Examine the significance of the behavioural revolution in politics. (2011, 30 Marks)
Between the 1920s and the early 1960s American political science changed both what it studied and what it accepted as knowledge. Robert A. Dahl titled his 1961 verdict an epitaph for a monument to a successful protest: the dissenters of Charles E. Merriam‘s Chicago School had become the establishment. Whether this deserves the name revolution, and what it left behind, decides its significance.
Why it counts as a revolution
- Ontology changed. The object of study moved from the state and its legal organs to behaviour of voters, groups and elites. David Easton replaced “state” with the political system, the authoritative allocation of values, in The Political System (1953).
- Epistemology changed. Easton’s foundation stones — regularities, verification, quantification, fact-value separation, pure science — made a claim scientific only if it could be tested against observed conduct. Changing both the object and the criterion of knowledge separates a revolution from a new technique.
- The Kuhnian test, partly met. In Thomas S. Kuhn‘s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a revolution follows when anomalies break a paradigm. The anomaly here was plain: legal-institutional analysis could not explain why similar constitutions worked so differently, least of all in the new states. A generation of scholars trained in survey and statistics then displaced the old one.
- But no single paradigm. Dahl admitted behaviouralism was easier to describe by what it rejected than by what it asserted; it remained a mood more than a unified theory. It revolutionised method more than theory.
What it changed
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Constitutions, organs | Individuals, groups, systems |
| Evidence | Documents, legal texts | Surveys, aggregate data, interviews |
| Values | Openly prescriptive | Bracketed as “non-scientific” |
| Scope | Western states | Any polity, via common categories |
It also built infrastructure: the Michigan Survey Research Center, the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics (1954) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political Research (1962), which made data a shared, cumulative resource.
The lasting legacy
- Surveys. Michigan’s election studies, begun in 1948 and formalised as the American National Election Studies in 1977, produced The American Voter (1960) by Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, which made party identification the core concept of electoral research. India’s Lokniti-CSDS National Election Study, uninterrupted since 1996, is its descendant; the 2024 post-poll round interviewed over 19,000 voters.
- Experiments. Harold F. Gosnell‘s Getting Out the Vote (1927) compared turnout in Chicago districts sent reminders with control districts; Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green revived the method in New Haven (2000). The 2019 economics Nobel to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer crowned the randomised approach. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) used India’s randomly rotated reservation of pradhan posts for women to show that women leaders invested more in the public goods women asked for, such as drinking water — behavioural evidence on a normative question.
Its limits
- It privileged the measurable over the important; Easton’s own 1969 address, The New Revolution in Political Science, held it better to be vague than non-relevantly precise.
- Its value-neutrality hid values: Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) treated Anglo-American moderation as the healthy norm, and Leo Strauss held that a science unable to rank ends could not tell statesman from tyrant.
- It explained stability better than rupture — the civil rights movement and Vietnam caught it unprepared.
Conclusion
The behavioural revolution was a revolution in method and in the definition of evidence, not in the discovery of political laws. Its philosophy was abandoned within a decade; its instruments — the representative survey and the randomised experiment — now serve even its critics, which is the truest measure of its significance.