A. The Behavioural Approach — the post-Second-World-War "behavioural revolution" (Charles Merriam's Chicago school; its manifesto in David Easton's The Political System, 1953).
Intellectual creeds of behaviouralism (Easton's eight):
1. Regularities — political behaviour shows discoverable patterns (testable generalisations);
2. Verification — theories must submit to empirical testing;
3. Techniques — deliberate, refined tools (surveys, sampling, statistics);
4. Quantification — measurement wherever possible;
5. Values — keep ethical evaluation separate from empirical inquiry (value-free science);
6. Systematization — research should build theory, not accumulate fragments;
7. Pure science — understanding before reform;
8. Integration — political science with the other social sciences.
Contributions: brought citizens, voters and power back into the centre; professionalised research; produced election studies, legislative studies, political culture studies (Almond & Verba's The Civic Culture).
Criticism: (i) pseudo-precision about things that matter little ("methodism" —ourage to be irrelevant? — the critique that it counted what could be counted); (ii) false value-neutrality — the study of politics can never be value-free; (iii) neglected the state, institutions and normative questions precisely when civil rights and war demanded them. Hence Easton's own "post- behavioural revolution" call (1969): relevance before method — facts and values must be rejoined.
B. The System (Input–Output) Approach — David Easton's political system model:
ENVIRONMENT (society, economy, world) │ INPUTS: demands + supports ──► POLITICAL SYSTEM ──► OUTPUTS: decisions, (authorities, regime, (conversion: laws, policies,
community) parliament, courts, actions bureaucracy) ▲ │ └──────────────── FEEDBACK ◄──────────────────────────┘
• Inputs: demands (claims for action — "build the road", "protect the language") and supports (obedience, taxes, votes, legitimacy).
• Conversion: the system's institutions (authorities — rulers and institutions) process inputs.
• Outputs: binding decisions and actions — the authoritative allocation of values.
• Feedback: outputs generate new demands/supports — the system adapts or faces stress (collapse of legitimacy — e.g., 2046 BS and 2062/63 BS in Nepal: when support failed, the system itself was changed).
Gabriel Almond's structural-functional version: every political system performs functions (political socialisation, interest articulation, interest aggregation, rule-making, rule-application, rule-adjudication) — whatever structures perform them (a parliament in London, a jirga in Afghanistan).
Merits: shows politics as continuous process; compares systems; explains stability and change. Criticism: conservative bias (system-maintenance language); "black box" of power; mechanical metaphor.
C. The Interdisciplinary Approach — political science deliberately borrows its neighbours:
• Political sociology (power, class, social movements — Lipset),
• Political psychology (personality, authoritarianism, voting psychology — Lasswell's Psychopathology and Politics),
• Political economy / rational choice (Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy — parties as vote-maximisers; public choice),
• Biopolitics, feminist political science, digital politics — the newest bridges.