Critically evaluate and bring out the weakest aspects of behavioural and post-behavioural approaches to the analysis of political system. What measurable and quantifiable criteria are available in political science to evaluate political behaviour? (1999)
Behaviouralism promised a science of the political system built on observable, measurable behaviour; post-behaviouralism, announced by David Easton in 1969, promised to make that science relevant. Each delivered real gains, but each has a characteristic weakness, and the measurable criteria the discipline now possesses show both the strength of the first and the need for the second.
Weakest aspects of behaviouralism
- Measurability bias: it studied what could be counted rather than what mattered, reviving the hyperfactualism Easton had diagnosed in the older discipline: an abundance of data starved of theory.
- Blindness to hidden power: observing decisions misses non-decisions; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (“Two Faces of Power”, 1962) showed that power also works by keeping issues off the agenda.
- System-maintenance bias: Easton’s systems model and Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba‘s The Civic Culture (1963) treat stability as normal and revolution as pathology, with the Western system as the implicit norm.
- False neutrality: its frameworks carried unacknowledged values while claiming to be value-free.
Weakest aspects of post-behaviouralism
- No method of its own: it reoriented purpose but offered no new technique for analysing the system.
- Relevance undefined: “relevant to whom?” was never answered, so the value problem was relocated, not solved.
- Politicisation: committed scholarship risks becoming advocacy and loses the authority it seeks.
- Short life: quantitative and formal methods regained dominance, which is why the Perestroika revolt of 2000 repeated its complaint.
On balance behaviouralism’s weakness is narrowness, post-behaviouralism’s is vagueness; the first can be corrected by theory, the second only by method.
Measurable criteria for evaluating political behaviour
| Criterion | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Turnout | Share of registered electors who vote |
| Vote share and swing | Change in party support between elections |
| Pedersen index | Electoral volatility: half the sum of absolute changes in party vote shares (Mogens N. Pedersen, 1979) |
| Effective number of parties | Fragmentation, 1/Σp² (Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, 1979) |
| Party identification | Durable attachment to a party (The American Voter, 1960) |
| Efficacy and trust scales | Belief that one’s participation counts; confidence in institutions |
| Roll-call and cohesion indices | Legislative party unity (Stuart A. Rice’s index of cohesion) |
| Democracy indices | Regime quality: Freedom House, Polity, V-Dem |
India shows both their power and their limits. The Lokniti-CSDS National Election Study measures vote choice by caste, class, gender and locality; its 2024 post-poll survey sampled 19,663 respondents across 191 parliamentary constituencies in 23 states, and its series since 1996 lets swing and social bases of support be tracked across elections. Yet roll-call cohesion is nearly uninformative in Parliament, since the anti-defection law (Tenth Schedule) enforces party-line voting. Democracy indices show that measurement embeds values: in 2021 V-Dem classified India as an “electoral autocracy” and Freedom House downgraded it to “Partly Free”, ratings Indian official critics disputed as resting on expert perception.
Conclusion
The criteria are real and indispensable, but each quantifies a prior judgement about what democracy or participation means. That is the lasting lesson of both approaches: behaviouralism supplies the instruments, post-behaviouralism the obligation to ask what they are measuring for.