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Comparative politics, as a core subfield of political science, emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the central question of explaining variation in political systems, institutions, and behaviors across different countries and contexts. Its evolution is marked by a series of dominant paradigms, each with distinct theoretical assumptions and methodological preferences, often arising in reaction to perceived limitations in prior approaches.
The field’s modern foundations were laid by the Old Institutionalism, which dominated from the early 1900s through the mid-20th century. This tradition focused on formal, legalistic descriptions of state structures—constitutions, legislatures, and administrative bodies—often in a historical and normative mode, emphasizing the uniqueness of national political development. Its static and descriptive nature was challenged by the behavioral revolution sweeping the social sciences in the 1950s. In comparative politics, this gave rise to Structural-Functionalism, a paradigm heavily influenced by Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Almond, which shifted attention from formal rules to the functions performed by political systems (e.g., interest articulation, rule-making) to maintain societal equilibrium. It sought universal categories for comparing all political systems, from democracies to authoritarian regimes.
By the late 1960s, Structural-Functionalism was criticized for its conservative bias, inability to explain conflict and change, and vague operationalization. This precipitated a turn toward more historically grounded, materialist explanations. Modernization Theory, which posited a linear path from traditional to modern society culminating in liberal democracy, was challenged by Dependency Theory and World-Systems Theory. These rival frameworks, emerging from Latin American and neo-Marxist scholarship, argued that underdevelopment in the periphery was a direct consequence of exploitation by core capitalist states, reversing the causal logic of modernization.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a "bringing the state back in" movement and a renewed focus on institutions, but now theorized as dynamic, rule-based constructs that shape political strategies and outcomes. This New Institutionalism fragmented into several distinct strands. Rational Choice Institutionalism, applying microeconomic logic, analyzed institutions as solutions to collective action problems. Historical Institutionalism emphasized path dependence and the long-term impact of critical junctures. Sociological Institutionalism focused on how culturally embedded norms and scripts constitute political actors. These schools coexisted and often competed, with Rational Choice and Historical Institutionalism becoming particularly prominent research programs.
Concurrently, other major paradigms solidified. The Comparative Political Economy tradition, integrating insights from economics, systematically analyzed the interaction between politics and markets, focusing on varieties of capitalism, welfare states, and development models. Another significant approach was Comparative Authoritarianism, which moved beyond simple democracy-autocracy dichotomies to theorize the sub-types, resilience, and dynamics of non-democratic regimes.
More recently, the field has been characterized by methodological pluralism and mid-range theory building, though several broader trends are visible. There is a sustained emphasis on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and mixed methods, alongside continued refinement of advanced statistical techniques for causal inference. The rise of Subnational Comparative Method has shifted the unit of analysis within countries. Furthermore, critiques from Postcolonial Theory and Critical Comparative Politics have challenged the field’s Western-centric assumptions and urged deeper engagement with contextual specificity and power hierarchies in knowledge production. While no single paradigm dominates the contemporary landscape, the institutionalist frameworks and comparative political economy remain central pillars of the subfield.
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