princeton university. And also served as a
faculty in Princeton university , Stanford
university and Chicago university. His main
works include
 He had published around 83 works in 8
languages. He was passed away in 2019.
Gabriel Almond ( 1911-2002)
Gabriel Almond was an American political
scientist and he was one of the most
influential pioneer of the subject of
Comparative politics. He did his studies at
University of Chicago , and got his PhD in
1938. He worked as a faculty in Brooklyn
college, Yale university , Princeton
university and Stanford university. He also
worked for the US army. His famous work
was the Civic Culture co authored with
Sidney Verba. He was passed away in 2002.

The Civic Culture(1963)

Sidney Verba and Gabriel Almond

were renowned comparative political
scientists. The political sociology of
Verba and Almond is strongly influenced
by sociological structural
fundamentalism , emerged in the late
19th and early 20th century in the context
of intense social change and the
emergence of destabilizing mass political
movements spurred by industrialization
and political enfranchisement. It was the
potential disintegration of society at the
hands of rapid change that motivated
early functionalist, particularly Emile
Durkheim , to study how societies can
maintain social unity
The most important contribution of
them is the civic culture which was
published in 1963. This is one of the
most important work in political culture
as well as in Comparative politics. The
civic culture is a mixed culture: it is a
fusion of parochial, subject, and
participant cultures. The characteristics
of the rationality-activist model of
democratic citizenship often taught in
civics classes (where citizens are
informed, active, and rational) are
indeed components of the civic culture,
but additionally the role of subject and
parochial remain dominant. The
participant role has thus been added to
the subject and parochial roles, whereby
citizens maintain their traditional,
parochial ties (such as church
membership) as well as their more
passive political role (as subjects
accepting of elite decision-making). Now
let’s see how Sidney Almond and Gabriel
Almond contributed to the field of
comparative politics. As mentioned
before comparative politics can compare
anything related to politics between 2 or
more countries. For writing civic culture
Verba and Almond analysed and
compared every aspect of political
system in United Kingdom, United States
, Mexico , Italy ,Germany and also
conducted a survey among people to
gather more information for comparing
these states between 1959 and 1960 ,
this shows Verba and Almond used
methods mentioned in comparative
politics for their work that is empirical in
nature.
Criticism
In his classic 1970 article on
conceptualization in comparative
politics, Giovanni Sartori delivered a
scathingcritique of the structural
functionalist approach to political
sociology. For Sartori, the structural
functionalist is a prime perpetrator of
conceptual stretching, for “even when
we deliberately ask “what is,” we are
invariably prompted to reply in terms of
“what for.”Secondly, one may add the
charge of conceptual exhaustion to
Sartori’s conceptual stretching critique.
Almond and
Verba take great pleasure in
conceptually deconstructing and re-
compartmentalizing political society,
only to leave some of the resulting
conceptual building blocks aside to
gather dust. The tripartite distinction
between affective, evaluative, and
cognitive orientations, , is seldom
leveraged outside of their introductory
chapter.Thirdly, despite Almond and
Verba’s attempt to demonstrate that the
“connecting link between micro and
macropolitics is political culture” , there
is almost no role for micropolitics – for
individual agency – in their
account.Finally the Anglo – American
bias . Verba and Almond stated that only
US and UK have the capacity for long
term democratic stabilization