ABSTRACT
Inquiry into the nature of politics seeks to incorporate methods of science. This chapter focuses on the search to formulate, and the struggle to maintain, a paradigm in the field of comparative politics. First, it examines three approaches that have dominated the field during the past century: the traditional, behavioral, and postbehavioral approaches. Next, the chapter reviews the historical roots and the fundamental premises of the paradigmatic search. It also examines positivist thought and the legacy of thinking and conceptualization that have shaped the movement to establish a mainstream paradigm. In this regard of the early positivists, the chapter briefly discusses and identifies the early political sociologists, and the early behaviorists. It explores historicist thought, influential in the movement to seek an alternative paradigm and identifies the early historicists as well as the later historicist trends. Finally, the chapter contrasts and compares the characteristics of these dominant paradigms in comparative politics.
