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Political Representation
members, bureaucrats, terrorists, or revolutionar-
ies—are seen as influencing what they do politi-
cally; and, in turn, the political culture, political
system, mechanisms of political socialization,
political movements and parties, and the interna-
tional system are perceived as having an impact on
what people are like. (Hermann 1986, p. 2)
Political psychology finally took shape as an academic
discipline in its own right when the International Society
of Political Psychology was founded in 1978 and began
holding annual scientific meetings and publishing a quar-
terly journal, Political Psychology. Today, political psychol-
ogy is a key component of the political behavior subfield
of political science. Its diverse objects of analysis range
from the psychobiography of political leaders (for exam-
ple, the 1997 psychobiography of President Richard
Nixon by Vamik D. Volkan, Norman Itzowitz, and
Andrew W. Dod) to inquiries into the “postmaterial”
bases of identity politics (e.g., Ronald Inglehart’s seminal
work, Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political
Styles among Western Publics, 1977). Psychological termi-
nology is now an important and pervasive part of political
science discourse, as numerous psychological concepts
have been incorporated into political studies at both the
national and international level. Psychological concepts
are widely used in research on voting behavior, political
socialization, political leadership, the dynamics of public
opinion, political attitudes, political conflict and coopera-
tion, international negotiation, decision-making, and,
more recently, political information processing.
The two empirical research methods most often
employed to study psychological variables are the sample
survey and the in-depth interview. For example, political
psychologists frequently use attitude surveys to probe the
connections among personality structures, demographic
and population variables, and dispositions toward politi-
cal participation and party preference. Other more inno-
vative but less frequently utilized research tools include
simulation, projective techniques, content analysis, focus
groups, and the controlled experiment. The application of
psychological insights to political inquiry remains a wide-
spread and growing trend, as many political psychology
studies continue to appear within the framework of
related social-science disciplines, especially political sci-
ence. Although no underlying scientific paradigm or even
a single basic theory provides unity and coherence to this
eclectic interdisciplinary field, political psychology has
already acquired a permanent, if rather heterogeneous and
pluralistic, presence within the discipline of political
science.
SEE ALSO Almond, Gabriel A.; Attitudes, Political;
Authoritarianism; Authority; Behaviorism; Cognition;
Communication; Fascism; Frankfurt School; Lay
310 I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
Theories; Left Wing; Persuasion; Political Science;
Politics; Preferences; Prejudice; Psychoanalytic Theory;
Psychology; Right Wing; Stereotype Threat; Stereotypes;
Tolerance, Political; Verba, Sidney
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, William, and Barbara Hirschfelder-Ascher. 2005.
Revitalizing Political Psychology: The Legacy of Harold D.
Lasswell. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cottam, Martha L., et al. 2004. Introduction to Political
Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Elster, Jon. 1993. Political Psychology. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hermann, Margaret G., ed. 1986. Political Psychology. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Knutson, Jeanne N. 1973. Handbook of Political Psychology. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 2002. Political Psychology.
Mahwah, NJ, and London: Erlbaum.
Sears, David O., Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis, eds. 2003.
Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Rossen Vassilev
POLITICAL
REPRESENTATION
SEE Constituency; Democracy; Representation.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
The first efforts to systematically study politics can be
traced to Plato’s Republic (c. 427–c. 347 BCE) and
Aristotle’s Politics (384–322 BCE). Their works were later
incorporated into Christianity through neo-Platonists,
such as St. Augustine (354–430 CE), and neo-
Aristotelians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274
CE). The classical and Christian traditions of political phi-
losophy postulated metaphysical first principles and relied
on a process of deductive reasoning that sought to derive
the moral and ethical principles of an ideal-state. Whether
the ideal-state was ever achieved by any civilization was
considered secondary to discovering the “highest good”
that ought to guide citizens and statesmen.
The political writings of Niccolò Machiavelli were
the first to break with these traditions of political philos-
ophy. Machiavelli believed that the study of political his-
tory could yield general principles to guide statesmen in
the conduct of politics, diplomacy, and war. He studied

existing and historical political institutions, and the
actions of great statesmen, not for the purpose of discern-
ing a morally ideal-state, but to identify institutional
arrangements that would maintain social order and polit-
ical stability. The separation of politics from any meta-
physical or theological foundation led subsequent political
philosophers to seek a new basis for legitimate political
authority, although, in the end, solutions such as reason,
natural law, custom, and tradition were superceded by the
idea that sovereignty resides in a nation’s people.
FROM POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY TO
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Francis Lieber (1798–1872) is considered the first mod-
ern political scientist. He was a liberal German émigré to
the United States, who from 1827 to 1832 devoted him-
self to writing and editing the thirteen-volume
Encyclopedia Americana. Its major contribution was to
establish “the idea of the state,” or Staatswissenshaft, as the
organizing concept of political science. The idea of the
state was gaining wide currency in Europe, particularly in
Germany, but it was Lieber who first argued in the United
States that the “idea of the state is the basis of a class of sci-
ences, and gives them a distinct character as belongs to the
various classes of history, philosophy, theological, medical,
&c., sciences” (1838, Vol. 10, p. 225). He drew a distinc-
tion between idea of the state and the “form of govern-
ment,” which was “merely a means of obtaining the great
objects of the state” (1838, Vol. 11, p. 568). Against the
backdrop of events leading up to the U.S. Civil War,
Lieber articulated a distinctly idealistic theory of the state
which identified the state as an abstract and organic sov-
ereign society that was the source of governmental author-
ity and the basis of its legitimacy. Lieber’s appointment as
professor of history and political science at Columbia
University in 1857 made him the first person to hold that
title in the United States.
THE DOMAIN AND METHODS OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE
After Lieber, political science was established as a broader
discipline when John W. Burgess, a professor of constitu-
tional law, founded the Faculty of Political Science at
Columbia in 1880. Burgess’s school became the leading
graduate faculty in political science during the 1890s
along with the Department of History, Politics, and
Economics, which had been established by Henry Baxter
Adams at Johns Hopkins University in the 1870s. Burgess
and Adams were both adherents of the Staatswissenshaft
doctrine, but they shifted the discipline’s methodological
emphasis from political ethics to history.
In 1886 Columbia’s faculty founded the Political
Science Quarterly (PSQ), which was the new discipline’s
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first scholarly journal. In its first issue, Edmund Munroe
Smith, a professor of international law, announced that it
would “recognize but one political science—the science of
the state” (1886, pp. 2–3). However, the PSQ also facili-
tated a new departure in Staatswissenshaft by emphasizing
that it was one thing to describe the state’s development,
comparatively and historically, but more was required to
explain changes and development in the state. Smith
argued “if we seek to trace through history the evolution
of the state, we find each step in its development recorded
in the evolution of law and explained to a great degree by
economic changes” (p. 7). This methodological principle,
which was called “the economic interpretation of history”
was developed first by James E. Thorold Rogers
(1823–1890), a professor of political economy at Oxford
University, whose work stimulated the next advances in
the discipline.
THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF
POLITICS
The Populist revolt and the Progressive movement were
fertile political environments for an intellectual revolt
against the formalist-idealism of the early discipline. The
method of economic interpretation led to a new iteration
of Staatswissenschaft that seemed better able to explain the
political conflicts of the era. During the 1890s, there were
several miscues in the effort to define “the method of eco-
nomic interpretation,” including both skirmishes and dia-
logues with Marxian historical materialists. The major
breakthrough came from Edwin R. A. Seligman, a politi-
cal economist in Columbia’s Faculty of Political Science.
Seligman’s general statement of the economic interpreta-
tion of history is that:
The existence of man depends upon his ability to
sustain himself; the economic life is therefore the
fundamental condition of all life. Since human
life, however, is the life of man in society, individ-
ual existence moves within the framework of the
social structure and is modified by it.…To eco-
nomic causes, therefore, must be traced in the last
instance those transformations in the structure of
society which themselves condition the relations
of social classes and the various manifestations of
social life (1967, p. 3).
The method of economic interpretation was widely
adopted by political scientists in the early twentieth cen-
tury, particularly after Seligman had differentiated it from
Karl Marx’s historical materialism. Nevertheless, the
method of economic interpretation is most often identi-
fied with the work of Charles A. Beard, one of Seligman’s
students, and the author of An Economic Interpretation of
the Constitution of the United States (1913). In its political
context, the book became an intellectual lightning rod,
311
Political Science
because according to Beard capitalistic interests had dom-
inated the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787 and,
consequently, they authored a founding document that
appealed “directly and unerringly to identical interests in
the country at large” (p. 188). Beard later sought to gen-
eralize this doctrine in The Economic Basis of Politics
(1922).
Beard exerted a powerful influence on the discipline
over the next two decades, partly by authoring the first
introductory textbook on American Government and
Politics (1910), which became a standard text in political
science for nearly four decades. In 1926, Beard’s soaring
reputation secured his election as president of the
American Political Science Association (APSA). By the
mid-1930s, his economic interpretation of the American
state had achieved orthodox status among scholars as the
Great Depression forced economic considerations to the
forefront of government and political science.
However, developments in political science and other
disciplines put the doctrine of Staatswissenschaft under
pressure from the outset. In 1895 the American Historical
Association was established by historians seeking to insti-
tutionalize Leopold von Ranke’s methodological program
of historical positivism. Frank J. Goodnow, who had been
a member of PSQ ’s editorial board, led the founding of
the American Political Science Association in 1903, along
with its new journal, the American Political Science Review.
As the APSA’s first president, Goodnow reaffirmed that
the domain of political science is “that political organiza-
tion of society which is termed ‘the State’ ” (Ross 1991, p.
282). Nevertheless, the vision for a science of the state,
anchored by political economy, started to fragment as one
social science after another splintered into separate disci-
plines and, after World War I, began exploring the new
positivist philosophy as an alternative methodological
foundation.
THE POSITIVIST MOVEMENT
During the 1920s, political science began a paradigm shift
that culminated in the behavioral revolution of the 1950s.
The first aspect of this paradigm shift was a redefinition of
the meaning of “science.” The positivist movement sought
to place political science on the same methodological
foundations as the natural sciences. This movement was
also promoted by the federal government, which was anx-
ious to bring about the same types of technical success in
the social sciences as had been achieved in the physical,
life, and behavioral sciences (psychology) during World
War I. Positivists claim that all research is similar in
method and differs only in the specific problems to be
solved by a particular science. Thus, there is a single “sci-
entific method” that starts with the formulation of a
hypothesis, followed by empirical observation or experi-
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mentation, which leads to a falsification or verification of
the initial hypothesis. Knowledge is accumulated incre-
mentally as hypotheses are rejected or accepted as a result
of empirical tests.
The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) was
chartered in 1923 as an independent nonprofit organiza-
tion, and funded by private foundations, specifically to
encourage “behavioral research” in economics, sociology,
and political science that employed empirical and statisti-
cal methods of the type advocated by positivists. The
University of Chicago, which was among the first to pio-
neer such methods, was designated as the SSRC’s show-
case institution. The SSRC distributed funds to political
scientists and political science departments for fellowships
and training in the new empirical methods, for the devel-
opment of new courses in statistics and behavioral
research design, and general department building along
the Chicago model. Charles E. Merriam, a professor of
political science at Chicago, is often called the father of
behavioral political science. In his New Aspects of Politics
(1925), Merriam called for a science based on the obser-
vation of real governments and political behavior,
although he remained skeptical about an overly quantita-
tive political science. This skepticism was retained by
Harold D. Lasswell and V. O. Key, who were both stu-
dents of Merriam and important transitional figures
between the positivist movement of the 1920s and the
behavioral revolution of the 1950s. Lasswell called for an
applied political science oriented toward solving the prob-
lems of democracy as opposed to a discipline that emu-
lated natural science in a quest to discover “universal laws”
of political behavior without respect to their practical
applications. In 1951 Lasswell proposed that “policy sci-
entists” should conduct research that was directly and
immediately useful to decision makers, while employing
“appropriate” quantitative methodologies that acknowl-
edged the limits of data availability and the pressures of
time and scarce resources in the decision-making process.
Key is best known for his work on political parties, inter-
est groups, electoral behavior, and public opinion.
Although he disagreed with the behavioralists’ fundamen-
tal tenets, he pioneered many of the statistical techniques
and analytic concepts later employed by them.
THE BEHAVIORAL REVOLUTION
The positivist influence reached its apogee in the “behav-
ioral revolution” of 1950s, which consolidated the disci-
pline’s paradigm shift, first, by codifying behavioral
methodology and, second, by finally rejecting outright the
concept of the state. The behavioralists broke with the ear-
lier practice of political scientists by claiming to have dis-
covered a “value-neutral” science and by viewing all earlier
works on politics as merely a storehouse of hypotheses for

empirical falsification or verification. This attitude toward
political philosophy widened the long simmering rift
between empirical political science and normative politi-
cal theory with the latter regarded as an “unscientific”
legacy of the discipline’s past.
Behavioralism’s main methodological claim was that
uniformities in political behavior could be discovered and
expressed as generalizations, but that such generalizations
must be testable by reference to observable political
behaviors, such as voting, public opinion, or decision
making. Most behavioralists equated observation with
quantification to a degree that went beyond what
Merriam, Key, or Laswell had considered “appropriate
quantification.” Finally, the behavioralists proposed a
“pure science” where the theoretical explanation of politi-
cal behavior was to precede the solution of urgent practi-
cal policy problems in society.
The concept of the state, which had been central to
political science, was also displaced in the 1950s by a con-
cept of the “political system” that is mainly associated with
Talcott Parsons’s systems analysis. Parsons’s sociology
identified the political system with behaviors and institu-
tions that provide a center of integration for all aspects of
the social system. David Easton echoed this view by
declaring, “neither the state nor power is a concept that
serves to bring together political research” and instead
defined the political system as “those interactions through
which values are authoritatively allocated for a society”
(1953, p. 106). Systems analysis was tied closely to vari-
ous theories of decision making, but most notably to plu-
ralist theory, which viewed decision making as the
outcome of peaceful bargaining between interest groups
in society. Easton emphasized that to account for the per-
sistence of political systems, one had to assume that they
successfully generate two “system outputs”: (1) the politi-
cal system must successfully allocate values for a society
(decision making); and (2) the political system must
induce most members to accept these allocations as bind-
ing, at least most of the time (legitimacy). These “policy
outputs” feed back into the social, economic, interna-
tional, and natural systems to generate new inputs and
demands that must be continually processed by the polit-
ical system.
Easton’s model of the political system stimulated a
great deal of research over the next two decades on deci-
sion making, interest groups, political communications,
political parties, elections and voting behavior, legislative
behavior, political socialization, political beliefs, and the
policy process. These fields of research have also been
characterized by ever increasing levels of sophistication in
the use of statistical techniques and concepts. However,
the systems model was often limited in applicability by its
emphasis on system stability and the assumption of insti-
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Political Science
tutional arrangements peculiar to Western democracies.
These limitations were partly addressed by the functional-
ists, who employed a modified concept of the political sys-
tem that focused on “functions” and “processes,” while
acknowledging that the same functions could be fulfilled
in various political systems through different processes or
institutions. Functionalism was particularly influential in
the study of comparative politics and non-Western politi-
cal systems, where there were different institutional
arrangements or where the use of statistical techniques
was hampered by the absence of data and technology.
During the 1950s the political science discipline also
assumed its current form as a collection of distinct sub-
fields with most political scientists specializing in one or
two subfields, while having less and less interaction with
practitioners in other subfields of the discipline. The stan-
dard subfields are American government, comparative
politics, international relations, political theory, public
administration, and public policy, although the two latter
“applied” fields have often been shifted into separate aca-
demic units, such as schools of public administration or
public policy, while political theory is now actually prac-
ticed as often by historians, philosophers, and literary crit-
ics as by political scientists.
THE POSTBEHAVIORAL
REVOLUTION
Political science entered a postbehavioral revolution
amidst the political rebellions of the late 1960s and the
new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. New intel-
lectual currents, such as neo-Marxism, postpositivism,
poststructuralism, and postmodernism were conjoined
with a variety of political movements, including pacifism,
feminism, environmentalism, postcolonialism, and the
gay and lesbian liberation movements. Easton identified
the source of the postbehavioral revolution as a “deep dis-
satisfaction with political research and teaching, especially
of the kind that is striving to convert the study of politics
into a more rigorously scientific discipline modeled on the
methodology of the natural sciences” (1969, p. 1051).
The behavioral persuasion remains the dominant orienta-
tion of the official discipline, but it has been challenged
numerous times since the late 1960s.
One of the most significant intellectual challenges to
the behavioralist paradigm and to pluralist theory was the
return to the state initiated in the late 1960s by Marxists,
such as Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas and then
carried forward by the “new institutionalists.” Nicos
Poulantzas’s Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales (1968),
and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society
(1969) directly challenged systems analysis and pluralist
theory by drawing on a radical tradition identified with
the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin,
313
Political Science
and Antonio Gramsci. These authors developed theories
of the state that questioned the basic assumptions of the
dominant political science, particularly its assumption
that political power is distributed more or less equally
among different social groups. At the height of his popu-
larity in the mid-1970s, Miliband was recognized as one
of the leading political scientists in the English-speaking
world, while Nicos Poulantzas was arguably the most
influential political theorist in the world for a time.
However, the interest in state theory waned tem-
porarily as many political scientists abandoned the quest
for grand theory in the context of a more widespread
intellectual disillusionment with grand scale metanarra-
tives, such as state theory and their attendant transforma-
tional political projects. The shift from Marxist to
post-Marxist to poststructuralist and postmodernist the-
ory shifted the analysis of power from macroscopic to
microscopic forms of power and, therefore, to the multi-
ple “technologies of power” such as language, family,
interpersonal relationships, culture, leisure and entertain-
ment, and the configurations of repressed desire (Foucault
1972, p. 12).
The growing discontent among a minority of politi-
cal scientists led to the establishment of the Caucus for a
New Political Science in 1967. The Caucus includes polit-
ical scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it is united
by the idea that the discipline should abandon “the myth
of a value-free science” and advance a progressive political
agenda. While originally founded as an alternative to the
APSA, it won recognition as the first organized section of
the APSA with the right to sponsor its own panels, collect
dues, and to publish its own journal New Political Science.
Members of the Caucus have authored numerous com-
mentaries on “the tragedy” of political science, “the crisis”
in political science, and “the flight from reality in political
science.” In 2000, these discontents again resurfaced in
the “perestroika” rebellion, which denounced the APSA as
an organization controlled by “East Coast Brahmins,”
which promotes a “narrow parochialism and methodolog-
ical bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational
choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches”
(Monroe 2005, pp. 1, 9).
While Caucus members remain a small proportion of
the APSA’s membership, it established a precedent that
has resulted in the proliferation of “organized sections” to
represent the interests of political scientists in interdisci-
plinary, subfield, and methodological research outside the
official discipline. There are now 37 organized sections in
the APSA, whose combined membership is greater than
that of the discipline as a whole and attendance at “sec-
tion” panels of the APSA’s annual meeting tends to be
higher than at the “disciplinary” panels. Political science is
now fragmented into so many subfields, methodological
314 I N T E R N AT I O N A L E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F T H E S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , 2 N D E D I T I O N
approaches, area specializations, and theories that “politi-
cal scientists apparently come together at APSA meetings,
but only in spatial terms” (Yanow 2003, p. 398). The
future of the discipline in the next century is not clear, but
its development over the last century has been character-
ized by the accretion of multiple approaches. Despite
major paradigm shifts, no conception of the discipline is
ever completely displaced by another approach and the
discipline is now clearly marked by a lack of consensus
concerning its basic concepts, theories, and methodology.
SEE ALSO Campbell, Angus; Dahl, Robert Alan; Data;
Data, Longitudinal; Economics; Empiricism;
Enlightenment; Experiments; Game Theory;
Methodology; Methods, Qualitative; Methods,
Quantitative; Methods, Research (in Sociology);
Methods, Survey; Philosophy, Political; Plato; Political
Psychology; Political Science, Behavioral; Politics;
Politics, Comparative; Regression; Regression Analysis;
Reliability, Statistical; Research, Cross-Sectional;
Research, Longitudinal; Research, Survey; Scientific
Method; Social Science; Validity, Statistical
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Almond, Gabriel A., and G. Bingham Powell Jr. 1966.
Comparative Politics: System, Process, and Policy. Boston:
Little, Brown.
Barrow, Clyde W. 1993. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist,
Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Beard, Charles A. 1913. An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Burgess, John W. 1897. Political Science and History. American
Historical Review 2 (3): 401–408.
Burgess, John W. 1930. The Founding of the School of Political
Science. Columbia University Quarterly 22: 351–396.
Burgess, John W. 1993. The Idea and Forms of the State. In
Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States,
eds. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, 49–62. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press. (Article orig. pub. 1891).
Dahl, Robert A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Easton, David. 1953. The Political System: An Inquiry into the
State of Political Science. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Easton, David. 1965. A Framework for Political Analysis.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Easton, David. 1965. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Easton, David. 1969. The New Revolution in Political Science.
American Political Science Review 63 (4): 1051–1061.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The
Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row.
Furner, Mary O. 1975. Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the
Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905.
Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Goodnow, Frank J. 1905. The Work of the American Political
Science Association. Proceedings of the American Political
Science Association 1: 35–46.
Gunnell, John G. 1993. The Descent of Political Theory. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lerner, Daniel, and Harold D. Lasswell, eds. 1965. The Policy
Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Lieber, Francis, ed. 1838. Encyclopaedia Americana. 13 vols.
Philadelphia: Thomas, Cowperthwait, & Co.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Merriam, Charles E. 1925. New Aspects of Politics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Merriam, Charles E. 1993. Recent Advances in Political
Methods. In Discipline and History: Political Science in the
United States, eds. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman,
129–146. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Article
orig. pub. 1923).
Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 2005. Perestroika! The Raucous
Rebellion in Political Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Ricci, David. 1984. The Tragedy of Political Science. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Rogers, James E. Thorold. 1888. The Economic Interpretation of
History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Ross, Dorothy. 1991. The Origins of American Social Science.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Seidelman, Raymond. 1985. Disenchanted Realists: Political
Science and the American Crisis 1884–1984. Albany : State
University of New York Press.
Seligman, Edwin R. A. 1967. The Economic Interpretation of
History. 2nd ed. New York: Gordian Press.
Smith, Munroe. 1886. Introduction: The Domain of Political
Science. Political Science Quarterly 1 (1): 1–8.
Yanow, Davora. 2003. Practicing Discipline. PS: Political Science
and Politics 36 (3): 397–399.
Clyde Barrow
POLITICAL SCIENCE,
BEHAVIORAL
Behavioral political science is an approach to the study of
politics that claims to be more “scientific” and method-
ologically sophisticated than the older, so-called “tradi-
tional” political science. Although the study of politics
and government dates back to Plato and Aristotle, Greek
philosophers in the fourth century BCE, political science
only emerged as a separate academic discipline toward the
end of the nineteenth century. Since that time, the science
of politics has shifted from a descriptive focus on political
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Political Science, Behavioral
history, formal institutions, and legal codes to a more
“behavioral” emphasis upon decision-making processes,
the political behavior of individuals and groups, and their
informal relationships. Methodologically, behavioral
political science has replaced the predominantly histor-
ical, legalistic, and institutional studies of the tradi-
tional approach with the more empirical methods of
modern social science, borrowed mostly from the field of
psychology.
Broadly defined, the traditional approach of political
science was concerned with the purpose, nature, and
organization of the “state,” stressing humanistic, ethical,
and philosophical perspectives. The traditionalists shared
a preference for intensive case studies and other qualitative
observations in which inferences were derived on the basis
of subjective norms and values. Quantitative methods
were only rarely used, because the traditionalists doubted
that the “scientific method” of the natural sciences could
be successfully applied to the investigation of the more
indeterminate human behavior. Research typically
focused on the detailed description of historical data,
political institutions, constitutions, and legal systems,
earning traditionalists the label of “hyperfactualists.”
Traditionalist political scientists regarded both empir-
ical and normative questions as equally worthy of schol-
arly attention, often undertaking their studies because of
strongly held personal opinions about the nature of poli-
tics. Many of their inquiries showed a normative or pre-
scriptive slant, trying to describe the general principles
and best-suited institutions of “good” government. They
were also inclined to examine the influence of human val-
ues in politics and prescribe specific public policies.
In contrast, behavioral political science has attempted
to apply the methodologies of empirical natural sciences
to the study of politics and government. In response to the
influential political scientist Heinz Eulau’s (1915–2004)
call for political scientists to study behavior, not institu-
tions, the field has focused analysis on the political behav-
ior of individuals and groups, rather than on their formal
roles or the structures within which they function.
Although little consensus exists about the exact character-
istics of the so-called “behavioral revolution” in political
science, the scientific method of the behavioralists empha-
sizes the collection of observable data and the use of sta-
tistical analysis based on many recorded cases. Behavioral
political science claims to be “value-neutral” in the sense
of separating fact from value and describing political phe-
nomena without judging their goodness or morality.
Behavioralist-oriented political scientists try to be
more rigorous and disciplined in their research, seeking
scientific precision by the quantification and measure-
ment of collected data. Through the formulation and sys-
tematic testing of empirical hypotheses, they attempt to
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