Examine the importance of behavioural approach in political theory. What led to its decline? (2021, 15 Marks)
The behavioural approach, launched in the 1920s by Charles E. Merriam‘s Chicago School (New Aspects of Politics, 1925), ascendant after the Second World War and codified by David Easton in the early 1960s, made observable conduct rather than legal form the subject of political study. Its rise and fall came within two decades — and it fell not to its traditionalist enemies but to its own practitioners, which is the key to both its importance and its decline.
Its importance
- A new standard of knowledge. Easton’s foundation stones — regularities, verification, quantification, the separation of fact and value — demanded that claims be testable. Easton attacked the older discipline’s theoretical malnutrition and hyperfactualism; behaviouralism promised theory disciplined by evidence. The other four stones — techniques, systematisation, pure science and integration — tied it to the wider sciences.
- Interdisciplinary borrowing. Psychology, sociology, anthropology and statistics lent the discipline their concepts and tools — Harold D. Lasswell brought psychoanalysis to the study of political leaders.
- Prediction and proximity. Studying voters and activists rather than only constitutions brought the subject nearer to citizens’ everyday politics and made modest, probabilistic prediction possible, the basis of later election forecasting.
- A wider field. Politics became the authoritative allocation of values wherever it occurred, not only in constitutional organs. Groups, parties, elites, socialisation and political culture entered the discipline, and Easton’s systems analysis gave a vocabulary to compare any polity.
- Testing democratic claims. Robert A. Dahl‘s Who Governs? (1961), a study of New Haven, asked who actually decides rather than who formally rules — the gap between theory and practice became researchable.
- Comparative reach. The Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics (1954), under Gabriel A. Almond, used behavioural tools to study the new states where constitutions explained least.
- India. Rajni Kothari‘s Caste in Indian Politics (1970) showed that caste was not a survival but a political resource — not that politics gets caste-ridden, but that caste gets politicised. Later survey work, notably Lokniti-CSDS’s National Election Studies since 1996, documented the rising turnout of poorer and lower-caste voters — what Yogendra Yadav called a second democratic upsurge.
What led to its decline
- Unkept promises. No general theory or Kuhnian paradigm emerged. Dahl admitted in 1961 that it was easier to say what behaviouralism was not than what it was; the output was often precise data on trivial questions.
- Irrelevance in a crisis. Civil rights, urban riots and the Vietnam War found the profession silent. The Caucus for a New Political Science (1967, APSA Chicago) attacked its complacency, and in 1969 Easton himself, in The New Revolution in Political Science, accused scholars in ivory towers of perfecting technique while ignoring its purpose — the credo of relevance and post-behaviouralism followed.
- The collapse of its philosophy of science. Thomas S. Kuhn‘s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) showed science itself resting on shared, non-neutral assumptions; Charles Taylor‘s “Neutrality in Political Science” (1967) argued that every explanatory framework carries a value slope. Value-neutrality now looked like concealed conservatism.
- Scientism and reductionism. The premise that people behave alike in like circumstances ignored that political action is indeterminate, shaped by meaning, memory and choice; reducing a complex polity to a regression equation lost what mattered.
- Traditionalist rebuke. Leo Strauss (epilogue to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, 1962) said the new science fiddles while Rome burns, excused only because it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
- Rival programmes. John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) revived normative theory; rational choice offered rigour by deduction rather than induction; new institutionalism brought the state back.
The decline was of the creed, not the method. The anonymous “Perestroika” e-mail of 2000 protested that quantitative methods still dominated American political science — hardly the symptom of a dead approach.
Conclusion
Behaviouralism mattered because it forced political theory to answer to evidence; it declined because it pretended evidence could answer every question. What survived is the survey and the experiment, now used openly in the service of chosen values.