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The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert A. Dahl
Robert A. Dahl*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the “behavioral approach” in political science is the ambiguity of the term itself, and of its synonym “political behavior.” The behavioral approach, in fact, is rather like the Loch Ness monster: one can say with considerable confidence what it is not, but it is difficult to say what it is. Judging from newspaper reports that appear from time to time, particularly just before the summer tourist season, I judge that the monster of Loch Ness is not Moby Dick, nor my daughter's goldfish that disappeared down the drain some ten years ago, nor even a misplaced American eight heading for the Henley Regatta. In the same spirit, I judge that the behavioral approach is not that of the speculative philosopher, the historian, the legalist, or the moralist. What, then, is it? Indeed, does it actually exist?

Although I do not profess to know of the full history of the behavioral approach, a little investigation reveals that confusing and even contradictory interpretations have marked its appearance from the beginning. The first sightings in the roily waters of political science of the phenomenon variously called political behavioral approach, or behavioral(ist) research, evidently occurred in the 1920s. The term “political behavior,” it seems, was used by American political scientists from the First World War onward. The honor of first adopting the term as a book title seems to belong, however, not to a political scientist but to the American journalist Prank Kent, who published a book in 1928 entitled Political Behavior, The Heretofore Unwritten Laws, Customs, and Principles of Politics as Practised in the United States. To Kent, the study of political behavior meant the cynical “realism” of the tough-minded newspaperman who reports the way things “really” happen and not the way they're supposed to happen. This meaning, I may say, is often implied even today. However, Herbert Tingsten rescued the term for political science in 1937 by publishing his path-breaking Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistic. Despite the fact that Tingsten was a Swede, and his work dealt with European elections, the term became increasingly identified with American political science.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1961 , pp. 763 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

*

A paper presented at the Fifth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, September 26, 1961.

References

1 Easton, David, The Political System (1953), p. 203 Google Scholar.

2 Kent's, earlier book, The Great Game of Politics (1924)Google Scholar, made no pretence of being systematic and continued to be widely read by students of American politics, but within a few years Political Behavior fell into an obscurity from which it has never recovered.

3 Cf. Crick, Bernard, The American Science of Politics, Its Origins and Conditions (London, 1959)Google Scholar.

4 “Progress in Political Research,” this Review, Vol. 20 (February, 1926), p. 7 Google Scholar, quoted in Truman, David B., “The Implications of Political Behavior Research,” Items (Social Science Research Council, December, 1951), p. 37 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

5 See Catlin's, , Science and Method of Politics (1927)Google Scholar. Another early example of the behavioral approach was Rice, Stuart, Quantitative Methods Politics (1928)Google Scholar. Rice had received his Ph.D. at Columbia University.

6 Cf. Bernard Crick, op. cit., pp. 21–31. Crick notes that “The Fifth Volume of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science published a long study, edited by White, Andrew D., ‘European Schools of History and Politics’ (December, 1887)Google Scholar. It reprinted his Johns Hopkins address on ‘Education in Political Science’ together with reports on ‘what we can learn from’ each major European country.” Fn. 1, p. 27.

7 Herbert Emmerich, Charles S. Hyneman, and V. O. Key, Jr.

8 Heard, Alexander, “Research on Political Behavior: Report of a Conference,” Items (Social Science Research Council, December, 1949), pp. 41–44 Google Scholar.

9 Social Science Research Council, Items (June, 1950), p. 20 Google Scholar. (Emphasis added.)

10 “To precisely what kind of research does the concept of political behavior refer? It is clear that this term indicates that the research worker wishes to look at participants in the political system as individuals who have the emotions, prejudices, and predispositions of human beings as we know them in our daily lives …. Behavioral research … has therefore sought to elevate the actual human being to the center of attention. Its premise is that the traditionalists have been reifying institutions, virtually looking at them as entities apart from their component individuals…. Research workers often use the terms … to indicate that they are studying the political process by looking at the relation of it to the motivations, personalities, or feelings of the participants as individual human beings.” Easton, David, The Political System (1953), pp. 201–205 Google Scholar.

11 As we shall see, Van Dyke distinguishes the term “behavioral approach” from “political behavior.”

12 “What is Political Behavior?,” PROD, July, 1958.

13 Ibid., p. 159.

14 Social Science Research Council, Items (December, 1951), pp. 37–39 Google Scholar. (Emphasis added.)

15 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York, 1944)Google Scholar.

16 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip, Stokes, Donald, and Miller, Warren, The American Voter (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, a study extended and refined by the same authors in “Stability and Change in 1960: A Reinstating Election,” this Review, Vol. 55 (1961), pp. 269–280 Google Scholar.

17 A finding, incidentally, that may have to be revised in turn. A recent re-analysis of the data of the voting studies, completed after this paper was prepared, has turned up new evidence for the active, interested independent voter. Flanigan, William, Partisanship and Campaign Participation (Ph.D. dissertation. Yale University Library, 1961)Google Scholar.

18 Cf. Janowitz, , ed., Community Political Systems (1961)Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward, Political Influence (1961)Google Scholar; and the English study by Birch and his colleagues at the University of Manchester, Small Town Politics (1959)Google Scholar.

19 E.g., in his Nationalism and Social Communication (1953). See also his recent article with the economist Eckstein, Alexander, “National Industrialization and the Declining Share of the International Economic Sector, 1890–1959,” World Politics (January, 1961), pp. 267–299 Google Scholar; and his “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” this Review, Vol. 55 (September, 1961), pp. 493–514 Google Scholar.

20 For an interesting example of an application of the behavioral mood to comparative politics, see Rokkan, Stein and Valen, Henry, “Parties, Elections and Political Behavior in the Northern Countries: a Review of Recent Research,” Politische Forschung (1960)Google Scholar. Probably the most ambitious attempt to apply survey methods to comparative politics is represented by a study of political socialization and political values in five nations, conducted by Gabriel A. Almond; this study has not yet been completed.

21 In 1942, in The New Belief in the Common Man, C. J. Friedrich challenged the prevailing generalizations about the need for consensus (ch. 5). However, his challenge seems to have met with little response until 1960, when Prothro and Grigg reported the results of an empirical study of consensus on “democratic” propositions in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Tallahassee, Florida. See their “Fundamental Principles of Democracy,” Journal of Politics (May, 1960), pp. 276–294 Google Scholar.

22 The historians and the elections were: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the election of 1824, Samuel E. Morison and Henry S. Commager on the election of 1860, Allan Nevins on the election of 1884, and William Diamond on the election of 1896. See his “Research Problems in American Political Historiography,” in Komarovsky, , ed., Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (1957)Google Scholar.

23 “The Emergence of the One-Party South—the Election of 1860,” in Political Man (1960)Google Scholar.

24 Benson, Lee, Turner and Beard, American Historical Writing Re-Considered (1960)Google Scholar.

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