ABSTRACT
The study of comparative politics has come a long way since its inception
more than a century ago. The initial focus on the nature and characteristics
of the state and its constituent institutions remained resilient for a number
of decades and has never been fully cast aside, its latter-day theoretical
refurbishing and resurrection the subject of much scholarly excitement and
debate since the 1980s. The ‘‘behavioralists’’ and other proponents of sys-
tems theory have lost much ground since the 1960s and 1970s, when their
theories of social input and political output closely resembled the revolutionary air of most Western societies at the time. To this day, nevertheless,
such ardent proponents of the functionalist perspective as Gabriel Almond
remain convinced of the paradigm’s superior merits. Drawing on some of
the insights and contributions of each of these differing paradigms, in the
preceding chapters I have sought to bring into sharper focus a recurring
theme in much of the recent literature in the discipline, namely attention to
the separate phenomena of state and society as well as their interactions.
