What is meant by “behavioural approach” to politics? Is it a fool-proof approach? How far is it correct to say that the behavioural approach to political analysis appeared in order to counteract the Marxist approach. (1998)
The behavioural approach studies politics through the observable actions and attitudes of individuals and groups, using the methods of natural science. Its origins lie in 1920s Chicago, its triumph in 1950s America — and the gap between those two dates is where the Marxist question must be settled.
Meaning
- Charles E. Merriam (New Aspects of Politics, 1925) and Harold D. Lasswell moved enquiry from legal form to behaviour and power; David Easton codified the creed in eight foundation stones.
- Its core claims: political conduct shows regularities; generalisations must be verified and, where possible, quantified; facts and values are separate; the unit is the individual or group, aggregated through surveys and statistics.
Is it fool-proof?
No — it is reliable within a narrow range and fallible outside it.
- Measurement error: people misreport, and samples miss. In June 2024 most exit polls projected the NDA well above 350 seats; it won 293. Surveys stay indispensable but are probabilistic, not certain.
- Meaning and motive escape observation; the same vote can express caste loyalty, welfare gratitude or protest.
- Values cannot be excluded: choosing what to measure is itself evaluative, and Easton himself conceded in 1969 that technique had displaced relevance.
- It explains stability better than change, and misses power exercised through non-decisions.
Did it appear to counteract Marxism?
The case for the thesis
- Patronage. The approach spread on foundation money — Carnegie, Rockefeller and above all the Ford Foundation, whose Behavioral Sciences Program (1951) gave the label its currency — at the height of the Cold War.
- Ideology. The end-of-ideology thesis of Daniel Bell (1960) and Seymour Martin Lipset (Political Man, 1960) held that class struggle had yielded to technical problem-solving; both attended the 1955 Milan conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, later revealed to be CIA-funded.
- Method as counter-theory. Individual rather than class, equilibrium rather than contradiction, pluralist bargaining rather than a class state. Gabriel A. Almond turned interview research on ex-communists in The Appeals of Communism (1954), and modernisation theory offered new states a non-revolutionary path — Walt W. Rostow subtitled The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) A Non-Communist Manifesto.
- Critics. The Caucus for a New Political Science (1967) and Ralph Miliband‘s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) read pluralist-behavioural science as an apologia for capitalist democracy.
The case against
- The Chicago School’s quarrel of the 1920s was with legal formalism and armchair philosophy, not with Marx; its models were psychology and statistics, and it predates the Cold War by two decades.
- Its most sustained enemies were traditionalists such as Leo Strauss, and it was itself reformed from within by post-behaviouralism.
Conclusion
The thesis is correct about the approach’s diffusion and use, not its origin or logic. Behaviouralism was not invented against Marxism, but Cold War patronage and the end-of-ideology mood made it function as liberalism’s scientific alternative to Marxism — which is why its claim to neutrality was least credible precisely where it was most influential.