Comparison Misconceived: Common Nonsense in Comparative Politics

Research contributing to a general science of politics requires the use of concepts that overcome the limitations of partial application. Some political scientists have therefore attempted to develop concepts that would permit comparison among the entire range of political systems. David Easton's systems approach to political phenomena, for example, specifies that the conversion of support and demands into authoritative allocations is a process that operates in all political systems-ranging from the most democratic to the most totalitarian. Both the Anglo-American and Sino-Soviet systems can be assessed in terms of, say, support. The conceptual framework represented by the systems approach is designed to explore more than simply one class of political systems.' This does not mean that the levels of support actually found in extremely different systems need to be similar. Quite the contrary: it may be that in one system there is high or positive support, in another only acquiescence, indifference, or apathy, and in a third an actual withdrawal of all support so that there is incipient hostility or open opposition.2 The point is that a measure of support may be applied even to those systems lacking support, and so the use of support as a common or universal conceptual dimension allows us to compare all political systems in order to determine not only their similarities but also their differences. Analogous to support, political culture has been proposed by Gabriel A.