Behavioural approach to Political Science. (2024, 10 Marks)
The behavioural approach moves the object of political enquiry from the institution to the observable conduct of individuals and groups — how people actually vote, bargain, join, protest and obey — and studies it with the methods of the natural sciences. Heinz Eulau‘s phrase in The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (1963) states the premise: the root is man. It is at once a creed, a toolkit and a correction that itself needed correcting.
Where it came from
- Revolt against tradition: the legal, historical and philosophical approaches looked descriptive and speculative, silent on the pressing social questions of the day. Behaviouralists promised a science that would renew the discipline and make it useful to policy.
- Charles E. Merriam (New Aspects of Politics, 1925) and the Chicago School demanded scientific rigour and borrowed from psychology and sociology; Harold D. Lasswell redefined politics as who gets what, when, how (1936).
- After 1945, survey methods and foundation funding met a practical need: new states whose borrowed constitutions explained little about how they worked. By 1961 Robert A. Dahl called it a protest that had succeeded (“Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest”, American Political Science Review).
The creed
David Easton — who defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values in The Political System (1953) — codified eight intellectual foundation stones. They reduce to three commitments:
- Epistemological: knowledge consists of regularities that can be verified against behaviour and expressed, where possible, through quantification.
- Methodological: rigorous techniques (sample surveys, statistics, interviews), systematisation of research by theory, and integration with the other social sciences.
- Ethical: fact and value are kept apart; the aim is pure science.
What it gave the discipline
- Voting, participation and political culture became fields of knowledge; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba‘s The Civic Culture (1963) made attitudes comparable across nations.
- In India, Rajni Kothari‘s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS, 1963) built the National Election Studies. In 2024 its pre-poll survey found 62 per cent saying jobs had become harder to find and 71 per cent reporting price rise, and its post-poll data showed the NDA losing about five points among Dalit voters — explaining the BJP’s fall to 240 seats as no constitutional reading could.
Its limits
- It tends to study what is measurable rather than what matters, giving precise answers to minor questions; technique crowded out the normative core of justice, rights and liberty. Christian Bay (“Politics and Pseudopolitics”, 1965) complained that much of it described the pursuit of private advantage rather than politics as the meeting of human needs.
- Value-neutrality is itself a value: Leo Strauss argued that a science unable to rank ends cannot tell a tyrant from a statesman, and critics on the left saw in it an ideology of the status quo.
- It struggles with meaning, hidden power and change — hence Easton’s own post-behaviouralism of 1969. His Credo of Relevance put substance before technique, readmitted values and asked scholars to act on their knowledge; the Perestroika protest of 2000 against quantitative dominance shows the tension never fully closed.
Conclusion
Behaviouralism lost the argument about values but won the argument about evidence: even normative debate on Indian democracy now cites survey data. Its lasting worth is as a disciplined method serving questions it cannot itself choose. It was less a single approach than a movement: it held the field for a generation, remade the discipline’s standards of evidence and then faded as a separate cause — just as Dahl foresaw, because its methods had been absorbed into the mainstream.