Discuss the interpretive approach to the study of comparative politics.

What the approach claims

Max Weber’s verstehen asked the analyst to grasp the subjective meaning of action. Clifford Geertz’s thick description treated a ritual, a courtroom or a vote as a text that must be read in a local language of symbols. Charles Taylor argued that social science cannot copy physics because humans are self-interpreting. In comparative politics this becomes a method: constitutions, elections and revolutions are compared through the stories, categories and practices that make them intelligible to participants.

The approach grew as a reply to mid-century behaviouralism, which privileged surveys, covering laws and a search for universal regularities. Interpretivists do not deny that turnout can be counted. They deny that the count is the whole of politics. A vote in a consociational bargain, a vote in a clientelist village, and a vote in a polarised presidential republic may share a ballot paper and not share a meaning.

What it explains

It explains legitimacy, nationalism, religious politics and everyday the state. Why do similar federal texts produce unlike centre–state fights. Why does a coup in one country look like liberation and in another like crime. Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, James Scott’s hidden transcripts of resistance, and ethnographic work on Indian elections sit in this family even when the authors are not labelled ‘interpretivists’ on a syllabus list. Comparative politics needs this layer because culture is not a residual. It is how power is recognised.

The method uses ethnography, discourse analysis, history and close reading of law as practised, not only as printed. Cases are often few and deep. The payoff is a map of political languages: civic republicanism in one setting, divine kingship in another, developmental nationalism in a third.

Limits

Interpretation can slide into relativism, where every practice is only ‘true for them’ and comparison dies. It can become impressionistic if the scholar’s reading is not checked against archives, votes and budgets. Theda Skocpol and historical institutionalists remind us that organisations, armies and tax systems constrain what meanings can do. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system and class analysis remind us that meaning sits inside a material hierarchy of core and periphery. The interpretive approach is strongest as a necessary reading of politics, not as a claim that structures do not exist.