Empirical Approach - Grade: 8 PDF

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APPROACHES TO POLITICAL THEORY...

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EMPIRICAL POLITICAL THEORY

The gist of empirical political theory is concerned with making generalizations about political phenomena and constructing testable hypotheses from which predictions can be made. It embodies three linked claims: the first is the more general one, that politics is about informal day to day activity, mundane decision-making, power and the allocations of resources. The corollary of this is that politics, at root, is neither overtly institutional nor theoretical. The second claim is that such activity can be explained in a manner which has parallels with the explanatory nature of the natural sciences. Third, such explanatory social scientific accounts can not only take over many, if not all, of the functions or roles previously performed by classical, historical, and institutional political theory. It could test the claims of such earlier theories either by falsifying or corroborating them. It could also offer valid recommendations, on the basis of established corroborated empirical evidence, as to where policy might proceed in future. In other words, empirical theory takes over (on a firmer ground) the role of institutional and political design. This even supersedes normativism. At its peak of confidence, empirical political theory imagined that it could literally become the whole of political theory. Empirical theory is therefore the telos of political theory itself. Although many recognized this at the time as a ‘pipe dream’, it is nonetheless important to realize the strength of this contention for its votaries.

This section will first briefly indicate the relation of empirical theory with the previous accounts of theory. Second, given that empirical theory developed under the rubric of ‘political science’, this latter term will also be briefly clarified. Third, the discussion will shift to an examination of the behavioural movement, which contains the most optimistic formulation of empirical political theory. This will also entail a cursory discussion of the idea of positivism. Fourth, the decline of the empirical approach, or, at least, the decline of its imperial ambitions, will be considered in the light of critical responses and the development of ‘post-behaviouralism’. In this context, there will be a succinct discussion of the after shocks of empirical theory on political theory. The main after shock is rational choice theory.

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The shape of empirical theory in the 1950s was premised largely on a rejection of both institutional state theory, historical and traditional normative theory—except where they could be shown to contain an empirically-verifiable content. Institutional state theory was seen to be hidebound by its formal attachment to institutions and the historical comparative method. The task was to consider informal behaviour. The state also was seen, by many empirical theorists, as too vague and imprecise a concept. Further, the bulk of classical political theory was considered a body of highly questionable unverifiable assumptions. The only viable substance to classical theory was a very limited range of testable hypotheses. The history of this body of questionable assumptions was therefore considered as innocuous antiquarianism. At this point, as mentioned, there was a strong suggestion that political science was political theory, in the sense that all the traditional senses of the term ‘political theory’ had been vacated. This perspective on political theory, particularly in America, had a strong grip until the late 1960s, when it came under criticism. However, one should not imagine by any means that the issues were resolved. They merely faded from discussion and could well arise again.

Second, given the close correlation between empirical theory and political science, it is important to get some purchase on the development of the idea of ‘political science’ itself. There are three uses of the term ‘political science’, which were all prevalent during the late nineteenth century. The first, and original use dates back to late eighteenth century thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Condorcet, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and David Hume, where it was usually understood as the ‘science of the legislator’. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were particularly significant here. In fact, other areas, like political economy, were frequently viewed as a subset of political science. Adam Smith, for example, in his Wealth of Nations, described ‘political economy’ as a ‘branch of the science of a statesman or legislator’ (Smith 1979: 428). There was therefore little or no demarcation of what might now be regarded as separate disciplines. Smith’s Wealth of Nations blends political economy, moral philosophy, political theory, and history as part of a unified enterprise. The term ‘political science’ was picked up by North American commentators, from the vocabulary of the Scottish Enlightenment, and used in debates over the new Constitution and Republic.34 Political science was also linked to a more general demand for ‘social science’. One major intellectual input into this process was the Enlightenment itself. It is problematic

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to generalize about the Enlightenment, given its very differing manifestations across Europe and North America (see Haakonssen 1995; Schmidt 2000).Minimally, though, many Enlightenment thinkers were making an effort to grasp human affairs through the open use of reason, in order to perceive identifiable and verifiable causal patterns. There was, in other words, a greater appetite for empirical facts concerning nature, human nature, and society. Theorists were often inspired by success of Newtonian physics, and the new ‘experimental philosophy’, in searching for these patterns. There were, for these diverse writers, therefore parallels between the science of nature and the science of politics. For Hume, for example, ‘It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produced the same actions: The same events follow from the same causes’ (Hume 1975: 83). Inconstancy of human action was ‘no more than what happens in the operation of the body, nor can we conclude anything from the one irregularity, which will not follow equally from the other’ (Hume 1981, Book II, Part III, Section 1: 403–4). Thus, theorists, such as Hume, Turgot, and Montesquieu, believed in the possibility of causal social laws. Political science was also viewed as an ‘applied science’, which could spawn social projects for social and political improvement. It could potentially show how to increase the happiness of state populations. Thus, as many theorists of the period urged, every government concerned to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain of its citizens, should take serious note of political science. This early conception of political science was though still inclusive of—what we would now regard as—separate disciplines. Sound moral precepts were regarded as both morally obligatory and empirically correct, that is, for human nature to achieve its political ends. Political science was consequently regarded as a subtle blending of moral and empirical generalizations. Only political economy came nearer to what we might now regard as ‘empirical science’, namely, creating empirical generalizations, which did not have to be necessarily linked with moral precepts.35 The second view of political science reflects the development of the idea of political studies in the late nineteenth century. This use of political science traded on a perception of the classical Greek view, where political science was, quite literally, the ‘science of the polis’. Political science was therefore a basic synonym for both classical political theory and institutional theory. There was, though, a growing awareness of

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the significance of political science as a more uniquely empirical approach, but it was still regarded with scepticism. Ernest Barker (the first professor of political science in Britain) noted, in his inaugural lecture, that ‘I am not altogether happy about the term “science”. It has been vindicated so largely, and almost exclusively, for exact and experimental study of natural phenomena . . . I shall use it, as Aristotle . . . to signify a method or form of inquiry by the name of Political Theory’ (Barker in King (ed.) 1978: 18). In this sense, theorizing about politics meant the systematic linkage of ideas about politics. Barker, and many others, considered that this is what Plato’s and Aristotle’s work on politics had been concerned with. Such a science blended empirical and more abstract normative considerations. This use of political science also characterized the Staatslehre tradition up to the 1920s, in Europe and North America. Political science therefore meant systematic institutional political theory. However, Staatslehre itself also began to be regarded as suspect during this later period. Given that it tended to unify legal, political, historical, and philosophical ideas, it also suffered from the increasing emphasis on the segmentation of disciplinary areas in the early twentieth century. In general, therefore, despite Ernest Barker’s nostalgic appeal, this more inclusive notion of political science, qua Staatslehre—as closely linked to classical political theory—was fading fast. The third use of political science developed from the 1920s. It is here that we find the groundwork for both the apparent separation of political theory and political science and subsequent attempts at the reabsorption of political theory into the imperium of empirical theory. This third use also forms the backdrop in the 1950s to the sense of spiritual crisis in political theory that pervaded the writings of Strauss, Arendt, and Voegelin.36 This third conception was an open attempt, in tandem with other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology, to emulate the methods and achievements of the natural sciences. It not only separated out normative and historical political theory from political science, but also led, in some cases, to the attempt to colonize the whole concept of political theory. For some, therefore, political theory became political science. This latter notion still pervades some American conceptions of political theory, particularly in its rational choice mode—often now called ‘positive political theory’. This third sense of political science became, for a time during the twentieth century, the dominant use. During the late 1920s a loose sense of identity began to

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develop in the social sciences in America. This third sense developed in North America in two stages. The first stage, from the 1920s up to 1940s, has been seen as a prelude to behaviouralism. Largely under the leadership of Charles Merriam in Chicago University, the politics-profession in North America began to turn its attention away from institutional and historical study towards more empirical and quantitative techniques. Large political science conferences were held in Chicago between 1923 and 1925 devoted to the new empirical ‘science of politics’, which, in the words of one commentator, converted ‘virtually every leader of the profession to the behavioural persuasion’ (Jensen in Lipset (ed.) 1969: 5). Chicago, under Merriam, subsequently became a centre of this new scientific approach to politics. Under Merriam’s academic leadership graduate students such as Leonard White, V. O. Key, Gabriel Almond, Harold Lasswell, Herbert Simon, and David Truman, amongst many others, devoted their talents to this new empirical discipline. This earlier period was, on one level, reacting to the legalism, institutionalism, and comparativism of the earlier phase. However, an interest also developed in a more strict approach to informal behaviour, focused on public opinion surveys, voting patterns, and socialization processes. This still entailed a blend of empirical political science with continuing concerns about the normative importance of democracy. The second stage focused on behavioural political science, which had a powerful impact in the 1950s and 1960s period. This had a far more immediate and longer term effect in America than in Britain or Europe. Disciplines like politics, sociology, and anthropology, all became enthralled with the prospect of attaining greater scientific empirical rigour.40 For proponents of behaviouralism one should distinguish behaviourism and behaviouralism. Both shared the belief that the approach of the natural sciences was most fitting for the study of humans. However, for David Easton, for example, political science ‘has never been behaviouristic’ (Easton in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) 1993: 294; see also Farr in Farr, Dryzek, and Leonard (eds.) 1995: 202). For Easton, behaviourism ‘refers to a theory in psychology about human behaviour’, as embodied in the work of psychologists such as J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, the founder of operant conditioning. There is a form of physiological reductionism in behaviourism, which behaviouralists found uncongenial. Politics in terms of attitudes, meanings, and beliefs could not be reduced in this manner. However, political theory critics of behaviouralism, such as Dante Germino, were quite

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clear that there was little to choose between the two empiricisms and the distinction was merely rhetorical (see Germino 1967: 193–5).

Easton, in a retrospective article, saw seven main themes within behaviouralism: a concern with discoverable uniformities in political behaviour; to be able to test and verify empirical generalizations; to focus on techniques for acquiring and interpreting empirical data (i.e. questionnaires, interviews, sampling, regression analysis, factor analysis, and rational modelling); the precise quantification and measurement of empirical data; the analytical separation of values or evaluative concerns from factual data; the concern to systematize the relation between research and theory; and, finally, the aim to engage, as far as possible, in pure science, but with an eventual eye to ‘utilize political knowledge in the solution of practical problems of society’ (see also David Easton in Monroe (ed.) 1997: 14). The central preoccupations thus became the recording and quantifying of political behaviour. Political systems with input and output functions replaced the study of states; the study of democracy became electoral behaviour and public opinion quantification and surveys; pressure or interest group behaviour replaced the study of societies.

The behavioural movement of the 1950s coincided with other important developments. There was, first, the coincidence with the end-of-ideology movement, which repudiated both normative political theory and political ideology (in some cases the two terms were regarded as synonymous). This involved some degree of self-satisfaction with the role and achievements of liberal democracy in practice. Ideology and normative theory had thus both become redundant (see Vincent 1995, ch. 1). There was, in addition, a clear belief in the 1950s, amongst a generation that had lived through the 1930s and 1940s, with the wars, Gulags, show trials, Nazism, Jewish pogroms, and Stalinism, that ideological or normative-based politics embodied dangerous delusions. Ideologies might serve a function in developing immature societies, yet in industrialized democratic societies they no longer served anything more than a decorative role. Consensus and convergence on basic aims had been achieved in liberal democracies. Most of the major parties in industrialized societies had achieved, in the welfare mixed economy structure, the majority of their reformist aims. The left had accepted the dangers of excessive state power and the right had accepted the necessity of the welfare state and the rights of working people. As Seymour Martin

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Lipset remarked, ‘This very triumph of the democratic social revolution of the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate them to political action’ (Lipset 1969a: 406; see also Bell 1965). With basic agreement on political values achieved, politics became focused on more peripheral pragmatic adjustment, GNP, prices, wages, the public-sector borrowing requirement. All else was gesture and froth. As Lipset commented ‘The democratic struggle will continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies’ (Lipset 1969a: 408). The ‘end of ideology’ also coincided with the heroic age of sociology—a science free from all superstition and yet embodying commitments to freedom and liberal democracy. In the social sciences of the 1950s, ideology was the foremost superstition, which needed unravelling. The development of empirical social science therefore demanded a value-free rigour, scepticism, empirical verification, or falsification, unsullied by the emotional appeals of ideological or normative political theory. A positivistic separation of facts and values lurked beneath all these judgements. In addition, the end of ideology coincided with the ‘death of political philosophy’ movement (which will be discussed in Part Two), consensus politics in Britain, and finally with the more disturbing phenomenon McCarthyite anti-communist purges in North America. Apart from some extreme adherents of behaviourism, positivistic political science did not always demand the complete elimination of normative theory and ideology. There were those who would have liked to see this elimination, or, at least, transmutation into rigorous empirical political theory. However, many political scientists, such as David Easton, Robert Lasswell, Robert Dahl, Karl Deutsch, and Heinz Eulau, had been trained initially as more traditional political theorists. They did not therefore construe political theory as a total waste of time. The historical and normative vision could offer hypotheses for empirical testing. In this sense, the hard contrast, which occasionally appears between political theorists and political scientists can be misleading.

For John Gunnell, the crucial factor defining the stance of behavioural theory, was tied to the political theory writings of the 1920s and 1930s émigré generation, including figures such as Strauss, Arendt, Brecht, Adorno, and many others, who adopted a deeply-critical stance to political science, associating it with individualistic liberalism, relativism, potential nihilism, and social crisis. In this critical context,

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political scientists, for Gunnell, ‘eventually felt constrained to make a choice’ (Gunnell 1993b: 220). In the end, this was not so much a debate about method, as about the culture of liberalism and democracy. Gunnell thus notes that by ‘the early 1960s, the conflict was not simply one between individuals such as Easton and Strauss. It had been passed to a new generation of scholars who had been trained in the new ways of political theory, denied by the émigrés and by the founders of the behavioural movement, and who had already begun to lose sight of the roots of the conflict between the paradigms into which they had been initiated’ (Gunnell 1993b: 250). The intellectual background to behavioural political science lay in the popularity of what might loosely be termed positivism in the twentieth century. One of the leading philosophers of Viennese positivism, Carnap, was teaching in Chicago during the 1950s. A new generation of political scientists became familiar with this philosophical position. Positivism gelled with the idea of a genuine ‘empirical political theory’. Positivism was essentially though a broader programme tied up with a more general conception of science. Theories in the natural sciences were viewed as unified systems of explanation, incorporating laws, which were ‘controllable by factual evidence (Nagel 1961: 4). The basic contention was that scientific theories could grasp an objective reality through a neutral observation language. Reality was definitely not structured or constituted by natural science theory. Theories tell us, in a moderately detached way, ab...