political science

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 BCE) in China and Kautilya (flourished 300 BCE) 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 BCE), whose ideal of a stable republic still
yields insights and metaphors, as the first political scientist, though most consider Aristotle
(384–322 BCE), who introduced empirical observation into the study of politics, to be the
discipline’s true founder.
 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
zoom_in
Confucius governing in their own interests). Legitimate systems
Rubbing of Confucius after a design
included monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the
attributed to Wu Tao-hsuan, 19th
century. few), and polity (rule by the many), while corresponding
© Everett Historical/[Link]
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 BCE) and, after his death,
the division of his empire among his generals brought
zoom_in
Aristotle large new political forms, in which society and political
Detail of a Roman copy (2nd century
system came to be seen as separate entities. This shift
BCE
required a new understanding of politics. Hellenistic
) of a Greek alabaster portrait bust of
Aristotle (c. 325 thinkers, especially the Stoics, asserted the existence of a
BCE natural law that applied to all human beings equally; this
); in the collection of the Museo idea became the foundation of Roman legalism and
Nazionale Romano, Rome.
A. Dagli Orti/©De Agostini Editore/age
Christian notions of equality (see Stoicism). Thus, the
fotostock Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), 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.
 Early Christian thinkers, such as St. Augustine (354–
430), emphasized the dual loyalty of Christians to both
God and temporal rulers, with the clear implication that
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
zoom_in
Cicero was lost to Europe but preserved by Arab philosophers
Marcus Tullius Cicero, detail of a
such as al-Fārābī (c. 878–c. 950) and Averroës (1126–
marble bust; in the Capitoline
Museums, Rome. 1198). Translations of Aristotle in Spain under the Moors
© AISA—Everett/[Link]
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
zoom_in amoral advice to actual and would-be princes on the best
St. Augustine
St. Augustine, undated engraving. means of acquiring and holding on to political power.
© Lanmas/Alamy 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-
zoom_in
Niccolò Machiavelli powerful God, how humans, endowed with a natural
Niccolò Machiavelli, oil on canvas by
right to self-preservation but living in an anarchic state
Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence. of nature, would be driven by fear of violent death to
Mondadori Portfolio/age fotostock
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
zoom_in
Thomas Hobbes collective that overrides individual wills, “forcing a man
Thomas Hobbes, detail of an oil
to be free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced by
painting by John Michael Wright; in
 the National Portrait Gallery, London. French revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery,
London 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
zoom_in
John Locke embraced by the framers of the Constitution of the
John Locke, oil on canvas by Herman
United States (see separation of powers; checks and
Verelst, 1689; in the National Portrait
Gallery, London. balances). Montesquieu also produced an innovative
Universal History Archive/Universal
analysis of governance that assigned to each form of
Images Group/REX/[Link]
government an animating principle—for example,
keyboard_arrow_left keyboard_arrow_right 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.

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith

zoom_in (1723–90) is considered the founder of classical
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, undated economic liberalism. In An Inquiry into the Nature and
aquatint.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he argued that
York; the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, the the role of the state should be restricted primarily to
Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1975 (accession
enforcing contracts in a free market. In contrast, the
no. 1975.616.11); [Link]
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
zoom_in an important psychological or cultural insight: that
Montesquieu political systems are living organisms that grow over
Montesquieu.
 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, centuries and that depend on a sense of legitimacy that is
Amsterdam
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

zoom_in modern state was first developing, provided a

Adam Smith justification of the legitimacy of national governments,
Adam Smith, paste medallion by
one fiercely defended to this day. Many political
James Tassie, 1787; in the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. scientists, especially in international relations, find
Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait
Bodin’s notion of sovereignty useful for expressing the
Gallery, Edinburgh
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
zoom_in social science. Capturing this fervour of scientific
Jean Bodin
Jean Bodin, 16th-century engraving.
optimism was Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Tracy (1754–1836), who in the 1790s coined the term
Paris
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

zoom_in worked because Americans had developed “the art of

Auguste Comte association” and were egalitarian group formers.
Auguste Comte, drawing by Tony
Tocqueville’s emphasis on cultural values contrasted
Toullion, 19th century; in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. sharply with the views of the German socialist theorists
H. Roger-Viollet
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 also
communism).

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
zoom_in
Alexis de Tocqueville Oxford in 1912.
Alexis de Tocqueville, detail of an oil
painting by Théodore Chassériau, The early 20th century
1850; in the Château de Versailles.
H. Roger-Viollet
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,
zoom_in
Karl Marx established a school of political science at Columbia
Karl Marx, c. 1870.
University in New York City. Although political science
From Karl Marx's Oekonomische Lehren,
by Karl Kautsky, 1887 faculties grew unevenly after 1900, by the 1920s most
major institutions had established new departments,
keyboard_arrow_left keyboard_arrow_right 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 geography
rather 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 bureaucracies systematically. His
zoom_in
Max Weber theories, which focused on culture as a chief source of
Max Weber, 1918.
economic growth and democracy, still find support
Leif Geiges
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 War competition 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
esoteric jargon 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 ephemeral attitudes 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 integrating all 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 crisis could
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
zoom_in is sufficient to know the actors’ interests and to assume
Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington, 2004. that they pursue them rationally. Whereas the earlier
Peter Lauth/World Economic Forum decision-making approach sought to explain the
([Link])
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.

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.

Michael G. Roskin

Citation Information
Article Title:
political science
Website Name:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published:
29 October 2020
URL:
[Link]
Access Date:
February 02, 2022