Discuss the Normative and Behavioural Approaches to the study of political science and examine the limitations of Behavioural Approach. (1991)
Political science has always carried two questions: what ought political life to be, and what actually is it? The normative approach answers the first by argument, the behavioural approach the second by observation. Their quarrel in the 1950s and 1960s shaped the modern discipline — and exposed the limits of the behavioural answer.
The normative approach
- The oldest approach: from Plato‘s Republic to Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971), it asks what makes power legitimate, obligation binding and distribution just.
- Its tasks are the clarification of concepts (liberty, equality, justice) and the construction of standards of right by which institutions are judged. Leo Strauss held political science and political philosophy to be one enterprise: the search for true knowledge of the good political order.
- Its weakness, pressed by logical positivists, is that value claims cannot be verified; T. D. Weldon (The Vocabulary of Politics, 1953) likened them to statements of taste.
The behavioural approach
- Launched by Charles E. Merriam‘s Chicago School and codified by David Easton, it studies observable conduct — voting, participation, group bargaining — to discover regularities that can be verified and quantified, keeping fact and value apart.
| Criterion | Normative | Behavioural |
|---|---|---|
| Question | What ought to be | What is, and why |
| Method | Logical and ethical argument | Survey, statistics, observation |
| Values | Central object | Excluded as unscientific |
| Unit | State, community, the good life | Individual and group behaviour |
| Test of truth | Coherence, reasonableness | Empirical verification |
Limitations of the behavioural approach
- The fact-value divide cannot hold. Isaiah Berlin (“Does Political Theory Still Exist?”, 1962) argued that political life consists of disagreement about ends, and no evidence about means settles a disagreement about ends.
- Scientism. Human beings interpret and react to findings about them; prediction alters behaviour, and language is too open-textured for natural-science precision. Bernard Crick‘s The American Science of Politics (1959) traced the aspiration to American liberal culture rather than to the nature of politics.
- Micro-bias and loss of the state. By dissolving the state into a “system” of behaviours, it lost sight of institutions and history — hence Theda Skocpol‘s call to bring the state back in (1985) and the rise of new institutionalism.
- Hidden conservatism and ethnocentrism. Stability was treated as normal and Anglo-American democracy as the model; Rajni Kothari applied structural-functionalism to India in Politics in India (1970) and later abandoned it.
- Irrelevance. Easton’s own 1969 address conceded that refined techniques had ignored the purposes they served.
Why the two need each other
The Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling of 1 August 2024 in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, permitting states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes, shows the division of labour. Whether benefits have been cornered by a few sub-castes is an empirical question — the Court required states to justify sub-classification with data; whether sub-classification realises or betrays equality of opportunity is a normative one. Neither approach alone decides the case.
Conclusion
The normative approach without evidence risks becoming preference; the behavioural approach without values becomes measurement without purpose. Behaviouralism’s deepest limitation was to treat its method as the whole of political science, when it is one half of a single enquiry.