Comparative Politics: Liberty and Policy as Variables

Political science has been greatly stimulated in recent years by the invention of new designs for the comparative analysis of political systems. The diversity of these designs, however, risks creating a situation in which it may be difficult to derive agreed conceptual tools. Any points of convergence which can be found, therefore, and particularly in contrasting comparative designs, need to be emphasized. The purpose of this note is to show that in two recent designs for comparative analysis which are divergent in purpose, method and universe of application, there is a convergence on two fundamental points. The first is that liberty, taken to mean freedom of criticism and of discussion, is a major variable for comparative analysis. The second is that once liberty has been employed as a variable, it is necessary to employ policy as a secondary variable in order to discriminate among those political systems in which freedom of discussion does not exist or is severely limited.Neither of the systems of comparative analysis which I will discuss, one constructed by Raymond Aron and the other by Gabriel Almond, explicitly employs either liberty or policy as variables. In fact, Aron makes a deliberate effort to avoid using liberty as a variable, and policy is implicitly ruled out of Almond's design by his reliance on functional categories. Yet both authors implicitly take freedom of discussion as a major variable, and when they discuss totalitarian regimes they both employ additional variables which can be subsumed under the heading of policy.