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The Limits of Behavioural Explanation in Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

K. W. Kim
K. W. Kim*
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

The unique contribution of American scholarship to the study of politics is undoubtedly the development of behaviouralism. As “a successful protest” against the limits of traditional political science, the behavioural approach has certainly broadened our perspective by calling attention to hitherto neglected areas of political research. It has also made us methodologically more sophisticated by its insistence on rigorous empiricism and on theory-building as a major task. And yet it is difficult to be convinced that “all segments of political science can be treated behaviorally,” as one student has recently claimed. Behaviouralism is certainly an effective way of studying politics. But it is quite a different thing to say that there exists no aspect of politics which cannot be treated behaviourally. It is the aim of this paper to enquire whether there may not exist segments of politics which by their very nature resist the behavioural treatment.

Let us first define what is to be understood by behaviouralism. In view of its inherent “ambiguity,” it may be best to start by listing three major assertions which I think set apart behavioural explanations from other kinds of statements in political studies. These assertions are: (1) individuals rather than groups constitute proper units for analyses; (2) facts must be separated from values; and (3) legitimate explanations always run in terms of laws or generalizations, but never in terms of descriptive statements of particular occurrences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , August 1965 , pp. 315 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1965

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References

1 Dahl, Robert A., “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review, LV (1961).Google Scholar

2 Eulau, Heinz, “Segments of Political Science Most Susceptible to Behavioristic Treatment,” in The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science, Charlesworth, James C., ed. (Philadelphia, 1962), 17.Google Scholar Hereafter referred to as The Limits.

3 Dahl, , “The Behavioral Approach,” 766.Google Scholar

4 David Easton's definition of political behaviouralism as “a science of politics modelled after the methodological assumptions of the natural sciences” would make sense only if the term “science” had a “definite and unambiguous application,” which is not the case. For the latter view, see Black, Max, Problems of Analysis: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, NY, 1954), 5.Google Scholar For David Easton's definition, see “The Current Meaning of Behavioralism in Political Science,” in The Limits, 9.

5 Catlin, George E. G., Science and Methods of Politics (New York, 1927), 141–2Google Scholar, cited by Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, 1957), 3.Google Scholar See also Dahl, , “The Behavioral Approach,” 766.Google Scholar Curiously, David Easton's “tolerably accurate and reasonably exhaustive account” of the assumptions and objectives of “this movement” says nothing about individuals being units of analysis. “The Current Meaning,” 7.

6 Lasswell, and Kaplan, , Power and Society, 3.Google Scholar

7 For an holistic argument, see Mandelbaum, Maurice, “Societal Facts,” British Journal of Sociology (1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Theories of History, Gardiner, Patrick, ed. (Glencoe, Ill., 1959), 476–88.Google Scholar For the opposing view, see Watkins, J. W. N., “Ideal Types and Historical Explanations,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1952)Google Scholar, reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Feigl, Herbert and Brodbeck, May, eds. (New York, 1953), 723–43.Google Scholar

8 David Truman seems to think that they do have more reality about them. The Governmental Process (New York, 1960), 14–44.Google Scholar

9 “The Current Meaning,” 8. Whether this statement itself is an instance of evaluation or explanation is an intriguing question. See also Interuniversity Summer Seminar on Political Behavior, Social Science Research Council, “Research in Political Behavior,” American Political Science Review, 44 (1952), 1003.Google Scholar

10 “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Shils, Edward A. and Finch, Henry A., trans, and ed. (Glencoe, Ill. 1949), 6.Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Berns, Walter, “The Behavioral Sciences and the Study of Political Things,” American Political Science Review, 55 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell Kirk, “Segments of Political Science Not Amenable to Behavioristic Treatment,” and Sibley, Mulford Q., “The Limitations of Behavioralism,” both in The Limits, 49–67, 68–93.Google Scholar

12 Easton, , “The Current Meaning,” 7.Google Scholar See also Interuniversity Summer Seminar, “Research in Political Behavior,” 1003.Google Scholar

13 Using the term, “events,” may raise a problem, since some behaviouralists maintain that the behavioural approach to politics “specifies the unit or object of both theoretical and empirical analysis as the behavior of persons and social groups rather than events.” See the Introduction to Political Behavior: A Reader in Theory and Research, Eulau, Heinz et al., eds. (Glencoe, Ill., 1956).Google Scholar On the other hand, Lasswell and Kaplan state that “the subject matter of political science” is to be formulated “in terms of a certain class of events rather than timeless institutions or political patterns.” Power and Society, xiv. For the present analysis, the concept of an event will be broadly understood embracing what may be called its macro as well as micro connotations.

14 Popper, Karl R., The Open Society And Its Enemies (Princeton, 1955), 445–6.Google Scholar Carl G. Hempel makes a distinction between causal explanation and statistical explanation, which are said to be both instances of a larger category, called “nomological explanation.” Since social sciences depend mostly on statistical generalizations, I shall treat both causal and statistical explanations as logically equivalent propositions. For Hempel's view, see “The Logic of Functional Analysis,” in Symposium on Sociological Theory, Gross, Llewellyn, ed. (New York, 1959), 275-6.Google Scholar

15 Dyke, Vernon Van, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Stanford, Calif., 1960), 159.Google Scholar

16 Berelson, Bernard and Steiner, Gary A., Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings (New York, 1964), 417.Google Scholar

17 First published in Journal of Phihsophy (1942), reprinted in Gardiner, Patrick, ed., Theories of History (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), 344–56.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 345.

19 Hempel, Carl G. and Oppenheim, Paul, “The Logic of Explanation,” Philosophy of Science, 15 (1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, part in, Logical Analysis of Law and Explanation, 337-50.Google Scholar

20 Thus, Hempel and Oppenheim are perfectly understandable when they argue that the uniqueness argument “involves a misunderstanding of the logical character of causal explanation. Every individual event, in the physical sciences no less than in psychology or the social sciences, is unique in the sense that it, with all its peculiar characteristics, does not repeat itself.” Ibid., 326. An example of this kind of misunderstanding may be found in David G. Smith's apparently unqualified acceptance of Windelband's distinction between “nomothetic” and “ideographic” sciences. See “Political Science and Political Theory,” American Political Science Review, 51 (1957), 737.Google Scholar

21 It is plain that my position here is not open to such criticism as made by Karl W. Deutsch, who tried to dispose of the uniqueness argument by stating that “no knowable object can be completely unique.” This sort of objection is as trivial as the position it attacks. See The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control (New York, 1963), 14.Google Scholar

22 Crane Brinton, for example, was quite successful in making some meaningful generalizations. See The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, 1952), sec. IIGoogle Scholar, “Some Tentative Uniformities” of chap. 9.

23 Sidney Hook has demonstrated very convincingly that the Russian Revolution “was triumphant because of the directing leadership of Lenin and that without him it would have been lost.” The Hero in History (Boston, 1960), chap, x, 184–228.Google Scholar

24 Chalmers A. Johnson, “Revolution and the Social System,” a paper delivered at the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 9. It needs to be pointed out that my comments here do not constitute a criticism of Johnson's paper as a whole.

25 The tautological character of the statement will not be affected by the “elite intransigence” part of the statement, since the latter can have meaning only in conjunction with “multiple dysfunctions.”

26 Johnson, , “Revolution and the Social System,” 2.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 3.

28 Ibid., 5.

29 Beer, Samuel H., “Causal Explanation and Imaginative Re-enactment,” History and Theory, III, no. 1 (1963), 9.Google Scholar Prof. Beer cites V. O. Key's American Democracy and Public Opinion as an example of a successful attempt in terms of “relative explanations.” Joseph LaPalombara made the same kind of point in “The Utility and Limitations of Interest Group Theory in Non-American Field Situations,” Journal of Politics, 22 (1960)Google Scholar, reprinted in Eckstein, Harry and Apter, David E., eds., Comparative Politics, A Reader (New York, 1963), 421–30.Google Scholar See also Richard Snyder's plea for “concepts and theories which are situationally referred” (italics in the original). “Some Recent Trends in International Relations Theory and Research,” in Ranney, A., ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana, New York, 1962), 129.Google Scholar

30 See, for example, Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, (New York, 1955).Google Scholar

31 Max Weber insisted that every historical work worthy of publication should contain “judgments of possibilities.” “The Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” in Methodology of the Social Sciences, 173: It must be pointed out that Weber considered the category of possibility within the framework of “a positive knowledge of the ‘laws’ of events” (p. 174). This point will be considered later.

32 Herbert Marcuse advocates “the revival … of negative thinking” which he associates correctly with Hegel. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston, 1961).Google Scholar See the preface, “A Note on Dialectic.” My aim is less ambitious as will become clear.

33 John Stuart Mill, who was the first to give a rigorous formulation of inductive logic, gave also one of the most persuasive definitions of “imagination,” when he defined it as “that which enables us by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real. …” See “Bentham” in The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Ethical, Political and Religious, Cohen, Marshall, ed. (The Modern Library, 1960), 174.Google Scholar

34 Stanley Hoffmann advocates a search for “relevant utopias,” which I would regard as “non-events.” See Contemporary Theory in International Rehtions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1960), 174.Google Scholar

35 For the line of reasoning here, I am heavily indebted to Rapoport, Anatol, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1960), sec. v, Critique of Social Physics, of part I, 85–103.Google Scholar For the philosophical formulation of the position taken in this essay, see Dray, William, Laws and Exphnation in History (Oxford, 1957), chap, v, 118–55.Google Scholar

36 Berelson, and Steiner, , Human Behavior, 424.Google Scholar

37 Richard Snyder calls his analytic scheme a “general phenomenological approach.” Snyder, Richard C., Bruck, H. W., Spain, Burton, Foreign Policy Dectsiorir-Making, An Approach to the Study of International Politics (Glencoe, Ill., 1962), 100.Google Scholar It is never made clear in what sense Snyder understands “phenomenological approach.”