IV.

Contemporary Political Science

Despite this early call for a completely realistic and independent discipline based on an objective approach and using the tools of science, the older, library-based, speculative, and normative study of politics remained standard until the mid-20th century, when the scientific approach finally began to dominate the field. The experience of academics who returned to the campus after government service in World War II (1939-1945), had a profound effect on the entire discipline. Employment in agencies polished their skills in applying the methods of social science, including public opinion surveys, content analysis, statistical techniques, and other means of collecting and systematically analysing political data. Having seen first-hand how the game of politics is really played, these professors often came back to their research and to college classrooms eager to use these tools to determine precisely who gets political power in a society, why and how they get it, and what they do with it.

This movement came to be called “behaviouralism” because its proponents insisted that objective observation and measurement be applied to the full range of human behaviour as it manifests itself in the real world.

Opponents of behaviouralism have maintained that there can be no true science of politics. They contend, for example, that any form of experimentation in which all the variables are controlled in a political situation is not legal, ethical, or even possible with human subjects. To this argument, the behaviouralists have replied that small increments of systematically gathered knowledge will add up, over time, to broad-gauged theories that can be used to explain human behaviour.

Some political scientists developed sophisticated models of human activity to guide their research, frequently drawing on computer technology for concepts as well as hardware. The widespread study of politics as a system—with “inputs”, “outputs”, and “feedback”—is a major example of the influence of computers on the discipline of political science.

Other political scientists created a burgeoning field of policy analysis, which they promoted as an independent discipline. It calls for the mastery of rigorous scientific methods in order to put the policy analysts in a position to judge what would and would not work among the alternatives proposed to cope with public problems.

The debate about what political science is or should be continues to the present time. For all the differences that exist concerning methodology and approach, however, no one disputes that the study of government and politics is both proper and necessary. To the extent that the vitality of any scholarly discipline may be measured by how much its members care and argue about what should constitute its core, political science remains vigorous indeed.