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Content of body:
The roots of political obligation and the foundations of power are the two most
important building blocks of every political theory. Contractarian philosophers were
interested in the mechanisms that underlay state formation for a variety of reasons,
the majority of which were moral. Because of neoinstitutionalist contributions from
authors like North and Olson, the formation of states is now seen as a historical
turning point in which those agents who specialize in the exercise of violence acquire
the right incentives to shift from plundering a population of producers to protecting
them. To put it another way, the majority of state founders were bandits who, given
the necessary material and military circumstances, had the desire to dominate and
control a certain territory and people in a systematic and organized manner
(Przeworski, 2007). Neoinstitutionalists have limited the formation of states to a single
cause: the transformation of bandits into lords. However, the conclusion does not
seem to be believable on both historical and formal grounds. When producers came
together to confront plunderers, states may emerge, as they did in the past. Without
this second formative technique, it becomes difficult to explain why no coercive types
have been successful in founding and maintaining governments. When permanent
protective mechanisms are absent, that final argument explains why stateless
societies have done much worse economically than human communities organized by
state systems (Thelen, 1999).
The monopoly of coercion and power has grown immensely in scope and magnitude
over the last half-millennium; it is maybe more realistic to think of the current state as
a separate species from the ancient state. In the paper contained in this issue,
Hendrik Spurt gives an overview of recent contributions to our understanding of
modern state formation. Second, several valid predictions concerning the role of
states on economic growth have been provided by state formation theories (Thelen,
1999). The development of independent entities outside of Europe is not well
explained by historical accounts. According to Spruyt, the international system, the
economics, and colonial past have all affected how sovereignty and legitimacy have
expanded over the globe. He also examines some of the most well-known and still-
controversial debates over what led to the development of various constitutional and
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administrative systems. The formation of national identities has been a focus of inquiry
into the modern state's ideological basis. Despite the fact that the debate over the
origins, structure, and dimensions of national adscription and nationalism is far from
over, scholars now regard nations as primarily "modern constructs," or distinct
communities to which individuals perceive themselves as belonging and to which they
have specific moral and political obligations. For some, nationalism is a political
response to the demands of industrialization; for others, it is a result of the decline of
traditional mindsets and the rise of print capitalism and media markets (Thelen, 1999)
Others think that nationalism arose in the modern period as a response to the
upheaval of traditional hierarchies, which caused everyone's political position to be
reinterpreted. During the preceding fifty years, democratization theory has generated
different concepts and paradigms. According to empirical research, there seems to be
a significant link between levels of development and democracy. Theories have
recently been combined to explain why democratic regimes' social and economic
underpinnings are accounted for by the political ramifications of diverse constitutional
institutions. According to Barbara Geddes, there are still few conclusive and agreed
results about the causes of democracy. The problem might be attributed to the
variability of the explanandum, as well as democratization. Transitions from absolute
monarchy to constitutional monarchy or republics might be very different from
transitions from military dictatorship to popular democracy. Separation is the key to
coming up with distinct explanations for these occurrences. The relationship between
civic culture and political regimes has long been a source of concern for all current
political theorists. Welzel and Inglehart provide the findings of a variety of cross-
national research on the effects of mass beliefs. They show that the socioeconomic
modernisation process produces liberal mass attitudes, which are beneficial to
democracy. Embracing the postwar self-consciously empirical political science's new
approaches, The difficulty with this research program was not so much the
problematic notion of culture as it was the scientists' classification of democracy and
political culture. They had a distorted view of democracy, restricting it to the
institutional institutions that characterize national governance. As a consequence, they
overlooked the vast array of democratic activities taking place at the local and
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intermediate social levels. It was unclear what role these beliefs and attitudes had in
the preservation of democratic life and conduct. At a time when the political culture
approach had gone down a "degenerative path," researchers salvaged the idea by
highlighting its essentially relational character.

Putnam transformed our knowledge of government and culture with his famous study
of Italian regional politics. We know relatively little about the mechanisms that relate
social capital to good governance, and even less about the dynamics that develop,
preserve, and drain civic virtue, so this new approach is still in its early stages. And
some of us may be doubtful that citizens should engage in democratic politics with
confidence rather than skeptical engagement. However, in terms of "untangling the
delicate relationship between democracy and civic culture," the new strategy may be
heading us in the right path.

Organizational structural development of idea

More than thirty years ago, Juan Linz wrote a fundamental chapter on dictatorships for
the Handbook of Political Science, edited by Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby.
Linz's approach was primarily intellectual and sociological, and he drew on the
burgeoning literature on totalitarianism and authoritarianism that emerged after WWII.
Nondemocratic regimes, according to Linz, may be distinguished by their internal
heterogeneity, ideology, and the level of political mobilization demanded of their
citizens (Munck & Snyder, 2007). However, there is little empirical evidence for
typological approaches. Researchers established a lengthy and somewhat random
categorization system that encompassed military dictatorships, conventional absolutist
monarchy, one-party regimes, totalitarian and post-totalitarian systems, parliamentary
democracies, city-state oligarchies, "sultanistic" principalities, and so on. When it
comes to the mechanisms that control autocracies, these ideal types have shown to
be uninformative. In this scientific tradition, researchers describe each type's
characteristics—in other words, they enumerate the most prevalent qualities of each
ideal model. They don't go into depth, however, on the mechanisms that maintain
power in place or the influence that different institutional systems may have on
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political stability, citizen compliance, or economic advancement.

After a period of relative neglect, the literature on dictatorships has undergone a

considerable transformation in recent years. Several political economists have started
to break away from the strict typological paradigm, focusing instead on the incentives
and mechanisms that organize power and manage authoritarian countries. Wintrobe
(2007), for example, gives a rationalist account of dictatorships in an essay included in
the anthology we prepared. Tyrants must utilize a mix of repression and the building of
political allegiance in order to rule. Chilcote (2018) uses two factors to distinguish
between tin pot dictators, totalitarian dictators, tyrants, and democracies: repression
and loyalty, as well as the objective roles dictators may play. In addition to Wintrobe's
work, several scholars have added to our understanding of electoral autocracies, the
function of parties and legislatures in authoritarian regimes, and the dynamics of
competition among authoritarian elites.

In a vigorous and now famous debate, scholars contended that revolutions occur
exclusively as a result of social and economic modernization. More recently,
Goldstone's popular line of reasoning has depicted revolutions as the outcome of a
Malthusian imbalance between a growing population and its environment. In an
important article published in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, Steve
Incus claims that state modernisation has always been a necessary precursor to
revolution (Chilcote, 2018). At the same time as legitimizing shifts in ideology, state
modernisation efforts bring new social groups and places into close contact with the
state. These two elements provide revolutionary forces a social base and a
vocabulary to work with. Revolutions result in a wide variety of political outcomes.
Incus argues, in part following in the footsteps of Barrington Moore, Jr., that
revolutions lead to open, democratic regimes when the state is reliant on merchant
communities and international trade. In the absence of the latter, revolutions almost
always culminate in the foundation of a dictatorship (Kamrava, 2012).
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In recent decades, civil wars have climbed to the top of comparatists' concerns.
Research on the origins of current political violence (in the form of civil wars and
guerrilla warfare) has taken numerous theoretical twists since it began as a
comparative endeavour some fifty years ago. Modernization theorists explained
rebellions as a consequence of economic imbalance, the effect of social and
economic progress, and the status and political aspirations of certain social groups. A
second line of research was added to the first, which related violent conflict to ethnic
nationalism and resource distribution along ethnic lines. In recent years, almost all
researchers have emphasized the context of economic and political possibilities in
which potential rebels may decide to engage in violent action, rather than the
importance of economic forces, existing societal grievances, or political beliefs in
triggering violent confrontations. The expansion of rebellious acts, according to Collier
and Hoeffel (2004), is due to the availability of both finance—namely, abundant
natural resources—and potential recruits—individuals who have limited chances for
monetary advancement via peaceful methods. Calvas views civil wars as "imperfect,
multilayered, and fluid aggregations of very complicated, partly overlapping,
diversified, and localized civil wars with obvious heterogeneity from region to region
and valley to valley," downplaying the prevalence of singular, sociologically distinct
reasons. Calvas also argues in the book we edited that war-related conditions are
likely to influence the outcomes of interest: as civil wars advance, the distribution of
people, the interests of important participants, and the worth of resources sought by
combatants all change. A significant body of work on contentious politics and social
movements has resulted from the study of political conflict. As a result of
modernization and the spread of democracy, social movements arose.
Simultaneously, the timing and location of social movements had an impact on how
they developed.
Conclusion:

Developing theories of intentional agents and building models of rationalist people are
two different things. Recognizing that difference should assist us in avoiding what has
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historically been a source of contention and misunderstanding. By definition,

comparative politics and political science have benefitted from an increasing emphasis
on generating broadly applicable theoretical concepts, as well as a growing
appreciation of the role of individuals and their motivations. In some respects, they
have moved the study of politics much closer to our forebears in the discipline.
Despite the fact that they use various methods and data sets, all of these models are
founded on fundamental assumptions about human behavior. These assumptions are
still hotly debated in comparative politics, ranging from a purely instrumental
conception of political actors intent on securing survival and maximizing power to a
notion of individuals who may consent to particular structures in exchange for others
cooperating to, finally, political visions that appeal to humans' inherent sociability. This
competition is both inescapable and advantageous. We think that as we attempt to
construct deliberate political models, distinguishing between various points of
departure will become simpler.
.
References:

Chilcote, R. H. (2018). Theories of comparative politics: the search for a paradigm reconsidered.
Routledge.
Kamrava, M. (2012). Understanding comparative politics: a framework for analysis. Routledge.
Munck, G. L., & Snyder, R. (2007). Debating the direction of comparative politics: An analysis of leading
journals. Comparative Political Studies, 40(1), 5-31.
Przeworski, A. (2007). Is the science of comparative politics possible? Unpublished (September 29, 2006).
Thelen, K. (1999). Historical institutionalism in comparative politics. Annual review of political science,
2(1), 369-404.