Provide a comparative analysis of behavioural and institutional approach to the study of political theory. (Answer in 350 words)

- Provide a comparative analysis of behavioural and institutional approach to the study of political theory. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
The institutional approach studies the formal architecture of government; behaviouralism studies the observable conduct of the individuals who inhabit it. The contrast is between a legal-historical discipline and an aspiring empirical science.

Body

1. Lineage and exemplars: Institutionalism runs from Aristotle's comparison of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions through Bryce's Modern Democracies, Dicey's Law of the Constitution and Herman Finer. Behaviouralism is a mid-twentieth-century American creation: Merriam's Chicago School, Lasswell, David Truman and David Easton.
2. Unit of analysis: The institutionalist studies the office, the constitution and the statute; the behaviouralist studies voting, attitudes, socialisation and political culture, on the premise that only individuals act.
3. Method: Legal, historical and descriptive single-country study, against Easton's eight intellectual foundation stones of regularities, verification, technique, quantification, values, systematisation, pure science and integration. Sampling, survey research and statistics replace textual exegesis.
4. Stance on values: Institutionalism is openly prescriptive about good government; behaviouralism insists that ethical evaluation and empirical explanation be kept analytically distinct, and aspires to a value-free science.
5. Theoretical ambition: Institutionalism produced description without general theory. Behaviouralism sought testable cross-national generalisation, yielding Easton's systems analysis of inputs, conversion, outputs and feedback, and Almond's structural-functional categories.
6. Scope: Institutionalism is state-centred and formal; behaviouralism reaches the informal world of pressure groups, elites and party organisation, as in Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture and Dahl's Who Governs.
7. Their respective failures: Institutionalism could not explain why identical constitutions yield different politics, and was parochially Western. Behaviouralism was charged with triviality and status-quo bias; Easton conceded much of this in his 1969 credo of relevance, opening post-behaviouralism.
8. The convergence: New institutionalism, in March and Olsen and in Skocpol's call to bring the state back in, restores institutions as independent variables while keeping empirical rigour, in rational-choice, historical and sociological forms.

Conclusion
They are complementary rather than rival: rules without behaviour is formalism, behaviour without rules is sociology. Indian political science has travelled the same road, from Granville Austin's constitutional scholarship to the survey-based election studies of Lokniti, and the questions of federalism and judicial review remain irreducibly institutional.