Examine the limitations of Behaviouralism as an approach to the study of politics. (1992)
Behaviouralism set out, in David Easton‘s eight foundation stones, to make political study a science of observable behaviour — verifiable, quantified and value-free. Its limitations are best examined as the limits of that ambition rather than of empirical enquiry itself, and they were exposed from four directions.
The epistemological limit: facts do not speak
- Behaviouralism was inductivist: gather data, then generalise. Karl R. Popper had argued in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934; English 1959) that no accumulation of instances proves a law; science advances by bold conjecture and falsification. Observation is already theory-laden, so fact-gathering without prior theory reproduces the hyperfactualism Easton had condemned in older empiricism.
- Human action is meaningful, not mere motion. Peter Winch (The Idea of a Social Science, 1958) argued that social action is rule-governed: the same raised hand may be a vote, a salute or a protest, and only the actors’ rules tell them apart. Counting behaviour without interpreting it misses politics.
The normative limit: values cannot be bracketed
- Leo Strauss, in his epilogue to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962), argued that a science forbidden to rank ends cannot distinguish statesman from tyrant. His verdict: the new political science fiddles while Rome burns — excused only because it knows neither that it fiddles nor that Rome burns.
- The choice of what to study, which variables to measure and what counts as “stability” are themselves value choices. Value-neutrality does not remove values; it hides them.
The ideological limit: a science of the status quo
- Marxist and radical critics read the approach as conservative by construction. Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, 1964) argued that describing society in the terms it uses of itself ratifies it. Christian Bay‘s “Politics and Pseudopolitics” (1965) charged behavioural research with studying interest-bargaining while ignoring human needs.
- Systems and civic-culture models treated equilibrium as normal and revolution as pathology — poorly suited to the decolonising world.
The scope limit: power that is not visible
- By studying observable decisions, pluralists missed non-decisions. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (“Two Faces of Power”, 1962) showed that power also works by keeping issues off the agenda; Steven Lukes (1974) added the shaping of preferences themselves.
- India illustrates this: the flow of anonymous electoral bond donations was invisible to any voter survey and became public only after the Supreme Court struck the scheme down on 15 February 2024 in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India.
- Sheldon S. Wolin (“Political Theory as a Vocation”, 1969) called the result methodism — a training in technique that crowds out the theoretical imagination needed to conceive alternatives.
What survives the critique
These are limits of the creed, not of evidence. Easton accepted most of them in 1969, launching post-behaviouralism and its credo of relevance while keeping the techniques. Surveys such as Lokniti-CSDS‘s National Election Studies remain indispensable; they simply cannot say what should be done with what they find.
Conclusion
Behaviouralism fails where politics is most political — in meanings, ends, hidden power and change. Used as one instrument within a discipline that argues openly about values, it is invaluable; offered as the whole of political science, it narrows politics to what can be counted.