Comparative Politics — UPSC PSIR Optional Notes

1. Meaning and Nature

Definition: comparative politics is the systematic study of political systems, institutions, processes and behaviour in different countries in order to find similarities, differences and their causes. It is both a subject matter (politics within states) and a method (controlled comparison).

Aristotle as the founder: Aristotle and his students collected about 158 constitutions of Greek city-states, of which only the Constitution of the Athenians survives. In Politics he classified regimes by the number who rule and whether they rule for the common good or for themselves.

Comparison as a scientific method: Arend Lijphart, in 'Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method' (American Political Science Review, 1971), placed the comparative method beside the experimental, statistical and case-study methods. He saw it as the method to use when cases are few and variables are many.

Traditional phase (up to about 1945): formal-legal, historical, descriptive and often normative, centred on the constitutions of Britain, the USA, France and Germany. Examples are James Bryce, Modern Democracies (1921), Herman Finer, The Theory and Practice of Modern Government (1932) and Carl J. Friedrich on constitutional government.

Macridis's critique: Roy Macridis, The Study of Comparative Government (1955), said traditional studies were essentially non-comparative, descriptive, parochial (limited to Western Europe), static and monographic (one country at a time).

Modern phase: the Committee on Comparative Politics of the US Social Science Research Council (formed 1954, chaired by Gabriel Almond) pushed behavioural, cross-national and theory-driven research. Decolonisation created dozens of new states in Asia and Africa that the old categories could not explain.

The main shifts: from government to politics, from formal institutions to informal processes, from Western Europe to the whole world, from description to explanation, and from normative to empirical questions.

Later phase: from the 1970s scholars brought back the state, institutions and political economy, and today the field combines statistical, case-study and historical methods.

Nature of the field: it is interdisciplinary (drawing on sociology, economics, history and anthropology), problem-oriented (democracy, development, conflict) and seeks middle-range generalisations rather than universal laws.

2. Major Approaches

Institutional (legal-formal) approach: studies constitutions, legislatures, executives, courts and federal or unitary structures. It is precise about rules but ignores how institutions actually work and the social forces behind them.

Systems approach: David Easton, The Political System (1953) and A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values for a society. The system receives inputs (demands and supports) from its environment, converts them into outputs (decisions and actions), and feedback links outputs back to new inputs.

Structural-functional approach: Gabriel Almond, with James Coleman in The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960) and with G. Bingham Powell in Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966), argued that every political system performs the same basic functions through different structures. This made Western and non-Western systems comparable.

Almond's functions: input functions are political socialisation and recruitment, interest articulation, interest aggregation and political communication; output functions are rule-making, rule-application and rule-adjudication.

Political culture approach: Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (1963), surveyed five nations (USA, Britain, West Germany, Italy, Mexico). They identified parochial, subject and participant cultures, and argued that a mixed 'civic culture' best sustains stable democracy.

Political development approach: Lucian Pye described a 'development syndrome' of equality, capacity and differentiation, and listed crises that new states face: identity, legitimacy, penetration, participation, integration and distribution.

Huntington's challenge: Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), argued that rapid social mobilisation without strong institutions produces political decay, not development. He measured institutionalisation by adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence.

Political economy approach: dependency theory, world-systems theory and the developmental state link politics to production and markets (explained in the next topic).

Statist approach: Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (1985), treated the state as an actor with its own autonomy and capacity, not just an arena where groups compete.

New institutionalism: James March and Johan Olsen (1984) revived the study of institutions as rules and norms that shape behaviour. Its three strands are historical institutionalism (path dependence, critical junctures), rational-choice institutionalism (rules shape incentives) and sociological institutionalism (logic of appropriateness).

Rational choice approach: treats actors as self-interested maximisers; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), explained why parties converge on the median voter.

3. The Comparative Method: Logic and Design

Mill's methods: John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843), set out the method of agreement (cases with the same outcome; find the common factor) and the method of difference (cases that differ in outcome; find the factor that differs).

Most similar systems design: compare cases alike in most respects but different in outcome, so the few differences can explain the outcome. Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (1970), discussed this and its opposite.

Most different systems design: compare very different cases that share an outcome, to find the common cause.

Case-oriented and variable-oriented research: small-N studies give depth and context; large-N statistical studies give breadth. Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method (1987), proposed qualitative comparative analysis to combine the two.

Levels of comparison: a single-country study framed comparatively, a focused comparison of two to five countries, or a global statistical comparison.

4. Limitations of the Comparative Method

Many variables, small N: Lijphart's central problem; there are too many possible causes and too few countries to isolate any one cause.

Conceptual stretching: Giovanni Sartori, 'Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics' (APSR, 1970), warned that concepts stretched to cover more cases lose meaning. He proposed a ladder of abstraction to move between general and specific concepts.

Galton's problem: cases are not independent, because ideas and institutions diffuse through colonialism, borrowing and imitation, so similarities may not have separate causes.

Selection bias: choosing cases because of their outcome distorts results; Barbara Geddes made this point in 'How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get' (1990).

Ethnocentrism: Western categories were treated as universal, and modernisation was often equated with Westernisation. The tradition-modernity dichotomy was criticised for misreading non-Western societies.

Data and translation problems: statistics may be unreliable or not comparable, and concepts such as party, caste or civil society mean different things in different settings.

Value bias: much post-war development research was shaped by Cold War concerns, which critics such as Andre Gunder Frank attacked as ideological.

Uniqueness of context: history and culture make each case distinct, so generalisations risk being either trivial or wrong.

Critique of structural-functionalism: it was called static, biased towards the status quo and tautological, and it could not explain change or revolution.

5. Indian Context

India as a deviant case: Seymour Martin Lipset, 'Some Social Requisites of Democracy' (1959), linked democracy to economic development. India sustained democracy at low income and with great diversity, which forced comparativists to revise this link.

Tradition and modernity: Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (1967), showed that caste associations, a traditional structure, performed modern functions such as mobilising voters. This undermined the tradition-modernity dichotomy.

Systems thinking applied to India: Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (1970), used a systems framework and described the 'Congress system' of one-party dominance with internal competition.

Consociational reading: Lijphart, 'The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation' (APSR, 1996), argued that India had grand coalition, cultural autonomy, proportionality and minority veto in practice.

India and Pakistan: a classic most-similar comparison of two states with a shared colonial past and partition in 1947 but different regime paths. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (1995), compared them and questioned a simple democratic-versus-authoritarian contrast.

Comparative constitution-making: the Constituent Assembly borrowed the parliamentary system from Britain, judicial review and fundamental rights from the USA, Directive Principles from Ireland, and the idea of a federation with a strong centre from Canada.

Indian critiques: scholars such as Rajni Kothari and Ashis Nandy questioned the uncritical use of Western models and asked for concepts rooted in Indian experience.

6. Using It in the Exam

10-mark answer: define comparative politics, give one line on the move from traditional to modern study, explain two or three approaches or limitations with thinkers, add an Indian example and close in one line.

20-mark answer: open with Aristotle or Macridis; trace the evolution; discuss approaches with their critiques; explain the limitations and how scholars responded (research designs, new institutionalism); illustrate with India; conclude on the continued value of comparison.

Keywords: comparative method, conceptual stretching, structural-functionalism, civic culture, political development, new institutionalism, ethnocentrism.

Quotation: Rudyard Kipling asked 'What should they know of England who only England know?' (The English Flag, 1891). Lipset echoed the idea that a person who knows only one country knows none (paraphrase).

Tip: never list approaches without critique; pair every approach with its limitation and an example.

1. Meaning of the Two Perspectives

Political economy: studies how power and wealth interact, how states shape markets and how economic interests shape the state. Harold Lasswell's book title Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) captures its distributive concern.

Political sociology: studies the social bases of politics (class, caste, religion, ethnicity, culture) and how politics in turn reshapes society. Marx and Max Weber are its founding figures.

Why they arose: both reacted against the narrow formal-legal approach, and later against behaviouralism's neglect of power and structure. Both are society-centred, unlike state-centred approaches.

Classical roots: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), on markets; Marx's base and superstructure model in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), where the economic base conditions law and politics.

2. Political Economy Perspectives

Modernisation theory: W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), proposed five stages: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity and high mass consumption. Developing countries were expected to follow the Western path.

Structuralist origins of dependency: Raúl Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America argued (with Hans Singer) that the terms of trade of primary-commodity exporters decline over time. Their remedy was import-substitution industrialisation.

Development of underdevelopment: Andre Gunder Frank, in his 1966 Monthly Review essay of that name, argued that underdevelopment is not an original state but is produced by capitalism through a chain of metropolis-satellite relations.

Dependent development: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Spanish 1969, English 1979), argued that growth is possible within dependency ('associated dependent development'), shaped by internal class alliances.

Samir Amin: described unequal exchange between centre and periphery and argued for 'delinking' of peripheral economies from the world system.

World-systems theory: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (first volume 1974), saw a single capitalist world-economy since the sixteenth century divided into core, semi-periphery and periphery. States can move between zones, but the hierarchy remains.

Social origins of regimes: Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), traced three routes to the modern world: bourgeois revolution leading to democracy (England, France, USA), revolution from above leading to fascism (Germany, Japan) and peasant revolution leading to communism (Russia, China). He gave India a separate chapter as a puzzling case.

Bureaucratic authoritarianism: Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (1973), showed that industrialisation in Argentina and Brazil produced military-technocratic regimes, contradicting the optimism of modernisation theory.

Developmental state: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), showed how an elite bureaucracy guided industrial growth. Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy (1995), argued that successful states are autonomous from capture yet embedded in ties with business; he contrasted predatory Zaire, developmental South Korea and intermediate India and Brazil.

Public choice and rent-seeking: James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962), treated politicians and bureaucrats as self-interested. Anne Krueger's 'The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society' (1974) drew on India and Turkey, and Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981), explained policies biased against farmers.

Polanyi: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944), argued that a self-regulating market is a utopia because the economy is embedded in society. Attempts to disembed it provoke a 'double movement' of social protection.

3. Political Sociology Perspectives

Marx: politics reflects class conflict; the Communist Manifesto (1848) called the modern state a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Weber: separated three dimensions of stratification (class, status, party) and three types of legitimate authority (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational). He saw bureaucracy as the defining institution of modern society.

Classical elite theory: Vilfredo Pareto (circulation of elites, 'lions' and 'foxes'), Gaetano Mosca (The Ruling Class; an organised minority always rules) and Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911), with his iron law of oligarchy.

Power elite and pluralism: C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956), found an interlocking military, corporate and political elite in the USA. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (1961), studied New Haven and found power dispersed among competing groups; he later called such systems polyarchies (1971).

Lipset: Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (1960), analysed the social bases of politics and described elections as 'the democratic class struggle'.

Cleavage theory: Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (1967), traced party systems to four cleavages: centre-periphery, state-church, land-industry and owner-worker. Their 'freezing hypothesis' held that the party systems of the 1960s reflected the cleavages of the 1920s.

Culture and values: Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (1977), argued that affluent generations shift from materialist to post-materialist values, changing what politics is about.

Social capital: Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work (1993), found that Italian regional governments worked better where civic traditions and associational life were dense, as in the north.

Revolutions: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979), compared France, Russia and China and explained revolution by state breakdown under international pressure combined with peasant revolt, rather than by revolutionary will.

4. Debates and Critiques

Modernisation versus dependency: dependency theorists blamed external exploitation, while modernisation theorists blamed internal tradition. The rise of the East Asian newly industrialising economies through world markets weakened Frank's strong version of dependency.

Marxist critique of dependency: Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980), argued that capitalism spreads industrial development rather than blocking it.

Society-centred versus state-centred: Skocpol and Evans argued that the state has its own autonomy and capacity, so politics cannot be read off from society or economy alone.

Who rules: elite theorists, pluralists and Marxists still disagree on whether power is concentrated in elites, dispersed among groups or rooted in class.

Reductionism: Giovanni Sartori, 'From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology' (1969), criticised treating politics as a mere product of society. He argued that parties and institutions also shape social cleavages.

Rational choice critique: its critics say it ignores history, culture and identity; its defenders say it gives precise, testable explanations.

Current synthesis: most scholars now combine interests, institutions and ideas rather than relying on one perspective.

5. Indian Context

Bardhan: Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (1984), identified three dominant proprietary classes: industrial capitalists, rich farmers and professionals including the bureaucracy. Their competing claims produced subsidies, fiscal strain and slow growth.

Rudolphs: Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987), contrasted a 'command polity' with a 'demand polity', described 'bullock capitalists' (middle peasants) and argued that class politics remained marginal, giving Indian politics a centrist character.

Kohli: Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development (2004), classified South Korea as a cohesive-capitalist state, Brazil and India as fragmented-multiclass states, and Nigeria as neo-patrimonial.

Licence raj and reform: the rent-seeking critique of import licensing fed into the 1991 reforms, which moved India from a regulatory, planned economy towards markets.

Kothari on caste: Rajni Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics (1970), argued that democracy politicised caste, and that caste was transformed into an interest group rather than destroyed.

Srinivas: M.N. Srinivas described the dominant caste (numbers, landholding, political power and ritual status) and sanskritisation as a route of upward mobility.

Jaffrelot: Christophe Jaffrelot, India's Silent Revolution (2003), traced the rise of lower castes in north Indian politics.

Varshney: Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (2002), found that inter-communal associations explained why some Indian cities stayed peaceful while others saw Hindu-Muslim riots.

Chatterjee: Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004), distinguished civil society (rights-bearing citizens) from political society (the poor who negotiate with the state through mobilisation).

Yadav: Yogendra Yadav described a 'second democratic upsurge' in the 1990s, when the participation of lower castes, tribals and women rose sharply.

6. Using It in the Exam

10-mark answer: define both perspectives, give one thinker for each, and add one Indian illustration.

20-mark answer: contrast them with the institutional approach; explain political economy strands (modernisation, dependency, world-systems, developmental state) and political sociology strands (Marx, Weber, elites, cleavages, social capital); give critiques; apply to India (Bardhan, Rudolphs, Kothari); conclude on synthesis.

Keywords: dependency, core and periphery, developmental state, embedded autonomy, cleavages, social capital, dominant proprietary classes, demand polity.

Quotation: Barrington Moore's dictum 'No bourgeois, no democracy' (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966).

Tip: political economy here means the study of power and distribution, not economics; keep the focus on states, classes and interests.

1. The State: Meaning and Comparative Questions

Weber's definition: in 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919) Max Weber defined the state as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Legal elements: the Montevideo Convention (1933) lists a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

What the syllabus asks: how the characteristics and role of the state differ between capitalist and socialist economies, and between advanced industrial and developing societies, and how these are changing.

Four comparative dimensions: autonomy (from dominant classes and groups), capacity (to implement policy), legitimacy (why people obey) and the relationship with the market.

Despotic and infrastructural power: Michael Mann, 'The Autonomous Power of the State' (1984), separated despotic power (what elites can do without negotiation with society) from infrastructural power (the ability to penetrate society and implement decisions). Modern democracies are low in the first and high in the second.

2. The State in Capitalist Economies

Minimal state: classical liberals from Locke to Adam Smith limited the state to defence, justice and public works. Ferdinand Lassalle mocked this as the 'night-watchman state'.

Keynesian welfare state: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), justified state spending to sustain demand. The Beveridge Report (1942) targeted five giants (want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness) and shaped the post-war welfare consensus.

Three worlds of welfare: Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), classified welfare states as liberal (USA, UK), conservative-corporatist (Germany) and social democratic (Sweden). His key measure was decommodification, the degree to which people can live without depending on the market.

Neoliberal state: from the late 1970s, governments of Margaret Thatcher (from 1979) and Ronald Reagan (from 1981), drawing on Hayek and Milton Friedman, privatised, deregulated and cut taxes. John Williamson's 'Washington Consensus' (1989) carried this model to developing countries.

Regulatory and competition state: the state increasingly regulates through independent agencies rather than owning firms (Giandomenico Majone). Philip Cerny described a 'competition state' that competes to attract mobile capital.

Varieties of capitalism: Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001) contrasted liberal market economies (USA, UK) with coordinated market economies (Germany, Japan), showing that capitalist states do not converge on one model.

Marxist debate on the capitalist state: Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (1969), took an instrumentalist view (state personnel share ties with the capitalist class). Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (1968), took a structuralist view in which the state is relatively autonomous yet serves capital's long-term interests; the two debated in New Left Review (1969 to 1970).

Crisis theories: James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973), argued that the state must both support accumulation and maintain legitimation, which strains its finances. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1973), and Claus Offe described similar contradictions of the welfare state.

Return of the state: bank bailouts after the 2008 crisis, pandemic support after 2020 and the revival of industrial policy show that capitalist states remain active economic actors.

3. The State in Socialist Economies

Marx and Engels: the state is an instrument of class rule; after revolution a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875) would give way to a classless society in which the state 'withers away' (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1878).

Lenin: The State and Revolution (1917) said the bourgeois state must be smashed, not taken over. What Is To Be Done? (1902) set out the vanguard party that would lead the workers.

Main features: fusion of party and state, democratic centralism, state ownership of the means of production, central planning (Soviet five-year plans from 1928), an official ideology and a nomenklatura system of appointments.

Totalitarian model: Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), listed six traits including an official ideology, a single mass party, terror, and monopolies of communication, weapons and economic direction. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), treated Nazism and Stalinism together.

Critiques from within the left: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), described bureaucratic degeneration. Milovan Djilas, The New Class (1957), argued that the party bureaucracy had become a new exploiting class.

Economic critiques: Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944), warned that central planning leads to loss of freedom. János Kornai, Economics of Shortage (1980), showed that socialist firms faced 'soft budget constraints' and chronic shortages.

Collapse of the Soviet model: Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) from 1985 could not save the system, and the USSR dissolved in December 1991. Francis Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' (1989) read this as the victory of liberal democracy.

Chinese path: Deng Xiaoping launched reforms in December 1978, and the 'socialist market economy' was formally adopted in 1992. The Communist Party keeps its political monopoly while markets drive growth, a model often called state capitalism or 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'.

Other reforms: Vietnam's Doi Moi (1986) followed a similar path of market reform under one-party rule.

4. Advanced Industrial and Developing Societies

Advanced industrial states: high capacity, institutionalised bureaucracies, legitimacy through elections and welfare, and interest intermediation through pluralism or corporatism. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), described the shift to a knowledge and service economy.

Overdeveloped post-colonial state: Hamza Alavi, 'The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh' (New Left Review, 1972), argued that the colonial state was built to control the whole society, so it was 'overdeveloped' compared with local classes. Its military-bureaucratic oligarchy stood relatively autonomous, mediating between the metropolitan bourgeoisie, the indigenous bourgeoisie and the landed classes.

Soft state: Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama (1968), described South Asian states as 'soft' because they failed to enforce their own laws and to demand social discipline.

Strong societies, weak states: Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States (1988), argued that in many developing countries social control is fragmented among local strongmen, so states lack capacity to implement policy.

Types of developing states: developmental (South Korea, Taiwan), predatory (Mobutu's Zaire, in Evans's terms), neo-patrimonial (personal rule behind formal institutions, common in sub-Saharan Africa) and fragile or failed states that lose control of territory (Somalia in the 1990s).

Military and praetorianism: Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback (1962), and Huntington's idea of praetorian societies explained frequent military takeovers where civilian institutions were weak.

Nation-building burden: developing states had to build national identity, legitimacy and capacity at the same time, while managing ethnic diversity and mass poverty.

5. Changing Nature of the State

Retreat thesis: Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (1996), argued that markets and non-state actors had taken over functions once held by states. R.A.W. Rhodes described the 'hollowing out' of the British state through privatisation and agencies.

From government to governance: David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government (1992), urged governments to steer rather than row, leading to New Public Management, public-private partnerships and networks.

Security state: after the attacks of 11 September 2001, states expanded surveillance, border control and counter-terror powers.

Comeback of the state: the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and strategic rivalry led to bailouts, stimulus and industrial policy such as the US CHIPS and Science Act (2022).

Convergence debate: Jan Tinbergen (1961) suggested that capitalist and communist economies might converge, with markets borrowing planning and planned economies borrowing markets. China's mix of party rule and markets and the West's new industrial policy have revived this debate.

6. Indian Context

Mixed economy: the Industrial Policy Resolution (1956) and the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy of the Second Five Year Plan gave the public sector the 'commanding heights' while allowing private enterprise.

Constitutional basis: Directive Principles such as Article 38 (a social order based on justice) and Article 39(b) and (c) (distribution of material resources and prevention of concentration of wealth) shape the welfare role. The 42nd Amendment (1976) added 'socialist' to the Preamble, and in November 2024 the Supreme Court dismissed petitions challenging the words 'socialist' and 'secular'.

Article 39(b) reinterpreted: in Property Owners Association v State of Maharashtra (November 2024), a nine-judge bench held by majority that not every privately owned resource is a 'material resource of the community'.

From licence raj to regulatory state: after the 1991 reforms, India built regulators such as SEBI (statutory in 1992), TRAI (1997) and the Competition Commission (Competition Act, 2002).

Welfare models: rights-based laws (MGNREGA 2005, RTI 2005, RTE 2009, National Food Security Act 2013) were followed by Direct Benefit Transfer using the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, mobile), which Arvind Subramanian called a 'new welfarism' of publicly provided private goods.

Theories of the Indian state: Bardhan saw a relatively autonomous state balancing dominant classes; the Rudolphs called it a 'weak-strong' state; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent (1990), described a growing crisis of governability; Sudipta Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee used Gramsci's idea of 'passive revolution' for the post-colonial state.

Comparison with Pakistan: Alavi's overdeveloped-state thesis fits Pakistan's military-bureaucratic dominance, while India kept the civil service and army under elected control.

7. Using It in the Exam

10-mark answer: define the state (Weber), state two or three contrasts between capitalist and socialist or developed and developing states, and give one example.

20-mark answer: begin with Weber or Mann; compare capitalist and socialist states (welfare, neoliberal, party-state, reforms); compare advanced and developing states (Alavi, Myrdal, Migdal, developmental state); discuss changes under globalisation; place India; conclude that the state is being reshaped, not replaced.

Keywords: relative autonomy, overdeveloped state, soft state, developmental state, welfare state, decommodification, party-state, competition state.

Quotation: Weber's definition of the state as claiming 'the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory' (1919).

Tip: do not write two separate essays on capitalist and socialist states; compare them point by point on ownership, planning, legitimacy and change.

1. Political Parties: Meaning and Functions

Burke's definition: Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), defined a party as 'a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed'.

Competitive definition: Joseph Schumpeter and Anthony Downs saw parties as teams of leaders competing for votes to win office, with policies as the means rather than the end.

Functions: representation, aggregation of interests into programmes, recruitment of leaders, formation of governments and oppositions, political socialisation and holding governments to account.

Origins: Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, Political Parties and Political Development (1966), traced parties to parliamentary factions, to historical crises (legitimacy, integration, participation) and to modernisation.

Distinguishing the three: parties contest elections and seek to govern; pressure groups seek influence over specific policies; social movements are looser networks that challenge authorities through protest and may later produce parties or groups.

2. Party Types and Party Systems

Duverger: Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (1951), contrasted cadre parties of notables with mass parties built on membership. Duverger's law holds that plurality voting in single-member districts tends to produce two-party systems, while proportional representation favours multiparty systems.

Michels: Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911), studied the German Social Democrats and concluded that 'who says organisation, says oligarchy': even democratic parties come under the control of a leadership minority.

Catch-all party: Otto Kirchheimer (1966) described West European mass parties shedding ideology, appealing to all voters, strengthening leaders and reducing the role of members.

Electoral-professional and cartel parties: Angelo Panebianco (1988) described parties run by professionals and media experts. Richard Katz and Peter Mair (1995) argued that parties have formed a 'cartel' with the state, living on public funding and limiting competition.

Sartori's typology: Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (1976), classified systems by the number of relevant parties and their ideological distance: one-party, hegemonic, predominant, two-party, moderate pluralism, polarised pluralism and atomised.

Trends in advanced industrial societies: partisan dealignment, falling membership, the rise of green and populist parties and the personalisation of leadership. Peter Mair, Ruling the Void (2013), described a widening gap between parties and citizens.

Parties in developing societies: dominant parties (Congress in India, the PRI in Mexico until 2000, the ANC in South Africa), personality and dynastic parties, clientelism and weak institutionalisation, often interrupted by military rule.

Ethnic parties: Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985), showed that where parties form along ethnic lines, elections can become ethnic censuses and raise conflict.

Party system institutionalisation: Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully (1995) argued that stable roots in society, legitimacy and organisation distinguish institutionalised party systems (Chile) from inchoate ones (Brazil at the time).

3. Pressure Groups

Meaning: organised groups that try to influence public policy without seeking to form the government; also called interest groups. Their methods include lobbying, campaigns, litigation, funding and protest.

Group theory: Arthur Bentley, The Process of Government (1908), and David Truman, The Governmental Process (1951), saw politics as the interaction of groups, with policy as the balance among them.

Almond's typology: institutional groups (army, bureaucracy, church), associational groups (trade unions, business federations), non-associational groups (kinship, caste, region) and anomic groups (spontaneous riots and demonstrations).

Insider and outsider groups: Wyn Grant distinguished groups consulted regularly by government from those that work outside official channels.

Collective action problem: Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), showed that large groups suffer from free-riding, so small, concentrated interests (such as an industry) organise better than diffuse ones (such as consumers) unless selective incentives exist.

Pluralism and corporatism: pluralism assumes many competing groups with open access. Philippe Schmitter, 'Still the Century of Corporatism?' (1974), described corporatism as a limited number of hierarchical, state-recognised groups with representational monopoly, as in tripartite bargaining in Austria and Sweden.

Neo-pluralism: Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (1977), argued that business holds a privileged position because governments depend on it for investment and jobs.

Advanced industrial societies: professional lobbying is extensive and regulated (the US Lobbying Disclosure Act 1995, the EU Transparency Register). The US Supreme Court's Citizens United v FEC (2010) allowed unlimited independent political spending by corporations and unions.

Developing societies: groups are often tied to parties (party-affiliated trade unions and student wings), rely on caste, religious or regional identity, and use anomic methods such as bandhs. Patron-client networks often matter more than formal lobbying.

Pressure groups and democracy: they widen participation and supply expertise, but can entrench inequality, capture regulators and bypass elected bodies.

4. Social Movements

Meaning: Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow describe social movements as sustained campaigns of claim-making by networks of ordinary people against authorities, using repertoires such as marches, petitions and sit-ins.

Old and new social movements: old movements were class-based (labour, peasants) and aimed at redistribution. New social movements since the 1960s (environment, feminism, peace, gay rights) focus on identity, autonomy and quality of life; Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci and Claus Offe theorised them, and Inglehart linked them to post-materialist values.

Theories: relative deprivation (Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 1970); resource mobilisation (John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, 1977); political process and political opportunity structure (Doug McAdam, 1982; Tarrow, Power in Movement, 1994); framing (David Snow and Robert Benford).

Advanced industrial examples: the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, anti-nuclear and green movements that produced the German Greens (1980), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Black Lives Matter (from 2013) and Fridays for Future (from 2018).

Developing-society examples: movements over land, forests, water and displacement, peasant movements, Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST, 1984), the Zapatista uprising in Mexico (1994) and the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010.

Movements of the South: Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution (1993), argued that India's new social movements (Dalit, women's, farmers', environmental) combined material and identity claims, unlike the post-materialist movements of the West.

State responses and outcomes: states repress, co-opt or accommodate movements; successful movements often institutionalise into parties or NGOs, and digital media have made mobilisation faster but sometimes shorter-lived.

5. Indian Context

Party system phases: the Congress system of one-party dominance (Kothari, 1964), the challenge of 1967, Janata rule in 1977, the coalition era from 1989 to 2014, and BJP dominance after 2014, which some scholars describe as a new dominant-party system.

Legal framework: Article 19(1)(c) (right to form associations), the Tenth Schedule (52nd Amendment, 1985) against defection, tightened by the 91st Amendment (2003), registration under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act 1951, and the Election Symbols Order (1968). In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme (ADR v Union of India).

Pressure groups: business bodies (FICCI, founded 1927; CII; ASSOCHAM), trade unions (AITUC, 1920; INTUC; BMS), farmers' organisations (Bharatiya Kisan Union, Shetkari Sanghatana) and caste associations. India has no lobbying law, so influence works through informal access.

Social movements: Chipko (1973), Dalit Panthers (1972), Narmada Bachao Andolan (from 1985), the anti-arrack movement in Andhra Pradesh (early 1990s), the MKSS right-to-information campaign in Rajasthan that led to the RTI Act 2005, India Against Corruption (2011) that pushed the Lokpal Act 2013, and the farmers' protests of 2020 to 2021 that led to the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021.

Non-party political process: Rajni Kothari, 'The Non-Party Political Process' (Economic and Political Weekly, 1984), described grassroots groups that worked outside parties to defend the poor and marginalised.

Movements becoming parties: the Assam Movement produced the Asom Gana Parishad (1985), the Telangana movement strengthened the TRS, and India Against Corruption produced the Aam Aadmi Party (2012).

Comparative point: anomic and street-based pressure (bandhs, rasta roko) remains common in India, showing how formal channels of influence are still uneven.

6. Using It in the Exam

10-mark answer: define the concept, give one typology or theory, compare an advanced and a developing society in two lines, and add an Indian example.

20-mark answer: define and distinguish parties, groups and movements; present theories (Duverger, Kirchheimer, Sartori; Olson, Schmitter; resource mobilisation, new social movements); compare advanced and developing societies; illustrate with India; conclude on their role in deepening democracy.

Keywords: catch-all party, cartel party, dominant party system, iron law of oligarchy, collective action, corporatism, new social movements, political opportunity structure.

Quotation: Michels, 'who says organisation, says oligarchy' (Political Parties, 1911); E.E. Schattschneider's line in The Semisovereign People (1960) that the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.

Tip: the syllabus asks for comparison; every paragraph should contrast advanced industrial and developing societies, not describe one alone.

1. Meaning and Dimensions

Giddens's definition: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (1990), defined globalisation as 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa'.

Dimensions: economic (trade, foreign investment, finance and global value chains), political (international organisations and global governance), cultural (media, consumption, migration), technological (internet, logistics) and ecological (climate change, pandemics).

Drivers: new technology (container shipping, the internet), liberalising policies, the end of the Cold War, multinational corporations and institutions such as the WTO (1995).

Waves: a first globalisation from about 1870 to 1914, managed post-war integration under Bretton Woods, 'hyperglobalisation' after 1990, and a slowdown after the 2008 crisis that commentators called 'slowbalisation'.

Time-space compression: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), described how capitalism speeds up life and shrinks distance.

2. The Globalisation Debate

Three schools: David Held, Anthony McGrew and colleagues, Global Transformations (1999), sorted views into hyperglobalists, sceptics and transformationalists.

Hyperglobalists: Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World (1990) and The End of the Nation State (1995), argued that markets had made the nation-state obsolete as an economic unit. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), said states must wear a 'golden straitjacket' of market-friendly policies, and later wrote The World Is Flat (2005).

Sceptics: Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (1996), argued that the world economy was international rather than truly global, concentrated in North America, Europe and Japan, and no more open than before 1914.

Transformationalists: Held and Giddens argued that globalisation is real but uneven, and that it reshapes state power rather than ending it.

Critical views: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), saw globalisation as a project to restore class power; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), described a decentred network of global sovereignty.

3. Responses from Developed Societies

Embrace: Thatcher and Reagan liberalised trade and finance; the 'Third Way' of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (theorised by Giddens, The Third Way, 1998) accepted markets while investing in skills. Regional integration deepened through the EU single market (1993), the euro (1999) and NAFTA (1994).

Welfare debate: the 'race to the bottom' thesis predicted that capital mobility would force welfare cuts. Dani Rodrik's 1998 study 'Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?' and Geoffrey Garrett's work found instead that open economies often spend more to compensate those exposed to risk.

Adaptation: Denmark's 'flexicurity' combined easy hiring and firing with generous unemployment support and retraining.

Early resistance: the 'Battle of Seattle' protests at the WTO ministerial meeting (November 1999) gave visibility to an anti- or alter-globalisation movement of unions, environmentalists and NGOs.

China shock: economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that US regions most exposed to Chinese imports after 2001 suffered lasting job losses, which later fed political anger.

Populist backlash: the Brexit referendum (June 2016) with its slogan 'take back control', Donald Trump's 'America First' presidency (from 2017) and the US-China tariff war (from 2018), and the rise of anti-immigration parties in Europe.

New industrial policy: developed states now pursue reshoring, 'friend-shoring' and 'de-risking' of supply chains, subsidies such as the US CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act (both 2022), technology export controls and the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

Rodrik's trilemma: Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011), argued that a country cannot have hyperglobalisation, democracy and national self-determination at once; it can have at most two.

Polanyi's lens: the backlash can be read as Karl Polanyi's 'double movement', in which society protects itself against market disruption.

Cultural protection: France defended a 'cultural exception' to keep audiovisual sectors out of trade liberalisation.

4. Responses from Developing Societies

Adjustment: after the 1982 debt crisis, many countries accepted IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes based on the Washington Consensus; Latin America's 1980s became known as the 'lost decade'.

East Asian path: South Korea, Taiwan and later China (reforms from 1978, WTO entry in December 2001) integrated through export-led growth guided by strong states, rather than by pure liberalisation.

Financial crises: the Mexican crisis (1994 to 1995) and the Asian financial crisis (1997 to 1998) led countries such as Malaysia to impose capital controls. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), criticised IMF conditionality.

Resistance: the Zapatista uprising began on 1 January 1994, the day NAFTA came into force; the World Social Forum met first at Porto Alegre in 2001 under the slogan 'Another world is possible'; Bolivia's Cochabamba 'water war' (2000) reversed a water privatisation; Latin America's 'pink tide' brought left governments to power in the 2000s.

Bargaining coalitions: at the WTO Cancún ministerial (2003) a G-20 group of developing countries led by Brazil and India resisted rich-country farm subsidies. The Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health (2001) affirmed the right to protect public health, including through compulsory licensing.

New institutions: BRICS held its first summit in 2009 and created the New Development Bank (agreed 2014); the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank began operations in 2016.

Africa: commodity dependence persists, but the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement entered into force in 2019 to build regional markets.

Pro-globalisation case: Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (2004), argued that trade-led growth reduces poverty and that the problem is poor management, not globalisation itself.

Uneven gains: Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality (2016), presented the 'elephant curve': large gains for Asia's emerging middle classes and the global top 1 percent, and stagnation for the lower-middle classes of rich countries.

5. Cultural Globalisation and Identity

Homogenisation: George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (1993), described the spread of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control.

Hybridity: Roland Robertson's 'glocalisation' and Arjun Appadurai's five 'scapes' in Modernity at Large (1996) (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes) show that the global is adapted locally.

Identity backlash: Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs McWorld (1995), saw global consumerism and tribal reaction feeding each other; Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' thesis (article 1993, book 1996) predicted conflict along cultural lines.

Developing-society view: cultural globalisation is often seen as Westernisation, prompting revivalist and nationalist responses as well as creative hybrids.

6. Indian Context

1991 turning point: a balance of payments crisis, with gold pledged abroad to raise foreign exchange, led to the New Industrial Policy (July 1991) and the liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG) reforms.

India in the WTO: a founding member in 1995, India has defended food security and farm support; the Bali ministerial (2013) agreed an interim 'peace clause' protecting public stockholding programmes.

Services-led integration: India integrated through information technology services and a large diaspora; it has for many years been the world's largest recipient of remittances.

Domestic responses: the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (1991) and farmers' and trade union groups opposed parts of liberalisation; India withdrew from the RCEP negotiations in November 2019, citing concerns over imports, especially from China.

Self-reliance and selective openness: 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' (2020) and Production Linked Incentive schemes coexist with new trade agreements with the UAE (2022), Australia (2022) and the EFTA states (2024), and India and the UK concluded FTA negotiations in May 2025.

Federal angle: states now compete for investment, a pattern often called competitive federalism.

Critique: critics point to jobless growth, agrarian distress and rising inequality, while supporters point to faster growth and poverty reduction since 1991.

7. Using It in the Exam

10-mark answer: define globalisation (Giddens), state the three schools in two lines, and give one response each from a developed and a developing society.

20-mark answer: define; outline the debate; analyse developed-country responses (embrace, welfare adaptation, backlash, industrial policy) and developing-country responses (adjustment, East Asian path, resistance, coalitions); bring in India; conclude with Rodrik's trilemma or the idea of a reshaped, not reversed, globalisation.

Keywords: hyperglobalisation, Washington Consensus, structural adjustment, race to the bottom, double movement, trilemma, de-risking, glocalisation.

Quotations: Giddens's definition above; the World Social Forum slogan 'Another world is possible'.

Tip: avoid one-sided praise or condemnation; examiners reward answers that show how responses differ by country, class and sector.