Discuss the psychological approach to the study of comparative politics. (Answer in 150 words)

- Discuss the psychological approach to the study of comparative politics. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
The psychological approach explains politics by the motives, personality and beliefs of actors, making the mind rather than the constitution the unit of comparison. It entered the discipline with the behavioural revolution.

Body
1. Personality as political cause: Lasswell's Psychopathology and Politics (1930) held that private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalised as public interest.
2. Authoritarianism: Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) traced susceptibility to fascism through the F-scale, a method later used to compare regime support.
3. Political culture: Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) aggregated attitudes into parochial, subject and participant orientations and linked them to democratic stability across five countries.
4. Psychobiography: Erikson's Gandhi's Truth (1969) and Lucian Pye's work on Burma read nation-building through leaders' identity crises.
5. The critique: it risks reductionism and the ecological fallacy, and Marxist and institutional scholars object that it converts structural inequality into individual temperament.

Conclusion
The approach reaches what institutional comparison cannot: legitimacy, obedience and leadership. Its findings hold only when nested within structural explanation rather than substituted for it.