Broadly speaking, we may say that all Political Science begins comparative politics. It means that whenever a person notes that anoth country is not governed in the same way as his own country, he has undertaken comparative st,udy of politics. He then asks, why is it so an which is better? This kind of comparison is the basis of Comparati Politics. Interestingly enough, it was how the ancient Greeks began study of politics more than two thousand and five hundred years ago. The compared the political life in their city-States with that of the and Persians, Egyptians and other peoples around their country. Thus comparative method became the foundation of Political Science.
However, Comparative Politics, which is also known Comparative Government, is a recent development. For more than fi centuries, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, Political Science was m ‘ even exclusively* the study of national politics of the various Euro~ countries, USA and of the “white” Dominions of the Bri’ Commonwealth. But, from the middle of the twentieth century, two fi led to the growth of comparative politics. They are (i) the behave .movement and (ii) the rise of independent national States in the World, especially after the Second World War (1939-1945). Comp Politics may be defined as the comparative study of the variations differences in the political institutions and activities of various count the world for the purpose of discovering causal factors which ace these variations.
For the proper understanding of politics, it is neces study the political institutions and activities in all kinds of Sta governments in the whole world. The principal concept of Comp Politics is the political system. It means it is a study of political socialization, inputs, like interest articulation and aggre decision making or rule and policy making as outputs, and feedback. It is a
comparative study of the political systems in order to identify uniformities and differences in them. In other words, Comparative Politics is the structural-functional analysis of the political systems, the classification of their types, the study of the forms of their development and the observation of the many variations of actual political systems. It builds models of their essential elements and functions.
It provides us with die laws or uniformities in political behavior and process. However, this method has its limitations, for comparisons may be misunderstood or superficial. Later on, we shall discuss the concept of political systems and their various types in greater details.