Normative approach in political science. (2023, 10 Marks)
The normative approach studies politics in terms of what ought to be. It asks which ends a political community should pursue, what makes power legitimate and how institutions should be judged, so its statements are evaluative and prescriptive rather than descriptive. The tradition runs from Plato’s Republic to John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971), which revived it after positivism had declared it dead.
Normative and empirical
Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan (Power and Society, 1950) saw political theory as holding two strands: empirical propositions about how politics works, and value judgements that make up political doctrine. The divide goes back to David Hume‘s is–ought gap (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40): no “ought” follows from premises only about what is.
| Empirical | Normative | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | What is, and why? | What ought to be? |
| Test | Observation, prediction | Consistency, justification |
Plato and Aristotle asked what makes a polity good; most modern political scientists trace causes and effects and bracket verdicts of good and bad.
Method
- Conceptual analysis fixes what liberty, equality or justice mean and how they relate. Isaiah Berlin‘s split between negative and positive liberty (“Two Concepts of Liberty”, 1958) is the classic example.
- Justification from premises: arguments move from principles such as consent, utility or rights to conclusions about institutions, judged by consistency rather than prediction.
- Reflective equilibrium: Rawls tests principles against considered judgements (slavery is wrong) and revises both until they fit, giving moral reasoning its own discipline.
- Ideal and non-ideal theory: first the principles of a just society, then how to move an unjust one towards them. Models of a just society or an ideal democracy become benchmarks for grading real regimes.
- Rival traditions supply premises: utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham), deontology (Immanuel Kant), contractarian liberalism, communitarianism.
Tasks
Its tasks are to justify authority and obligation, evaluate laws and policies by their moral implications for justice and rights, and prescribe reform. It also guides policy on ethical dilemmas such as surveillance or euthanasia. Reconstruction is the task behaviouralism nearly abandoned.
An Indian case shows why these tasks cannot be left to data. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), a seven-judge bench, by 6:1, allowed states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes and overruled E. V. Chinnaiah (2004). Evidence showed some SC communities gaining far less from reservation than others. But whether equality means treating Scheduled Castes as one class, as Justice Bela M. Trivedi held in dissent, or requires the majority’s substantive equality within the class is a normative question. No survey can settle it.
Critiques
- Positivist: A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936) treated value judgements as expressions of feeling, neither true nor false; T. D. Weldon applied this to political philosophy.
- Behaviouralist: David Easton wanted fact and value kept apart for a cumulative science.
- Realist: Raymond Geuss (Philosophy and Real Politics, 2008) accuses it of applying moral ideals to politics instead of starting from how power and motives actually work.
- Comparative: Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) doubts that ranking real options requires a blueprint of the perfectly just society; removing famine or torture can be judged without one.
- Critical: Charles W. Mills (“‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology”, 2005) argued that idealised models leave out racial and gender domination and so hide real injustice. Marxists read its abstract universals as class interest.
Conclusion
The critiques have disciplined the normative approach rather than defeated it. Emotivism lost ground because political argument does respond to reasons, and Easton himself readmitted values in 1969. At its best the approach is empirically informed and alert to non-ideal conditions, yet it alone can say which inequalities are unjust. Empirical science sharpens the means; normative argument chooses the ends, and neither is complete without the other.