‘Credo of Relevance’ in post-behaviouralism advocates the importance of action science. Analyze. (2023, 15 Marks)
In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “The New Revolution in Political Science” (American Political Science Review, 1969), David Easton, the architect of behaviouralism, announced a post-behavioural revolution — a reaction against a hardening behavioural orthodoxy — whose watchwords were relevance and action. The Credo of Relevance is, at bottom, a demand that political science stop being a contemplative science and become an action science.
Why the credo arose
Civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War and urban riots found a discipline absorbed in refining survey technique with little to say. Christian Bay‘s “Politics and Pseudopolitics” (APSR, 1965) had already charged behavioural research with studying interest bargaining while ignoring human needs. The Caucus for a New Political Science (APSA, 1967) voiced the revolt from below; Easton conceded it from the top.
The seven tenets and their link to action
| Tenet | Claim | Bearing on action |
|---|---|---|
| Substance before technique | Science’s old rule preferred error to vagueness; Easton preferred vagueness to being non-relevantly precise | Urgent problems set the agenda |
| Empirical conservatism | Describing what exists quietly legitimises it | Neutral description is a political act |
| Contact with reality | Abstraction hides the realities of crisis | Research must face real needs |
| Values | No science is neutral; stating its value premises and developing values belong to the discipline | Ends enter research design |
| Role of intellectuals | Protect the humane values of civilisation | Scholar as guardian |
| To know is to act | Knowledge carries the responsibility for acting, and acting means reshaping society | Knowledge must be put to work |
| Politicisation of the profession | Associations and universities cannot stand aside | Collective action |
The tenets form a chain: the first three indict behavioural science, the next two restore values, and the last two turn values into obligations to act.
What “action science” means
- Epistemic: problem-driven, not method-driven inquiry; technique survives but serves purpose.
- Ethical: contemplative, value-free science suited an age of moral consensus; in an age of crisis, detachment becomes complicity.
- Institutional: the profession itself becomes a political actor.
- Temporal: the credo is future-oriented — not a return to a golden age of traditional theory, nor a campaign to save or scrap any one method, but a push in new directions. Behavioural tools stay; their purpose changes.
The term needs one distinction. Kurt Lewin‘s action research (1946) and the later Action Science (1985) of Chris Argyris and colleagues are research methods: researchers and practitioners test theories while changing practice together. Easton’s action science is an ethic of the discipline — a duty to apply knowledge to public crisis — not a technique.
An Indian illustration shows the idea at its most defensible. The Association for Democratic Reforms, founded in 1999 by IIM Ahmedabad professors, turned electoral research into litigation: Union of India v. ADR (2002) compelled candidates to disclose criminal and financial records, and ADR v. Union of India (February 2024) struck down electoral bonds. Knowledge was put to work through evidence and courts, not partisanship.
Tensions within the credo
- Advocacy versus evidence: committed scholarship invites the charge that findings are advocacy, eroding the authority that made knowledge worth acting on.
- Relevance to whom? Relevance is itself a value judgement, so the credo relocates the fact–value problem without solving it.
- Action can serve power: the US Army’s counterinsurgency study Project Camelot (1964–65) was also applied knowledge. Action needs a theory of just ends, which came from John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971), not from the credo.
- Politicisation divides: the APSA never became a political actor, and the Perestroika revolt of 2000 shows the tension recurring.
Conclusion
The credo made the scholar’s responsibility for the uses of knowledge a legitimate part of political science. But action is defensible only when rigorous knowledge serves publicly argued ends: relevance without rigour lapses into ideology, just as rigour without relevance had lapsed into irrelevance.