Behavioralism in Political Science

Richard J. Gelles, Heinz Eulau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138519374
• eBook ISBN: 9781351314343
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Changes in the thinking of science are usually accompanied by lively intellectual conflicts between opposing or divergent points of view. The clash of ideas is a major ingredient in the stimulation of the life of the mind in human culture. Such arguments and counter-arguments, of proofs and disproofs, permit changes in the arts and sciences to take place. Political science is not exempt from these conflicts.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the study of politics has been rocked by disagreements over its scope, theories, and methods. These disagreements were somewhat less frequent than in most sciences, natural or behavioral, but they have been at times bitter and persuasive. The subject matter of political science politics and all that is involved in politics has a halo effect. The stakes of politics make people fight and sometimes die for what they claim as their due. Political scientists seem to confuse academic with political stakes, behaving as if the victories and defeats on the battleground of the intellect resemble those on the battleground of political life.

Three issues seem critical to political science at the time this volume first appeared in the 1960s: First, disagreement over the nature of the knowledge of political things is a science of politics possible, or is the study of politics a matter of philosophy? Second, controversy over the place of values in the study of politics a controversy that makes for a great deal of confusion. Third, disagreements over the basic units of analysis in the study of politics'should the political scientist study individual and collective behavior, or limit the work to the study of institutions and large-scale processes? This collection brings together the most persuasive writings on these topics in the mid-1960s.

1 : The Condition of American Political Science

DAVID EASTON

Since the Civil War, American political science has come a long way in company with other social sciences. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was scarcely discernible as a separate teaching or research discipline.¹ While there are no exact data on the number of college and university instructors devoting most of their time to the study and teaching of politics, one author suggests that in 1900 they did not exceed a hundred.² As late as 1914 a typical large university offered at most twenty courses devoted to political science; and in a sample of three hundred universities and colleges, only thirty-eight maintained separate departments for the study of politics.³

Today the figures alone testify to the tremendous strides taken in political research. Full-time teachers of the subject exceed a thousand and the number of teachers engaged in one way or another in teaching it reaches almost five thousand.⁴ It is not unusual to find the larger universities each offering thirty to forty courses in the subject. Certainly no university or college of repute could afford to be without an administratively independent department of political science. This numerical strength of political science and its crystallization as a discipline are simply an index of the vast corps of workers now available for inquiry into the various aspects of domestic and international relations. Research has in fact ranged from the minute problems of personnel selection for municipal government to the unbounded horizons of international conflict, and from the activity of the individual in local politics to the interaction of national collectivities in a world society.

This wealth of accessible knowledge has helped to carry the political scientist into the turbulent stream of policy formation. At the turn of the century, training in political science alone was seldom sufficient to bring an invitation from official public agencies for consultation. Statesmen, complained Lowell early in the century, do not turn to professors of political science for advice.⁵ Today the ties between national or state capitols and university circles are strong and numerous. The historic report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management was almost exclusively the work of specialists with formal training in political science; and the recent Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of Government drew heavily upon their knowledge. The frustrating fact, for many political scientists, that their advice about means has often fallen on deaf ears is as much a commentary on the vagaries of policy conflicts within the political process as on the validity of the suggestions. It is true that with the exception of public administration, formal education in political science has not achieved the recognition in government circles accorded, say, economics or psychology.⁶ Nevertheless, the demands made on political scientists during the recent war were heavy enough to raise the question in not a few universities as to where the immediate obligation of the teacher in political science lay, to his students or to his government.

Yet, in spite of undeniable accomplishments, and in spite of the fact that every year there are millions of valuable and talented man-hours devoted to political research and its communication to others, the condition of American political science is disturbing and disappointing, if not in absolute results at least in terms of what is possible. That it falls short of what is needed is not subject to dispute; that it has failed to maximize its inherent and available potentialities is a more controversial matter.

To each generation its crucial political problems seem never to have been matched before; nevertheless, by any measure, a civilization has seldom been faced with a crisis weighted with graver consequences than that confronting us today. In the face of an urgent need for some reliable knowledge as an aid in solving our perplexities, whatever the enthusiasm and admiration for the present accomplishments of political research, honesty would compel an unimpassioned observer to confess that the fund of political knowledge falls far short of what is required. Other social sciences can still offer little enough; the whole corpus of social research is at so early a stage in its growth. Over twenty years ago Frederic Ogg complained in a biting evaluation of the trends in social research that “the meagerness of first-rate American contributions to philosophy, philology, political science … reveals the immaturity of our culture. Plenty of research work, of a kind, is all the time in progress. Quantitatively, there is little ground for complaint. But a considerable proportion of the studies undertaken are ill-planned, crudely executed, and barren of significant result.”⁷ Since that date great strides have been taken in the study of politics, but it lags far behind the other social sciences.

If the condition of political science represented the exhaustion of its present potentialities, then there would be little justification in voicing any concern about it. But comparison with the level of achievement of other social sciences demonstrates what political science could be doing. However much students of political life may seek to escape the taint, if they were to eavesdrop on the whisperings of their fellow social scientists, they would find that they are almost generally stigmatized as the least advanced. They could present society, they would hear, with at least a slice of bread but they offer it only a crumb. However hard this may fall on their ears, and however incendiary it may be to their professional pride, it must be the starting point for a forthright, even though at times distressing, discussion of the present condition of political science.

Political research has still to penetrate to the hard core of political power in society. Each revision or reaffirmation of social policy, if it is to be effective, must depend on reliable knowledge about the distribution of social power. Without this knowledge, there can be little assurance about the way in which political decisions will be formulated and about the degree to which, once adopted, they will be realized in practice. In spite of the intensive research activity of the last seventy-five years only limited knowledge can as yet be offered on the fundamental distribution of power among the basic social aggregates. Instead, in examining the way in which social groups interact in the creation and execution of policy, there has been a pronounced inclination in political research to assume the stability of the basic power pattern within which this interaction takes place. As a whole, political science has viewed the fundamental patterns of influence as given and has sought largely to trace the way in which the political process functions within this pattern. Not that it has disregarded the broader problem entirely, for there are numerous insights, supported with evidence in varying degrees, to suggest that the bulk of power lies with a political class, with the bureaucracy, or in some vague way with the people. But the energies of the discipline as a whole have not been given to developing consistent and integrated research in order that it might identify the major variables affecting power relations and the significant kinds of data to be observed. Solutions to these problems are inescapable prerequisites for the description of the basic power distribution in society.

However fashionable it may be today to talk about power and the power struggle, only occasionally have these lacunae in political research been observed. V. O. Key has complained that “the pattern of the allocation of values through politics has not been explored enough to permit ready collation” for a “study of politics as status [that] would furnish for a given moment a picture of the pattern of power and of the distribution of those ends or objectives that are gained through political power.”⁸ But research still concentrates on the trees.

Without reliable knowlege about the configurations of power, the determinants and knowable consequences of policy will continue to be vague and scientifically unforeseeable. Indeed, such is the state of political research that it is not uncommon to hear that many a Washington columnist has an intimate insight into and reliable knowledge of political life envied by most political scientists. The same cannot be said about the businessman’s knowledge of economics or the visitor’s insights into a foreign culture as compared with the respective generalizations of the economist or the cultural anthropologist. Unless political research is able to throw some light on the sources and knowable consequences of policy to give a more reliable picture than the insight of the well-informed layman—in this case the politician, the administrator, and those, like top-level columnists or lobbyists, whose job it is to know—the existence of a special political discipline will indeed take a good deal of explaining.

Not only is there a lack of knowledge about the locus of political power, but students of political life have also been prone to forget that the really crucial problems of social research are concerned with the patterns of change. No social institution is stationary; it is in continuous, if at times imperceptible, change. The idea of stationary conditions is an artificial abstraction necessary only as a means for simplifying changing reality. Its value lies in the fact that ultimately we shall be able to explain how we get from one moment to another in history. Yet, in spite of the acceptance as axiomatic, of Heraclitus’s well-known propositions about change, over the last seventy-five years political research has confined itself largely to the study of given conditions to the neglect of political change.

Aside from a brief period in the twenties and thirties, when it was fashionable to study revolutions as climactic moments in a process of change, and with the further exception of a sporadic and minor interest in the genesis and course of political movements, political science has viewed its task as one of discovering how ‘political institutions function today and what may happen in the immediate tomorrow. Although political scientists are taught to criticize fifth-century Greek thought for its dangerous and indeed fatal search for the conditions of stability, it is a tragedy of contemporary research that it too stands committed to the investigation of similar conditions. In fact, the preoccupation of contemporary political research with stationary conditions has even graver consequences than the similar preoccupation of the Greeks. The critical inclinations of the latter stand in marked contrast to the strong predisposition in American political research to view the going political system as though, with all its avowed imperfections, it were the best of all possible practical worlds. For this reason it is in Candide’s tutor, Pangloss, not in the hypercritical Greeks, that we see the image in caricature of the modern political scientist.

Political research was not always thus chained to the present. In the great age of liberal speculation and inquiry, especially in the early nineteenth century, the going political systems were always under the questioning scrutiny of skeptical social philosophers. As the work of any of the prominent nineteenth-century social philosophers, such as Comte or Marx, illustrates, they were interested in projecting present trends into the future. They stood on top of their world to see what a new world might be like; this was the occasion for an abortive attempt to define the laws of social change. Today political research seldom transcends the frame of reference of its own age. However painful it may be to admit, political research leaves the impression that the study of the sources and the direction of basic change is not of great consequence or urgency.

Furthermore, if we look at this research for its exactness of meaning and concreteness of reference, we find that here too it is wanting. At the earliest stage in the growth of social science, the stage out of which we may hope it is now passing, propositions are inevitably formulated as insights rather than as research statements. The initial identification of relevant variables and their relationships is always the work of a talented, uncurbed imagination.⁹ At this exploratory stage the important thing is to grope one’s way to a vague and not necessarily precise discovery of the vital elements and their connections, to obtain the insights. The activity of the imagination here is largely a matter of art about which we know little¹⁰ and it is of course the difference between keen imagination and pedestrian perception that separates the great from the mediocre political scientist. But whatever talent the insights may mirror, the first stage in any social science is clearly that of discovery, without too much concern for the rigor of the formulation of the propositions or the precision of meaning of the concepts.

When we look at the greater part of political research over the past several decades we cannot help but conclude that it shows evidence of still being in this earliest stage and, what is disturbing, it seems to be perpetuating this condition today. It exerts little effort to raise itself to the next stage. The major concepts, for example, are still frustratingly unclear. A science, it is often said, is as strong as its concepts; and if this is true, the vague, ill-defined concepts unfortunately so typical of research in political science reduce the discipline to a low position on a scale of maturity in the social sciences.¹¹ It is the rule rather than the exception to find difficulty in referring political concepts back to the things to which presumably they refer.

Part of this difficulty results from the very scope of the terms. Concepts such as “dictatorship,” “class,” “sovereignty,” “responsibility,”¹² and the like convey such broad meanings that it is possible for a number of students to use them apparently with reference to the same social phenomena but in fact with reference to considerably different things. In other cases the concepts such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “equality,” “rights,” “democracy,” and so forth provide the additional difficulty of conveying both factual and distinctly evaluative meanings in research which presumably seeks to be primarily empirical. If, for empirical research, we define a good concept as one that refers to an identifiable set of facts and that can be explained in terms of the operations needed to discover these facts, then a good part of the terminology used in political science falls far short of this standard.

The imprecision of the concepts explains in large part the reasons why there are such differences about political generalizations. With ambiguous terms the generalizations themselves become very broad and vaguely worded; the consequence is that definitive confirmation or invalidation for any given time is impossible. One set of political scientists can argue that planning and dictatorship are unalterably associated; another can demonstrate the contrary. One can maintain that the separation of powers acts as a restraint on political power; another can prove that it really makes possible the capricious and irresponsible exercise of power. It is possible to do for the whole of political science what one student has done for public administration; namely, to show that, like folk proverbs, for each principle supported by considerable evidence there is a contradictory one supportable by evidence of equal weight.¹³ The result is that all too often we have propositions, the subjects and predicates of which are so poorly defined that the meticulous student of politics finds it impossible to judge between conflicting statements.

I do not intend these remarks to depreciate the value of existing political knowledge. On the contrary, traditional political science has attracted and continues to attract to its approach some of the brilliant minds of each generation. In consequence it could not help but offer penetrating insights into the nature of the political process and the operation of political institutions; nor could it fail to identify crucial variables that must be examined more systematically. Twenty-five years ago such knowledge was at the forefront of the social sciences. Today it is still vital. But political research has now reached a point where it is possible to take what are essentially insights, to refine them, and to begin to examine them more rigorously. It is not a matter of discarding or spurning the results of what has come to be called traditional political research. It is a matter, where...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Tradition and Innovation: On the Tension between Ancient and Modern Ways in the Study of Politics
• 1 : The Condition of American Political Science
• 2 : The Impact on Political Science of the Revolution
• 3 : The Behavioral Approach in Political Science:
• 4 : What Is Political Philosophy?
• 5 : Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation
• 6 : “Behavioristic” Tendencies in American
• Index