Political science

WRITTEN BY:
 Michael G. Roskin
See Article History

Political science, the systematic study of governance by the application

of empirical and generally scientific methods of analysis. As traditionally defined
and studied, political science examines the state and its organs and institutions.
The contemporary discipline, however, is considerably broader than
this, encompassing studies of all the societal, cultural, and psychological factors
that mutually influence the operation of government and the body politic.
Although political science borrows heavily from the other social sciences, it is
distinguished from them by its focus on power—defined as the ability of one
political actor to get another actor to do what it wants—at the international,
national, and local levels. Political science is generally used in the singular, but in
French and Spanish the plural (sciences politiques and ciencias políticas,
respectively) is used, perhaps a reflection of the discipline’s eclectic nature.
Although political science overlaps considerably with political philosophy, the two
fields are distinct. Political philosophy is concerned primarily with political ideas
and values, such as rights, justice, freedom, and political obligation (whether
people should or should not obey political authority); it is normative in its
approach (i.e., it is concerned with what ought to be rather than with what is) and
rationalistic in its method. In contrast, political science studies institutions and
behaviour, favours the descriptive over the normative, and develops theories or
draws conclusions based on empirical observations, which are expressed in
quantitative terms where possible.
Although political science, like all modern sciences, involves empirical
investigation, it generally does not produce precise measurements and
predictions. This has led some scholars to question whether the discipline can be
accurately described as a science. However, if the term science applies to any
body of systematically organized knowledge based on facts ascertained by
empirical methods and described by as much measurement as the material
allows, then political science is a science, like the other social disciplines. In the
1960s the American historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn argued that political
science was “pre-paradigmatic,” not yet having developed basic
research paradigms, such as the periodic table that defines chemistry. It is likely
that political science never will develop a single, universal paradigm or theory,
and attempts to do so have seldom lasted more than a generation, making
political science a discipline of many trends but few classics.

Fields And Subfields

Modern university departments of political science (alternatively
called government or politics at some institutions) are often divided into several
fields, each of which contains various subfields.
1. Domestic politics is generally the most common field of study; its subfields include public
opinion, elections, national government, and state, local, or regional government.
2. Comparative politics focuses on politics within countries (often grouped into world regions) and
analyzes similarities and differences between countries.
3. International relations considers the political relationships and interactions between countries,
including the causes of war, the formation of foreign policy, international political economy, and the
structures that increase or decrease the policy options available to governments. International relations is
organized as a separate department in some universities.
4. Political theory includes classical political philosophy and contemporary theoretical perspectives
(e.g., constructivism, critical theory, and postmodernism).
5. Public administration studies the role of the bureaucracy. It is the field most oriented toward
practical applications within political science and is often organized as a separate department that prepares
students for careers in the civil service.
6. Public law studies constitutions, legal systems, civil rights, and criminal justice (now increasingly its
own discipline).
7. Public policy examines the passage and implementation of all types of government policies,
particularly those related to civil rights, defense, health, education, economic growth, urban renewal,
regional development, and environmental protection.
Historical Development

Ancient influences
Analyses of politics appeared in ancient cultures in works by various thinkers,
including Confucius (551–479 BC) in China and Kautilya (flourished 300 BC) in
India. Writings by the historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) in North Africa have
greatly influenced the study of politics in the Arabic-speaking world. But the fullest
explication of politics has been in the West. Some have identified Plato(428/427–
348/347 BC), whose ideal of a stable republic still yields insights and metaphors,
as the first political scientist, though most consider Aristotle (384–322 BC), who
introduced empirical observation into the study of politics, to be the discipline’s
true founder.
BRITANNICA STORIES
Aristotle’s students gathered descriptions of 158 Greek city-states, which Aristotle
used to formulate his famous sixfold typology of political systems. He
distinguished political systems by the number of persons ruling (one, few, or
many) and by whether the form was legitimate (rulers governing in the interests of
all) or corrupt (rulers governing in their own interests). Legitimate systems
included monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and polity (rule by
the many), while corresponding corrupt forms were tyranny, oligarchy,
and democracy. Aristotle considered democracy to be the worst form of
government, though in his classification it meant mob rule. The best form of
government, a polity, was, in contemporary terms, akin to an efficient, stable
democracy. Aristotle presciently noted that a polity functions best if the middle
class is large, a point confirmed by modern empirical findings. Aristotle’s
classification endured for centuries and is still helpful in understanding political
systems.
Plato and Aristotle focused on perfecting the polis (city-state), a tiny political
entity, which for the Greeks meant both society and political system. The
conquest of the Mediterranean world and beyond by Aristotle’s pupil Alexander
the Great (336–323 BC) and, after his death, the division of his empire among his
generals brought large new political forms, in which society and political system
came to be seen as separate entities. This shift required a new understanding of
politics. Hellenistic thinkers, especially the Stoics, asserted the existence of
 a natural law that applied to all human beings equally; this idea became the
foundation of Roman legalism and Christian notions of equality (see Stoicism).
Thus, the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), who was strongly
influenced by the Stoics, was noteworthy for his belief that all human beings,
regardless of their wealth or citizenship, possessed an equal moral worth.
BRITANNICA LISTS & QUIZZES


HEALTH & MEDICINE QUIZ

The Human Brain

SCIENCE LIST
7 Plants You Can’t Even Touch


 ARTS & CULTURE QUIZ
Pulitzer Prize

SOCIETY LIST
7 of the World’s Most Dangerous Festivals

Early Christian thinkers, such as St. Augustine (354–430), emphasized the dual

loyalty of Christians to both God and temporal rulers, with the clear implicationthat
the “heavenly city” is more important and durable than the earthly one. With this
came an otherworldly disdain for politics. For eight centuries knowledge of
Aristotle was lost to Europe but preserved by Arab philosophers such as al-
Fārābī(c. 878–c. 950) and Averroës (1126–1198). Translations of Aristotle in
Spain under the Moors revitalized European thought after about 1200. St.
Thomas Aquinas(1224/25–1274) Christianized Aristotle’s Politics to lend it moral
purpose. Aquinas took from Aristotle the idea that humans are both rational and
social, that states occur naturally, and that government can improve humans
spiritually. Thus, Aquinas favoured monarchy but despised tyranny, arguing that
kingly authority should be limited by law and used for the common good. The
Italian poet and philosopher Dante (1265–1321) argued in De
monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy) for a single world government. At the same
time, the philosopher Marsilius of Padua (c.1280–c. 1343), in Defensor
Pacis (1324; “Defender of the Peace”), introduced secularization by elevating the
state over the church as the originator of laws. For this, as well as for proposing
that legislators be elected, Marsilius ranks as an important modernizer.

Early modern developments

The first modern political scientist was the Italian writer Niccolò
Machiavelli (1469–1527). His infamous work The Prince (1531),
a treatise originally dedicated to Florence’s ruler, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici,
presented amoral advice to actual and would-be princes on the best means of
acquiring and holding on to political power. Machiavelli’s political philosophy,
which completed the secularization of politics begun by Marsilius, was based on
reason rather than religion. An early Italian patriot, Machiavelli believed that Italy
could be unified and its foreign occupiers expelled only by ruthless and single-
minded princes who rejected any moral constraints on their power. Machiavelli
introduced the modern idea of power—how to get it and how to use it—as the
crux of politics, a viewpoint shared by today’s international relations “realists,”
rational choice theorists, and others. Machiavelli thus ranks alongside Aristotle as
a founder of political science.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also placed power at the

centre of his political analysis. In Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a
Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), completed near the end of
the English Civil Wars (1642–51), Hobbes outlined, without reference to an all-
powerful God, how humans, endowed with a natural right to self-preservation but
living in an anarchic state of nature, would be driven by fear of violent death to
form a civil society and submit to a single sovereign authority (a monarch) to
ensure their peace and security through a social contract—an actual
or hypothetical agreement between citizens and their rulers that defines the rights
and duties of each. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who also
witnessed the turmoil of an English civil war—the Glorious Revolution (1688–89)
—argued in his influential Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) that people
form governments through a social contract to preserve their inalienable natural
rights to “life, liberty, and property.” He further maintained that any government
that fails to secure the natural rights of its citizens may properly be overthrown.
Locke’s views were a powerful force in the intellectual life of 18th-century
colonial America and constituted the philosophical basis of the
American Declaration of Independence(1776), many of whose drafters,
particularly Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), were well acquainted with Locke’s
writings.
If Hobbes was the conservative of the “contractualists” and Locke the liberal, then
the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the radical.
Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) constructs a civil society in which the
separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as the “general will” (volonté
générale) of the collective that overrides individual wills, “forcing a man to be
 free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by French revolutionaries and
later by totalitarians, who distorted many of his philosophical lessons.
Montesquieu (1689–1755), a more pragmatic French philosopher, contributed to
modern comparative politics with his The Spirit of Laws (1748). Montesquieu’s
sojourn in England convinced him that English liberties were based on the
separation and balance of power between Parliament and the monarchy, a
principle later embraced by the framers of the Constitution of the United
States(see separation of powers; checks and balances). Montesquieu also
produced an innovative analysis of governance that assigned to each form of
government an animating principle—for example, republics are based on virtue,
monarchies on honour, and despotisms on fear. Montesquieu’s analysis
concluded that a country’s form of government is determined not by the locus of
political power but by how the government enacts public policy.
TRENDING TOPICS
 Paleolithic Period
 Neolithic Period
 Ptolemy
 Massachusetts Bay Colony
 truth
 Johannes Kepler
 Northwest Coast Indian
 Dred Scott decision
 Plato
 American civil rights movement
The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90) is considered the
founder of classical economic liberalism. In An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he argued that the role of the state
should be restricted primarily to enforcing contracts in a free market. In contrast,
the classical conservatism of the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729–
97) maintained that established values and institutions were essential elements of
all societies and that revolutions that sought to destroy such values (e.g.,
the French Revolution) delivered people to irrational impulses and to tyranny.
Burke thus introduced an important psychological or cultural insight: that political
systems are living organisms that grow over centuries and that depend on a
sense of legitimacy that is gradually built up among their subjects.
The early development of political science was also influenced by law. The
French political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) articulated a theory
of sovereignty that viewed the state as the ultimate source of law in a given
territory. Bodin’s work, which was undertaken as the modern state was first
developing, provided a justification of the legitimacy of national governments, one
fiercely defended to this day. Many political scientists, especially in international
relations, find Bodin’s notion of sovereignty useful for expressing the legitimacy
and equality of states.

19th-century roots of contemporary political science

Contemporary political science traces its roots primarily to the 19th century, when
the rapid growth of the natural sciences stimulated enthusiasm for the creation of
a new social science. Capturing this fervour of scientific optimism was Antoine-
Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who in the 1790s coined the
term idéologie (“ideology”) for his “science of ideas,” which, he believed, could
perfect society. Also pivotal to the empirical movement was the French utopian
socialist Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a founder of Christian socialism, who
in 1813 suggested that morals and politics could become “positive” sciences—
that is, disciplines whose authority would rest not upon subjective preconceptions
but upon objective evidence. Saint-Simon collaborated with the French
mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), considered by
many to be the founder of sociology, on the publication of the Plan of the
Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society (1822), which
claimed that politics would become a social physics and discover scientific laws of
social progress. Although “Comtean positivism,” with its enthusiasm for the
scientific study of society and its emphasis on using the results of such studies for
social improvement, is still very much alive in psychology, contemporary political
science shows only traces of Comte’s optimism.
The scientific approach to politics developed during the 19th century along two
distinct lines that still divide the discipline. In the 1830s the French historian and
politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) brilliantly analyzed democracy in
America, concluding that it worked because Americans had developed “the art of
association” and were egalitarian group formers. Tocqueville’s emphasis on
cultural values contrasted sharply with the views of the German socialist
theorists Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95), who advanced a
materialistic and economic theory of the state as an instrument of domination by
the classes that own the means of production. According to Marx and Engels,
prevailing values and culture simply reflect the tastes and needs of ruling elites;
the state, they charged, is merely “the steering committee of the bourgeoisie.”
Asserting what they considered to be an immutable scientific law of history, they
argued that the state would soon be overthrown by the industrial working class
(the proletariat), who would institute socialism, a just and egalitarian form of
governance (see alsocommunism).
The first separate school of political science was established in 1872 in France as
the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (now the Institut d’Études Politiques). In
1895 the London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in
England, and the first chair of politics was established at the University of
Oxford in 1912.

The early 20th century

Developments in the United States
Some of the most important developments in political science since it became a
distinct academic discipline have occurred in the United States. Politics had long
been studied in American universities, but usually as part of the curricula of law,
philosophy, or economics. Political science as a separate discipline in universities
in the United States dates from 1880, when John W. Burgess, after studying at
the École Libre in Paris, established a school of political science at Columbia
Universityin New York City. Although political science faculties grew unevenly
after 1900, by the 1920s most major institutions had established new
departments, variously named political science, government, or politics.
Political science in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century was
influenced by the experience of numerous scholars who had done graduate work
at German universities, where the discipline was taught
as Staatswissenschaft(“science of the state”) in an ordered, structured,
and analytic organization of concepts, definitions, comparisons, and inferences.
This highly formalistic and institutional approach, which focused on constitutions,
dominated American political science until World War II. The work of American
political scientists represented an effort to establish an autonomous discipline,
separate from history, moral philosophy, and political economy. Among the new
scholars were Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), who would be elected president of
the United States in 1912, and Frank Goodnow, a Columbia University professor
of administrative law and, later, president of Johns Hopkins University, who was
among the first to study municipal governments. Their writing showed an
awareness of new intellectual currents, such as the theory of evolution. Inspired
by the work of Charles Darwin(1809–82), Wilson and others led a transformation
of American political science from the study of static institutions to the study of
social facts, more truly in the positivist temper, less in the analytic tradition, and
more oriented toward realism.
Arthur F. Bentley’s The Process of Government, little noticed at the time of its
publication in 1908, greatly influenced the development of political science from
the 1930s to the 1950s. Bentley rejected statist abstractions in favour of
observable facts and identified groups and their interactions as the basis of
political life. Group activity, he argued, determined legislation, administration, and
adjudication. In emphasizing behaviour and process, Bentley sounded themes
that later became central to political science. In particular, his insistence that “all
social movements are brought about by group interaction” is the defining feature
of contemporary pluralist and interest-group approaches.
Although Bentley’s effort to develop an objective, value-free analysis of politics
had no initial consequence, other movements toward this goal enjoyed more
immediate success. The principal impetus came from the University of Chicago,
where what became known as the Chicago school developed in the mid-1920s
and thereafter. The leading figure in this movement was Charles E. Merriam,
whose New Aspects of Politics (1925) argued for a reconstruction of method in
political analysis, urged the greater use of statistics in the aid of empirical
observation and measurement, and postulated that “intelligent social control”—a
concept reminiscent of the old Comtean positivism—might emerge from the
converging interests of politics, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. Because
Merriam’s basic political datum at this stage was “attitude,” he relied largely on
the insights of psychology for a better understanding of politics. An important
empirical work of the Chicago school was Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell’s Non-
voting, Causes and Methods of Control (1924), which used sampling methods
and survey data and is illustrative of the type of research that came to dominate
political science after World War II. Merriam’s approach was not entirely new; in
1908 the British political scientist Graham Wallas (1858–1932) had argued
in Human Nature in Politics that a new political science should favour the
quantification of psychological elements (human nature), including nonrational
and subconscious inferences, a view similarly expressed in Public Opinion (1922)
by the American journalist and political scientist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).
Harold Lasswell (1902–78), a member of the Chicago group, carried the
psychological approach to Yale University, where he had a commanding
influence. His Psychopathology and Politics (1930) and Power and
Personality (1948) fused categories of Freudian psychology with considerations of
power. Many political scientists attempted to use Freudian psychology to analyze
politics, but none succeeded in establishing it as a firm basis of political science,
because it depended too much on subjective insights and often could not be
verified empirically. Lasswell, for example, viewed politicians as unbalanced
people with an inordinate need for power, whereas “normal” people had no
compulsion for political office. Although intuitively insightful, this notion is difficult
—if not impossible—to prove scientifically.
Merriam’s Political Power (1934) and Lasswell’s classic Politics: Who Gets What,
When, How (1936)—the title of which articulated the basic definition of politics—
gave a central place to the phenomenon of power in the empirical study of
politics. Merriam discussed how power comes into being, how it becomes
“authority” (which he equated with power), the techniques of power holders, the
defenses of those over whom power is wielded, and the dissipation of power.
Lasswell focused on “influence and the influential,” laying the basis for
subsequent “elite” theories of politics. Although the various members of the
Chicago school ostensibly sought to develop political science as a value-free
discipline, it had two central predilections: it accepted democratic values, and it
attempted to improve the operation of democratic systems. Power approaches
also became central in the burgeoning field of international relations, particularly
after World War II. Hans Morgenthau (1904–80), a German refugee and analyst
of world politics, argued succinctly in Politics Among Nations (1948) that “all
politics is a struggle for power.”
The totalitarian dictatorships that developed in Europe and Asia in the 1920s and
’30s and the onset of World War II turned political science, particularly in the
United States, away from its focus on institutions, law, and procedures. The
constitution of Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic had been an
excellent model, but it failed in practice because too few Germans were then
committed supporters of democracy. Likewise, the Soviet Union’s 1936
constitution appeared democratic but in reality was merely an attempt to mask the
brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Works of this period focused on the role
of elites, political parties, and interest groups, on legislative
and bureaucratic processes, and especially on how voters in democracies make
their electoral choices. This new interest in actual political behaviour became
known as “behavioralism,” a term borrowed from psychology’s behaviourism.
Whereas most earlier thinkers had focused on the “top” of the political system—its
institutions—behavioralists instead explored the “bottom,” especially that which
could be quantified. The result was that much of political science became political
sociology.

Developments outside the United States

Since the time of Marx and Engels, political scientists have continued to debate
the relative importance of culture and economic structures in determining human
behaviour and the organization of society. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, the Italian economists Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941) and Vilfredo
Pareto (1848–1923) echoed Marx’s analysis that society was ruled by elites, but
they considered this both permanent and natural. They were joined by the
German-born Italian political sociologist and economist Robert Michels (1876–
1936), whose “iron law of oligarchy” declared rule by the few to be inevitable.
Mosca, Pareto, and Michels all agreed that the overthrow of the existing “political
class” would simply result in its replacement by another, a view that was
supported in the mid-20th century by Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas (1911–95)
in his The New Class (1957). Pareto also contributed the idea (which he borrowed
from economics) that society is a system tending toward equilibrium: like
an economic system, a society that becomes out of balance will tend to correct
itself by developing new institutions and laws or by redistributing power. This
approach was adopted by much of academic political science after World War II
and was later developed by “systems” theory.
In the early 20th century, the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864–
1922) treated the state as a fusion of organic and cultural elements determined by
geography. Kjellén is credited with coining the term geopolitics (geopolitik), which
acquired a sinister connotation in the years after World War I, when German
expansionists appealed to geopolitical arguments in support of the Nazi regime
of Adolf Hitler. Although geopolitics still exerts a considerable influence on
political science, particularly in the areas of international relations and foreign
policy, the discipline of political geography developed into a distinct subfield
of geographyrather than of political science.
The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who rejected Marx and
embraced Tocqueville’s emphasis on culture and values, was perhaps the most
influential figure in political science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Marx
had proposed that capitalism gave rise to Protestantism: the merchants and
princes of northern Europe developed commerce to such an extent that Roman
Catholic restrictions had to be discarded. Weber rejected this idea, claiming that
Protestantism triggered capitalism: the Calvinist idea of predestination led
individuals to try to prove, by amassing capital, that they were predestined for
heaven (see Calvinism). Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic is still disputed,
but not the fact that religion and culture powerfully influence economic and
political development.
Weber understood that the social sciences could not simply mimic the natural
sciences, because humans attach widely varying meanings and loyalties to their
leaders and institutions. It is not simply facts that matter but how people perceive,
interpret, and react to these facts; this makes causality in the social sciences far
more complex than in the natural sciences. To be objective, therefore, the social
scientist must take into account human subjectivity.

Weber discerned three types of authority: traditional (as in

monarchies), charismatic (a concept he developed to refer to the personal
drawing power of revolutionary leaders), and rational-legal (characteristic of
modern societies). Weber coined the term bureaucracy, and he was the first to
study bureaucraciessystematically. His theories, which focused on culture as a
chief source of economic growth and democracy, still find support among
contemporary political scientists, and he must be ranked equally as one of the
founders of both modern sociology and modern political science.
Other scholars also contributed to the growth of political science in the 19th and
early 20th centuries. In The English Constitution (1867), the English economist
and political analyst Walter Bagehot (1826–77), who was also an editor of The
Economist, famously distinguished between Britain’s “dignified” offices (e.g., the
monarch) and its “efficient” offices (e.g., the prime minister). James Bryce (1838–
1922), who taught civil law at the University of Oxford, produced one of the
earliest and most influential studies of the U.S. political system in The American
Commonwealth (1888). The Belorussian political scientist Moisey
Ostrogorsky(1854–1919), who was educated at the École Libre des Sciences
Politiques in Paris, pioneered the study of parties, elections, and public opinion
in Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (originally written in
French; 1902), which focused on the United States and Britain. In Paris, André
Siegfried, teaching at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Collège de
France, introduced the use of maps to demonstrate the influence of geography on
politics. At first few Britons turned to behavioralism and quantification, instead
continuing in their inclination toward political philosophy. In contrast, the Swedish
scholar Herbert Tingsten(1896–1973), in his seminal Political Behaviour: Studies
in Election Statistics (1937), developed the connections between social groups
and their voting tendencies. Before World War II the large areas of the world that
were colonies or dictatorships made few important contributions to the growth of
political science.

Post-World War II trends and debates

Perhaps the most important irreversible change in political science after World
War II was that the scope of the discipline was expanded to include the study of
politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—areas that had been largely ignored in
favour of Europe and North America. This trend was encouraged by the Cold
Warcompetition between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence
over the political development of newly independent countries. The scholarship
produced in these countries, however, remained largely derivative of
developments in Europe and the United States. Researchers in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, often in partnership with European and American colleagues,
produced significant studies on decolonization, ideology, federalism, corruption,
and political instability. In Latin America a Marxist-oriented view
called dependency theory was popular from the 1960s to the ’80s. Greatly
influencing the study of international relations in the United States and Europe as
well as in developing countries, dependency theorists argued that Latin America’s
problems were rooted in its subservient economic and political relationship to the
United States and western Europe. More recently, Latin American political
scientists, influenced by methods developed in American universities, undertook
empirical studies of the sources of democracy and instability, such as Arturo
Valenzuela’s The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978). African, Asian, and
Latin American political scientists also made important contributions as teachers
on the faculties of American and European universities.
Outside the United States, where political science initially was less quantitative,
there were several outstanding works. Like Lasswell, the German
philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and others adopted Freudian insights in
their pioneering study The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which used a 29-item
questionnaire to detect the susceptibility of individuals to fascist beliefs. The
French political scientist Maurice Duverger’s Political Parties (1951) is still highly
regarded, not only for its classification of parties but also for its linking of party
systems with electoral systems. Duverger argued that single-member-district
electoral systems that require only a plurality to win election tend to produce two-
party systems, whereas proportional-representation systems tend to produce
multiparty systems; this generalization was later called “Duverger’s law.” The
French sociologist Michel Crozier’s The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1964) found
that Weber’s idealized bureaucracy is quite messy, political, and varied.
Each bureaucracy is a political subculture; what is rational and routine in one
bureau may be quite different in another. Crozier thus influenced the subsequent
“bureaucratic politics” approach of the 1970s.
Behavioralism
Behavioralism, which was one of the dominant approaches in the 1950s and ’60s,
is the view that the subject matter of political science should be limited to
phenomena that are independently observable and quantifiable. It assumes that
political institutions largely reflect underlying social forces and that the study of
politics should begin with society, culture, and public opinion. To this end,
behavioralists utilize the methodology of the social sciences—primarily
psychology—to establish statistical relationships between independent variables
(presumed causes) and dependent variables (presumed effects). For example, a
behavioralist might use detailed election data to argue that voters in rural areas
tend to vote for candidates who are more conservative, while voters in cities
generally favour candidates who are more liberal. The prominence of
behavioralists in the post-World War II period helped to lead political science in a
much more scientific direction. For many behavioralists, only such quantified
studies can be considered political science in the strict sense; they often
contrasted their studies with those of the so-called traditionalists, who attempted
to explain politics by using unquantified descriptions, anecdotes,
historical analogies, ideologies, and philosophy. Like behaviourism in psychology,
behavioralism in political science attempted to discard intuition, or at least to
support it with empirical observation. A traditionalist, in contrast, might attempt to
support intuition with reason alone.
Perhaps the most important behavioral contributions to political science
were election studies. In 1955 American political scientist V.O. Key, Jr. (1908–
63), identified as “critical,” or “realigning,” several elections in which American
voters shifted their long-term party affiliation massively from one political party to
another, giving rise to the dominance of the Republican Party from 1860 to 1932
and of the Democratic Party after 1932. Pioneering statistical electoral analyses
were conducted by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center (SRC),
which was developed in the 1940s. In The American Voter (1960), Angus
Campbell, Philip Converse, William Miller, and Donald Stokes used the results of
studies by the SRC to develop the concept of party identification—the long-term
psychological attachment of a voter to a political party. The long-recognized
influences of religion, social class, region, and ethnicity, they argued, contribute to
voting behaviour only insofar as the voter has been socialized, primarily by his
parents, to adopt a particular party identification.
Behavioral approaches were soon adopted outside the United States, often by
scholars with connections to American universities. The University of Oxford
initiated election studies in the 1960s, and David Butler and Donald Stokes—one
of the authors of The American Voter—adapted much of the American study
in Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (1969). They
found that political generation (the era in which one was born) and “duration of
partisanship” also predict party identification—that is, the length of time one has
been a partisan heavily predicts one’s vote. They also found that party
identification, initially transmitted by one’s parents, may change under the impact
of historic events. The influential Norwegian scholar Stein Rokkan pioneered the
use of cross-national quantitative data to examine the interaction of party systems
and social divisions based on class, religion, and region, which in combination
explain much voting behaviour. Rokkan identified the importance of “centre-
periphery” tensions, finding that outlying regions of a country tend to vote
differently from the area where political and economic activities are centred. The
extensive Eurobarometer series—public-opinion surveys carried out in European
Union countries since 1973 on behalf of the European Commission—have given
European behavioralists a solid statistical base on a range of political, social,
economic, and cultural issues; the surveys have provided valuable data for
examining trends over time, and they have shown, among other things, that
modern European ideological opinion clusters around the political centre,
suggesting that stable democratic systems have taken root. More
recently, Transparency International, founded in 1993 in Berlin, has conducted
worldwide surveys that attempt to quantify corruption. In Latin America, Guillermo
O’Donnell and Arturo Valenzuela used public-opinion surveys and voting,
economic, and demographic data to examine the forces that have destabilized
democracy there.
The behavioral approach was also central to the work of the American sociologist
and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, whose influential Political Man: The
Social Bases of Politics (1960) used statistical and historical data to demonstrate
that social class is one of the chief determinants of political behaviour. Lipset
infuriated Marxists by portraying elections as “the democratic class struggle” in
which the working class finds its true voice in moderate leftist parties. Lipset also
contributed to modernization theory by identifying factors that explain why
countries adopt either authoritarian or democratic political systems. Specifically,
Lipset found a strong relationship between level of affluence and type of political
system, demonstrating that less-affluent countries seldom establish democratic
structures.
Behavioralism also influenced international relations, though it did not achieve the
same dominance in this area that it enjoyed in domestic and comparative politics.
The Correlates of War Project, founded at the University of Michigan in 1963,
gathered much quantitative data and became one of the leading sources for
scholars studying the causes and effects of war and international tension.
Behavioralism also established itself in studies of judicial and bureaucratic
systems.
By the 1960s behavioralism was in full bloom, forcing the traditionalists into
retreat in much of the discipline. By the late 1960s, however, criticism of
behavioralism had begun to grow. One charge leveled against it was that the
statistical correlations uncovered by behavioral studies did not always establish
which variable, if any, was the cause and which the effect. The fact that two
variables change together does not in itself show which causes which; indeed, the
changes exhibited by both variables may be the effects of an underlying third
variable. In order to make sense of the actual relationship between the variables,
the researcher must often use intuition—a tool that behavioralists expressly
sought to avoid. A study of white blue-collar Roman Catholics in Detroit,
Michigan, for example, might find that during a certain period they were more
likely to vote Republican as they became more affluent and suburbanized.
However, whether the change in their voting patterns was due to their race, their
religion, their increased affluence, or their suburban lifestyle—or whether they
simply responded to the message or personality of particular Republican Party
candidates—may be unclear.
In addition, though behavioral research yielded important insights into the political
behaviour of individuals, it often explained little about actual governance. Voting
studies, for example, rarely provided an understanding of public policy. Because
behavioral research tended to be limited to topics that were amenable to
quantitative study, it was often dismissed as narrow and irrelevant to major
political issues. Indeed, intense methodological debates among behavioralists
(and within the discipline more broadly) often seemed arcane, filled
with esotericjargon and addressed to issues of little concern to most citizens.
Because behavioralists needed quantitative survey and electoral data, which
were often unavailable in dictatorships or less-affluent countries, their approach
was useless in many parts of the world. In addition, the reliability of behavioral
research was called into question by its dependence in large part on verbal
responses to questionnaires. Analyses of survey results have shown that
respondents often give socially desirable answers and are likely to conceal their
true feelings on controversial topics; moreover, the wording of questions, as well
as the ordering of possible answers, can affect the results, making concrete
conclusions difficult. Finally, many behavioral findings revealed nothing new but
simply restated well-established or obvious conclusions, such as the observation
that wealthy people tend to vote conservative and poor and working-class people
tend to vote liberal or left-of-centre. For all of these reasons, behavioralism did not
become the sole methodology in political science, and many behavioralists
eventually acknowledged the need for the unquantified insights of traditionalists;
by the late 1960s political scientists called this the “postbehavioral synthesis.”

Political culture
Political culture may be defined as the political psychology of a country or nation
(or subgroup thereof). Political culture studies attempt to uncover deep-seated,
long-held values characteristic of a society or group rather
than ephemeralattitudes toward specific issues that might be gathered through
public-opinion surveys. Several major studies using a political culture approach
appeared simultaneously with the behavioral studies of the late 1950s, adding
psychological and anthropological insights to statistical covariance. The study of
political culture was hardly new; since at least the time of Plato, virtually all
political thinkers have acknowledged the importance of what Tocqueville called
“habits of the heart” in making the political system work as it does. Modern
political culture approaches were motivated in part by a desire to understand the
rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century in Russia, Germany, and Italy, and
many early studies (e.g., The Authoritarian Personality) focused on Nazi
Germany; one early political culture study, Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of
a Backward Society (1958), argued that poverty in southern Italy grew out of a
psychological inability to trust or to form associations beyond the immediate
family, a finding that was long controversial but is now accepted by many.
Perhaps the most important work of political culture was Gabriel
Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy
in Five Nations(1963), which surveyed 1,000-person samples in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Almond and Verba
identified three types of political culture: (1) participant, in which citizens
understand and take part in politics and voluntary associations, (2) subject, in
which citizens largely obey but participate little, and (3) parochial, in which
citizens have neither knowledge of nor interest in politics. The authors found that
democratic stability arises from a balance or mixture of these cultures, a
conclusion similar to that drawn by Aristotle. In Almond and Verba’s edited
volume The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), several authors demonstrated that
political culture in each of their subject countries was undergoing major change,
little of which was predictable from the original study, suggesting that political
culture, while more durable than mere public opinion, is never static. Critics
of The Civic Culture also pointed out that political structures can affect culture.
The effective governance and economic policies of West Germany’s government
made that country’s citizens embrace democracy, whereas Britain’s economic
decline made Britons more cynical about politics. The problem, again, is
determining causality.
Over the decades Lipset, who served as president of both the American
Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association, turned
from explanations of political values based on social class to those based on
history and culture, which, he argued, displayed consistency throughout history.
American political scientist Robert Putnam followed in this Tocquevillian tradition
in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), which
demonstrated that the historical cultures of Italy’s regions explain their current
political situations. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community (2000), Putnam claimed that the American tendency to form citizen
groups, a characteristic that Tocqueville praised, was weakening. Americans
were less often joining groups and participating in politics, Putnam argued,
leading to a loss of “social capital” (the collective value of social networks) and
potentially undermining democracy, a worry shared by other political observers in
the United States.
Adopting what became known as the “path-dependent development” approach,
advocates of the historical-cultural school maintained that contemporary society is
a reflection of society in ages past. The political culture approach declined in the
1970s but was later revived as political scientists incorporated it into explanations
of why some countries experienced economic growth and established democratic
political systems while others did not. Some suggested that the rapid economic
growth and democratization that took place in some East Asian countries in the
second half of the 20th century was facilitated by a political culture based on
Confucianism. In Africa and Latin America, they argued, the absence of a culture
that valued hard work and capital accumulation led to the stagnation of much of
those regions. This viewpoint was captured by the title of Lawrence E. Harrison
and Samuel P. Huntington’s edited volume Culture Matters: How Values Shape
Human Progress (2000).

Systems analysis
Systems analysis, which was influenced by the Austrian Canadian
biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and the American sociologist Talcott
Parsons (1902–79), is a broad descriptive theory of how the various parts and
levels of a political system interact with each other. The central idea of systems
analysis is based on an analogy with biology: just as the heart, lungs, and blood
function as a whole, so do the components of social and political systems. When
one component changes or comes under stress, the other components will adjust
to compensate.
Systems analysis studies first appeared alongside behavioral and political culture
studies in the 1950s. A groundbreaking work employing the approach, David
Easton’s The Political System (1953), conceived the political system
as integratingall activities through which social policy is formulated and executed
—that is, the political system is the policy-making process. Easton defined
political behaviour as the “authoritative allocation of values,” or the distribution of
rewards in wealth, power, and status that the system may provide. In doing so, he
distinguished his sense of the subject matter of political science from that of
Lasswell, who had argued that political science is concerned with the distribution
and content of patterns of value throughout society. Easton’s conception of
system emphasizes linkages between the system and its environment. Inputs
(demands) flow into the system and are converted into outputs (decisions and
actions) that constitute the authoritative allocation of values. Drawing
on cybernetics, the Czech-born American political scientist Karl Deutsch used a
systems perspective to view the political system as a communications network.
Following Deutsch, some political scientists tried briefly to establish
communications as the basis of politics.
Systems analysis was applied to international relations to explain how the forces
of the international system affect the behaviour of states. The American political
scientist Morton Kaplan delineated types of international systems and their logical
consequences in System and Process in International Politics (1957). According
to Kaplan, for example, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the
Soviet Union brought about a bipolar international system that governed much of
the two countries’ foreign and security policies. Locked in a zero-sum game
(when one country wins, the other loses), the two superpowers watched each
other vigilantly, eager for gains but also wary of the threat of nuclear war.
In Man, the State, and War (1959), the American international relations
theorist Kenneth Waltz applied systems theory to the study of international conflict
to develop a view known as structural realism. Waltz argued that the underlying
cause of war is an anarchic international system in which there is no recognized
authority for resolving conflicts between sovereign states. According to Waltz,
with many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its

grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire—conflict, sometimes leading

to war, is bound to occur.

By the 1970s, systems approaches to domestic politics were criticized and
generally abandoned as unverifiable abstractions of little explanatory or predictive
power. (In international politics, however, systems approaches remained
important.) On closer examination, the “conversion process” of systems theory—
i.e., the transformation of inputs into outputs—struck many as simply plain old
“politics.” Another problem was that much of systems theory took as its norm and
model an idealized version of American politics that did not apply universally to
the domestic politics of all societies. Systems analysis also was unable to explain
certain policy decisions that were made despite the absence of predominating
favourable inputs, such as the decision by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to
deepen U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. Finally, systems theorists
unrealistically reified the systems of the countries they studied, portraying them as
durable and stable because they were supposed to correct and reform
themselves. They were thus unable to explain defective systems or systemic
upheavals, such as the collapse of communist regimes in eastern and central
Europe in 1989–91.
Other approaches employing systems analysis flourished briefly in the late 20th
century. Decision-making theory is based on systems theory but also borrows
from game theory, which was devised by mathematicians during World War II.
Decision-making theory supposes that actors behave rationally to achieve goals
by selecting the course of action that will maximize benefits and minimize costs.
This assumption has been contradicted by some studies, such as Graham
Allison’s Essence of Decision (1971), which found that the decision-making
process of the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy during
the Cuban missile crisiscould not be adequately explained in terms of a strict
rational calculation of costs and benefits; instead, decisions often depended on
the standard operating procedures of organizational actors and the information
that subordinates fed to their superiors, which itself was skewed by “bureaucratic
politics.” Allison argued that one key determinant of Kennedy’s decision to impose
a naval blockade on Cuba rather than to invade the island was the delayed flight
of a spy plane, which resulted from a quarrel between the Central Intelligence
Agency and the U.S. Air Force over who was to pilot the plane. (Allison’s view
was refuted by subsequent studies that showed that Kennedy had decided in
advance not to bomb or invade Cuba.) Bureaucratic-process models, which
maintain that policy decisions are influenced by the priorities of bureaucrats who
compete with each other to protect their programs, budgets, and procedures,
became prominent during the 1970s, but research failed to identify a consistent
pattern of influence resulting from bureaucratic infighting.
There was no consensus among political scientists concerning the system that
developed after the end of the Cold War. Some scholars believed that there was
a return to a 19th-century balance-of-power system, in which multiple states make
and remake alliances. Others argued for the existence of a multipolar system
consisting of trade blocs that were neither mutually hostile nor totally cooperative
with each other. Some argued that the international system became unipolar, the
United States being the single dominant world power. Huntington, in a
controversial article published in 1993 and a book, The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, used cultural theory to propose
that the emerging international system constituted a “clash of civilizations.”
Several civilizations, each based mostly on religion, variously clashed and
cooperated. The worst clashes, he argued, took place between Islamic and other
civilizations. Many scholars rejected Huntington’s analysis as simplistic and ill-
informed, but others found it persuasive, especially after the September 11
attacks of 2001 and the U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq
(2003).

Theory of rational choice

The dominant school of thought in political science in the late 20th century
was rational choice theory. For rational choice theorists, history and culture are
irrelevant to understanding political behaviour; instead, it is sufficient to know the
actors’ interests and to assume that they pursue them rationally. Whereas the
earlier decision-making approach sought to explain the decisions of elite groups
(mostly in matters of foreign policy), rational choice theorists attempted to apply
their far more formal theory (which sometimes involved the use of mathematical
notation) to all facets of political life. Many believed they had found the key that
would at last make political science truly scientific. In An Economic Theory of
Democracy (1957), an early work in rational choice theory, Anthony
Downs claimed that significant elements of political life could be explained in
terms of voter self-interest. Downs showed that in democracies
the aggregate distribution of political opinion forms a bell-shaped curve, with most
voters possessing moderate opinions; he argued that this fact forces political
parties in democracies to adopt centrist positions. The founder of rational choice
theory was William Riker, who applied economic and game-theoretic approaches
to develop increasingly complex mathematical models of politics. In The Theory
of Political Coalitions(1962), Riker demonstrated by mathematical reasoning why
and how politicians form alliances. Riker and his followers applied this version of
rational choice theory—which they variously called rational choice, public choice,
social choice, formal modeling, or positive political theory—to explain almost
everything, including voting, legislation, wars, and bureaucracy. Some
researchers used games to reproduce key decisions in small-group experiments.
Rational choice theory identified—or rediscovered—at least two major
explanatory factors that some political scientists had neglected: (1) that politicians
are endlessly opportunistic and (2) that all decisions take place in some type of
institutional setting. Rational choice theorists argued that political institutions
structure the opportunities available to politicians and thus help to explain their
actions.

By the early 21st century, rational choice theory was being stiffly challenged.
Critics alleged that it simply mathematized the obvious and, in searching for
universal patterns, ignored important cultural contexts, which thus rendered it
unable to predict much of importance; another charge was that the choices the
theory sought to explain appeared “rational” only in retrospect. Reacting to
such criticisms, some rational choice theorists began calling themselves “new
institutionalists” or “structuralists” to emphasize their view that all political choices
take place within specific institutional structures. U.S. congressmen, for example,
typically calculate how their votes on bills will help or hurt their chances for
reelection. In this way, rational choice theory led political science back to its
traditional concern with political institutions, such as parliaments and laws. In
more recent years, increasing numbers of rational choice theorists have backed
away from claims that their approach is capable of explaining every political
phenomenon.

Democratic theory
Late in the 20th century, some political scientists rediscovered their Aristotelian
roots by returning to the question of how to achieve the good, just, and stable
polity—that is, by returning to the study of democracy. Although the approaches
taken were highly diverse, most researchers attempted to identify the factors by
which democracies are established and sustained. Democratic theory was
revived in earnest in the late 1980s, when communist regimes were collapsing
throughout eastern Europe, and was accompanied by the founding of the
influential Journal of Democracy in 1990.
The American political theorist Robert Dahl, who had long been a scholar of the
topic, viewed democracy as the pluralist interplay of groups in what he called a
“polyarchy.” Historical-cultural thinkers such as Lipset traced the origins of
democracy to the values that democratic societies developed long ago. Samuel
Huntington, perhaps the most influential post-World War II American political
scientist, worried about a “democratic distemper” in which citizens demand more
than the system can deliver. Huntington also viewed democracy as coming in
waves—the most recent having started in 1974 in Greece and Portugal and
having subsequently washed over Spain and Latin America—but warned of a
potential reverse wave toward authoritarianism. The Spanish American political
scientist Juan Linz explored how democracies can decline, and the Dutch-born
American scholar Arend Lijphart considered the institutional arrangements
(political parties and electoral systems, executives and parliaments) that were
most likely to produce stable political systems.
Modernization theorists noted the connection between democracy and economic
development but were unable to determine whether economic development
typically precedes democracy or vice versa. Few of them regarded democracy as
inevitable, and many noted its philosophical, psychological, and social
prerequisites, suggesting that democracy may be a largely Western phenomenon
that is not easily transplanted to non-Western cultures. Others, however, argued
that democracy is a universal value that transcends culture. Some worried that
the legitimacy of established democracies was eroding in the late 20th and early
21st centuries, as citizens became disenchanted with the political process and
many moved away from political participation in favour of private pursuits. Voter
turnout fell in most countries, in part because citizens saw little difference
between the major political parties, believing them to be essentially power-
seeking and self-serving. Some attributed this trend to a supposed abandonment
of ideology as most parties hewed to centrist positions in order to capture the
large moderate vote. Still others argued that party systems, ossified for at least a
generation and based on social and political conflicts that had long been resolved,
failed to address in a coherent fashion new social issues (e.g.,
feminism, environmentalism, civil rights) that concerned many citizens. Some
blamed the media for focusing on political scandals instead of issues of
substance, and some cited the inability of governments to fully address society’s
ills (e.g., crime, drug abuse, unemployment). Nevertheless, not all scholars
viewed this change with alarm. Some argued that citizens were generally better-
educated and more critical than they were given credit for, that they were simply
demanding better, cleaner government, and that these demands would eventually
lead to long-term democratic renewal.

Enduring Debates In Political Science

Political scientists, like other social and natural scientists, gather data and
formulate theories. The two tasks are often out of balance, however, leading
either to the collection of irrelevant facts or to the construction of misleading
theories. Throughout the post-World War II era, political scientists developed and
discarded numerous theories, and there was considerable (and unresolved)
debate as to whether it is more important to develop theories and then collect
data to confirm or reject them or to collect and analyze data from which theories
would flow.

Perhaps the oldest philosophical dispute has to do with the relative importance of
subjectivity and objectivity. Many political scientists have attempted to develop
approaches that are value-free and wholly objective. In modern political science,
much of this debate takes place between structuralists and cultural theorists.
Structuralists claim that the way in which the world is organized (or structured)
determines politics and that the proper objects of study for political science are
power, interests, and institutions, which they construe as objective features of
political life. In contrast, cultural theorists, who study values, opinions, and
psychology, argue that subjective perceptions of reality are more important than
objective reality itself. However, most scholars now believe that the two realms
feed into one another and cannot be totally separated. To explain the apparent
inertia of Japan’s political system, for example, a structuralist would cite the
country’s electoral laws and powerful ministries, whereas a cultural theorist would
look to deeply rooted Japanese values such as obedience and stability. Few in
one camp, however, would totally dismiss the arguments of the other.

Likewise, although some political scientists continue to insist that only quantified
data are legitimate, some topics are not amenable to study in these terms. The
decisions of top officials, for example, are often made in small groups and behind
closed doors, and so understanding them requires subjective descriptive material
based on interviews and observations—essentially the techniques of good
journalists. If done well, these subjective studies may be more valid and longer-
lived than quantitative studies.
Prior to the development of reliable survey research, most political analyses
focused on elites. Once a sizable amount of research had become available,
there was a considerable debate about whether rulers are guided by citizen
preferences, expressed through interest groups and elections, or whether elites
pursue their own goals and manipulate public opinion to achieve their ends.
Despite numerous studies of public opinion, voting behaviour, and interest
groups, the issue has not been resolved and, indeed, is perhaps unresolvable.
Analyses can establish statistical relationships, but it has been difficult to
demonstrate causality with any certainty. This debate is complicated by two
factors. First, although there is a considerable body of survey and electoral data,
most people ignore politics most of the time, a factor that must be considered in
attempting to understand which part of the “public” policy makers listen to—all
citizens, all voters, or only those expressing an intense view on a particular
matter. Political analyses based on elites are hindered by a dearth of reliable
elite-level data, as researchers are rarely invited into the deliberations of rulers.
Accordingly, much is known about the social bases of politics but little of how and
why decisions are made. Even when decision makers grant interviews or write
their memoirs, firm conclusions remain elusive, because officials often provide
accounts that are self-serving or misleading.
Political science has had difficulty handling rapid change; it prefers the static
(stable political systems) to the dynamic. If historians are stuck in the past,
political scientists are often captives of the present. For some the collapse of the
Soviet Union showed that the theories and methods of political science are of only
limited utility. Despite decades of gathering data and theorizing, political science
was unable to anticipate the defining event of the post-World War II era. Critics
charged that political science could describe what is but could never discern what
was likely to be. Others, however, maintained that this criticism was unfair,
arguing that such upheavals can be predicted, given sufficient data. Still,
the demise of the Soviet Union spurred some political scientists to develop
theories to explain political changes and transformations. Examining the collapse
of authoritarian regimes and their replacement with democratic governments in
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union
during the last three decades of the 20th century, they sought to develop a theory
of transitions to democracy. Others argued that no such universal theory is
possible and that all democratic transitions are unique.
BRITANNICA STORIES

At the beginning of the 21st century, political science was faced with a stark
dilemma: the more scientific it tried to be, the more removed it found itself from
the burning issues of the day. Although some research in political science would
continue to be arcane and unintelligible to the layperson and even to other
scholars, many political scientists attempted to steer a middle course, one that
maintained a rigorous scientific approach but also addressed questions that are
important to academics, citizens, and decision makers alike. Indeed, some
political scientists, recognizing that many “scientific” approaches had lost their
utility after a decade or two, suggested that the discipline should cease its
attempts to imitate the natural sciences and return to the classic concerns of
analyzing and promoting the political good.