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Biju P R, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Government Brennen College, Thalassery, Kerala, India
My Books
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In the classic treatise on ethics and
virtue titled Nicomachean Ethics, ancient father of politics had said
"Well begun is half done". Well that is relevant a maxim for any
discussion on the origin and development of politics. Best understanding
begins once the beginning is properly understood. Yes, politics as a
branch of knowledge originated in ancient Greece. Though the technical
and sophisticated shape this discipline claims today is a recent development,
the discipline is one of the oldest ones. Like many other superb academic
and original disciplines like Physics, literature, philosophy,
politics has many classics to its credit, which gave shape to the present day
political science. Before discussing that, it is apt to first look at the
development of lexicons of political science from ancient world.
In ancient Greece Polis was one of the oldest technical vocabulary developed in
association with politics as a branch of knowledge. Polis means city
state. Greeks had organised their life in a small city state, for example
think, Sparta, Athens. Best life was possible in polis. Ideal
life was possible in polis. Purpose of life was virtue which was possible
only in an ideal polis. That was founding philosophy of Greek city
state.
Demos and Kratos are two Greek words. But it has great association with
politics as a branch of knowledge. Demos means people and kratos meaning
power, democracy in ancient Greek meant people power which is the foundation of
modern day ideal of democracy.
Socrates, the Greek philosopher didnt write anything. He believed
memory was power. But his disciples wrote extensively. Particularly
Plato and Aristotle.
Plato wrote Republic which was a treatise on justice. It spelled out the
ideas of an ideal polis. He visualised a city state in which there were
three classes: philosopher kings, guardians and artisans. Education
was provided by state free of cost to everyone.
Plato's famous student, Aristotle; had written Politics which was a classic
book like Plato's Republic had extensive survey of political affairs. He
surveyed 156 constitutions and identified six popular forms of governments of
those days. They were monarchy, aristocracy and polity. They
were also ideal polises. Once they degenerate, perverted constitutions
take place. Hence monarchy pervert into despotism, aristocracy
pervert onto oligarchy and polity pervert into democracy. Aristotle's
best contribution was his idea that polity as a best constitution and democracy
as bad form of government. By the time Augustus Caesar established Roman
empire, politics had rich vocabularies- say polis, law,
justice, natural law, monarchy, despotism,
aristocracy, oligarchy, polity, democracy, etc.
By the same time two important classics were born. They were Plato's
Republic and Aristotle's Politics.
Analyses of politics appeared in ancient cultures in works by various thinkers,
including Confucius (551–479 bc) in China and
Kautilya (flourished 300 bc) in India. Writings by the historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
in North Africa have greatly influenced the study of politics in the
Arabic-speaking world. But the fullest explication of politics has been in the
West, particularly the Greeks.
As everyone know, medieval century curtailed free thinking,
politics didnt produce classics nor any vocabulary for a long time. It
was a period of god centred world in which art, writing, thoughts
etc were steered towards god and religion. Politics had a natural decline
as a discipline that produce ideas to liberate human beings from bondages. Keep
in mind, when free thinking is curtailed, society will have a
natural decline. Hence politics remind us the dangers to free
thinking. But there were some Christian thinkers during the medieval
period which really helped politics and its founding ideas over the centuries.
Early Christian thinkers, such as St. Augustine (354–430), emphasized the
dual loyalty of Christians to both God and rulers, with the clear implication
that the “heavenly city” is more important and durable than the earthly polis.
With this came disdain for politics. For eight centuries knowledge of Aristotle
was lost to Europe, but Greek thinking was preserved by Arab philosophers such
as al Farabi (c. 878–c. 950) and Averroes (1126–1198).
Translations of Aristotle in Spain under the Moors revitalized European thought
after about 1200. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) Christianized
Aristotle’s Politics to give it moral purpose. Aquinas took from
Aristotle the idea that humans are both rational and social, that states occur
naturally, and that government can improve humans spiritually. Thus, Aquinas
favoured monarchy but despised tyranny, arguing that kingly authority should be
limited by law and used for the common good. The Italian poet and
philosopher Dante (1265–1321) argued in De monarchia
(c. 1313; On Monarchy) for a single world government. At the same
time, the philosopher Marsilius of Padua (c.1280–c. 1343), in
Defensor Pacis (1324; “Defender of the Peace”), introduced idea of secularization
by elevating the state over the church institutions and considered state as the
originator of laws. For this, as well as for proposing that legislators be
elected, Marsilius is considered as an important modernizer.
Then came another philosopher who had given a true foundation to modern
political thinking. The first modern political scientist the Italian
writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). His infamous work The
Prince (1531), a treatise originally dedicated to Florence’s
ruler, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, presented amoral advice to actual and
would-be princes on the best means of acquiring and holding political power.
Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which completed the secularization of
politics begun by Marsilius, was based on reason rather than religion.
Later the English philosopher ans contractualist Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679) placed power at the centre of his political analysis.
In Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), completed near the end of
the English Civil Wars (1642–51), Hobbes outlined, how humans, get
natural right to self-preservation and state be a product of social
contract.
English philosopher John Locke(1632–1704), who also witnessed the turmoil
of an English civil war—the Glorious Revolution (1688–89)—argued in his
influential Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) that people form
governments through a social contract to preserve their inalienable
natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.” Locke’s views were a powerful
force in the intellectual life of 18th-century colonial America and constituted
the philosophical basis of the American Declaration of Independence
(1776), many of whose drafters, particularlyThomas Jefferson (1743–1826),
were well acquainted with Locke’s writings. Locke proposed idea of political
sovereign.
If Hobbes was the conservative of the “contractualists” and Locke the liberal,
then the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the
radical. Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) constructs a civil
society in which the separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as
the “general will” (volonté générale) of the collective that overrides
individual wills, “forcing a man to be free.” Rousseau’s radical vision was embraced
by French revolutionaries and later by totalitarians, who distorted many of his
philosophical lessons. He proposed idea of popular sovereign.
Montesquieu (1689–1755), a more pragmatic French philosopher, contributed
to modern comparative politics with his The Spirit of Laws(1748).
Montesquieu’s idea of separation and balance of power between
Parliament and the monarchy, a principle that was later embraced by the
framers of the Constitution of the United States (see separation
of powers; checks and balances). Montesquieu also produced an innovative
analysis of governance that assigned to each form of government an animating
principle—for example; republics are based on virtue, monarchies on honour, and
despotisms on fear. Montesquieu’s analysis concluded that a country’s form of
government is determined not by the locus of political power but by how the
government enacts public policy.
The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90) is
considered the founder of classical economic liberalism. In the book
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he
argued that the role of the state should be restricted primarily to enforcing
contracts in a free market. In contrast, the classical conservatism of the
English parliamentarian Edmund Burke(1729–97) maintained that established
values and institutions were essential elements of all societies and that
revolutions that sought to destroy such values (e.g., the French
Revolution) delivered people to irrational impulses and to tyranny. Burke thus
introduced an important psychological or cultural insight: that political
systems are living organisms that grow over centuries.
The early development of political science was also influenced by ideas
of law. The French political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96)
articulated a theory of sovereignty that viewed the state as the
ultimate source of law in a given territory. Bodin’s work, which was undertaken
as the modern state was first developing, provided a justification of the legitimacy
of national governments, one fiercely defended to this day. Many political
scientists, especially in international relations, find Bodin’s notion
ofsovereignty useful for expressing the legitimacy and equality of states.
Afterwards, political science began to get a sophisticated shape in
19th-century. Contemporary political science traces its roots primarily to the
19th century, when the rapid growth of the natural sciences stimulated
enthusiasm for the creation of a new social science. Capturing this
fervour of scientific optimism was Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt de
Tracy (1754–1836), who in the 1790s coined the
termidéologie (“ideology”) for his “science of ideas,” which, he believed,
could perfect society.
Also pivotal to the empirical movement was the French utopian
socialist Henri de Saint-Simon(1760–1825), a founder of Christian
socialism, who in 1813 suggested that morals and politics could become
“positive” sciences—that is, disciplines whose authority would rest not upon subjective
preconceptions but upon objective evidence. Saint-Simon collaborated with the
French mathematician and philosopherAuguste Comte (1798–1857), considered
by many to be the founder of sociology, on the publication of the Plan of
the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of
Society (1822), which claimed that politics would become a
socialphysics and discover scientific laws of social progress. Although
“Comtean positivism,” with its enthusiasm for the scientific study of society
and its emphasis on using the results of such studies for social improvement,
is still very much alive in psychology, contemporary political science
shows only traces of Comte’s optimism.
The scientific approach to politics developed during the 19th century along two
distinct lines that still divide the discipline. In the 1830s the French
historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) brilliantly
analyzed democracy in America, concluding that it worked because Americans had
developed “the art of association” and were egalitarian group formers.
Tocqueville’s emphasis on cultural values contrasted sharply with the views of
the German socialist theorists Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich
Engels(1820–95), who advanced a materialistic and economic theory of the state
as an instrument of domination by the classes that own the means of production.
According to Marx and Engels, prevailing values and culture simply reflect the
tastes and needs of ruling elites; the state, they charged, is merely “the
steering committee of the bourgeoisie.” Asserting what they considered to
be an immutable scientific law of history, they argued that the state
would soon be overthrown by the industrial working class
(the proletariat), who would institute socialism, a just and
egalitarian form of governance (see also communism).
The first separate school of political science was established in 1872 in
France as the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (now the Institut d’Études
Politiques). In 1895 theLondon School of Economics and Political Science was
founded in England, and the first chair of politics was established at the
University of Oxford in 1912.
The early 20th century was fascinating and the discipline of politics got a
vibrant shape during twentieth century. Developments in the United States is
noteworthy.
Some of the most important developments in political science since it became a
distinct academic discipline have occurred in the United States. Politics had
long been studied in American universities, but usually as part of the curricula
of law, philosophy, or economics. Political science as a separate
discipline in universities in the United States dates from 1880, when
John W. Burgess, after studying at the École Libre in Paris, established a
school of political science at Columbia University in New York City.
Although political science faculties grew unevenly after 1900, by the 1920s
most major institutions had established new departments, variously named
political science, government, or politics.
Political science in the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century
was influenced by the experience of numerous scholars who had done graduate
work at German universities, where the discipline was taught as
Staatswissenschaft (“science of the state”) in an ordered, structured, and
analytic organization of concepts, definitions, comparisons, and inferences.
This highly formalistic and institutional approach, which focused on
constitutions, dominated American political science until World War II.
The work of American political scientists represented an effort to establish an
autonomous discipline, separate from history, moral philosophy,
and political economy. Among the new scholars were Woodrow
Wilson (1856–1924), who would be elected president of the United States in
1912, and Frank Goodnow, a Columbia University professor of administrative
law and, later, president of Johns Hopkins University, who was among the first
to study municipal governments. Their writing showed an awareness of new
intellectual currents, such as the theory of evolution. Inspired by the work
of Charles Darwin (1809–82), Wilson and others led a transformation
of American political science from the study of static institutions to the
study of social facts, more truly in the positivist temper, less in the
analytic tradition, and more oriented toward realism.
Arthur F. Bentley’s The Process of Government, little noticed at the time
of its publication in 1908, greatly influenced the development of political
science from the 1930s to the 1950s. Bentley rejected statist abstractions in
favour of observable facts and identified groups and their interactions as the
basis of political life. Group activity, he argued, determined legislation,
administration, and adjudication. In emphasizing behaviour and process, Bentley
sounded themes that later became central to political science. In particular,
his insistence that “all social movements are brought about by group
interaction” is the defining feature of contemporary pluralist
andinterest-group approaches.
Although Bentley’s effort to develop an objective, value-free analysis of
politics had no initial consequence, other movements toward this goal enjoyed
more immediate success. The principal impetus came from the University of
Chicago, where what became known as the Chicago school developed in the
mid-1920s and thereafter. The leading figure in this movement was Charles
E. Merriam, whose New Aspects of Politics (1925) argued for a
reconstruction of method in political analysis, urged the greater use
of statistics in the aid of empirical observation and measurement,
and postulated that “intelligent social control”—a concept reminiscent of the
old Comtean positivism—might emerge from the converging interests of
politics, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. Because Merriam’s basic
political dictum at this stage was “attitude,” he relied largely on the
insights of psychology for a better understanding of politics.
An important empirical work of the Chicago school was Merriam and Harold
F. Gosnell’s Non-voting, Causes and Methods of Control (1924), which
used sampling methods and survey data and is illustrative of the type of
research that came to dominate political science after World War II.
Merriam’s approach was not entirely new; in 1908 the British political scientist Graham
Wallas (1858–1932) had argued in Human Nature in Politics that a
new political science should favour the quantification of psychological
elements (human nature), including nonrational and subconscious inferences, a
view similarly expressed in Public Opinion(1922) by the American
journalist and political scientist Walter Lippmann(1889–1974).
Harold Lasswell (1902–78), a member of the Chicago group, carried the
psychological approach to Yale University, where he had a commanding influence.
HisPsychopathology and Politics (1930) and Power and
Personality (1948) fused categories of Freudian psychology with
considerations of power. Many political scientists attempted to use Freudian
psychology to analyze politics, but none succeeded in establishing it as a firm
basis of political science, because it depended too much on subjective insights
and often could not be verified empirically. Lasswell, for example, viewed
politicians as unbalanced people with an inordinate need for power, whereas
“normal” people had no compulsion for political office. Although intuitively
insightful, this notion is difficult—if not impossible—to prove scientifically.
Merriam’s Political Power (1934) and Lasswell’s
classic Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)—the title of which
articulated the basic definition of politics—gave a central place to the
phenomenon of power in the empirical study of politics. Merriam
discussed how power comes into being, how it becomes “authority” (which he
equated with power), the techniques of power holders, the defenses of those
over whom power is wielded, and the dissipation of power. Lasswell focused on
“influence and the influential,” laying the basis for subsequent “elite”
theories of politics.
Although the various members of the Chicago school ostensibly sought to develop
political science as a value-free discipline, it had two central predilections:
it accepted democratic values, and it attempted to improve the operation of
democratic systems. Power approaches also became central in the burgeoning
field of international relations, particularly after World War II. Hans
Morgenthau(1904–80), a German refugee and analyst of world politics, argued
succinctly in Politics Among Nations(1948) that “all politics is a
struggle for power.”
The totalitarian dictatorships that developed in Europe and Asia in the 1920s
and ’30s and the onset of World War II turned political science, particularly
in the United States, away from its focus on institutions, law, and procedures.
The constitution of Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic had
been an excellent model, but it failed in practice because too few Germans were
then committed supporters of democracy. Likewise, the Soviet Union’s 1936
constitution appeared democratic but in reality was merely an attempt to mask
the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Works of this period
focused on the role of elites, political parties, andinterest groups, on
legislative and bureaucratic processes, and especially on how voters in
democracies make their electoral choices. This new interest in actual political
behaviour became known as “behavioralism,” a term borrowed from
psychology’s behaviourism. Whereas most earlier thinkers had focused on
the “top” of the political system—its institutions—behavioralists instead
explored the “bottom,” especially that which could be quantified. The result
was that much of political science became political sociology.
Developments outside the United States
Since the time of Marx and Engels, political scientists have continued to
debate the relative importance of culture and economic structures in
determining human behaviour and the organization of society. In the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Italian economists Gaetano
Mosca(1858–1941) and Vilfredo Pareto(1848–1923) echoed Marx’s analysis
that society was ruled by elites, but they considered this both permanent and
natural. They were joined by the German-born Italian political sociologist and
economist Robert Michels (1876–1936), whose “iron law of oligarchy”
declared rule by the few to be inevitable. Mosca, Pareto, and Michels all
agreed that the overthrow of the existing “political class” would simply result
in its replacement by another, a view that was supported in the mid-20th
century by Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas (1911–95) in
his The New Class (1957). Pareto also contributed the idea (which he
borrowed from economics) that society is a system tending toward equilibrium:
like an economic system, a society that becomes out of balance will tend to
correct itself by developing new institutions and laws or by redistributing
power. This approach was adopted by much of academic political science after
World War II and was later developed by “systems” theory.
In the early 20th century, the Swedish political scientist Rudolf
Kjellén(1864–1922) treated the state as a fusion of organic and cultural
elements determined by geography. Kjellén is credited with coining the
term geopolitics (geopolitik), which acquired a sinister connotation
in the years after World War I, when German expansionists appealed to
geopolitical arguments in support of the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
Althoughgeopolitics still exerts a considerable influence on political
science, particularly in the areas of international relations and foreign policy,
the discipline of political geography developed into a distinct
subfield of geography rather than of political science.
The German sociologist Max Weber(1864–1920), who rejected Marx and
embraced Tocqueville’s emphasis on culture and values, was perhaps the most
influential figure in political science in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Marx had proposed thatcapitalism gave rise to Protestantism:
the merchants and princes of northern Europe developed commerce to such an
extent that Roman Catholic restrictions had to be discarded. Weber rejected
this idea, claiming that Protestantism triggered capitalism: the Calvinist idea
of predestination led individuals to try to prove, by amassing
capital, that they were predestined for heaven (seeCalvinism). Weber’s theory
of theProtestant ethic is still disputed, but not the fact that religion
and culture powerfully influence economic and political development.
Weber understood that the social sciences could not simply mimic the natural
sciences, because humans attach widely varying meanings and loyalties to their
leaders and institutions. It is not simply facts that matter but how people
perceive, interpret, and react to these facts; this makes causality in the
social sciences far more complex than in the natural sciences. To be objective,
therefore, the social scientist must take into account human subjectivity.
Weber discerned three types of authority: traditional (as in monarchies),
charismatic (a concept he developed to refer to the personal drawing power of
revolutionary leaders), and rational-legal (characteristic of modern
societies). Weber coined the term bureaucracy, and he was the first to
study bureaucracies systematically. His theories, which focused on culture as a
chief source of economic growth and democracy, still find support among
contemporary political scientists, and he must be ranked equally as one of the
founders of both modern sociology and modern political science.
Other scholars also contributed to the growth of political science in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. In The English Constitution (1867), the
English economist and political analyst Walter Bagehot (1826–77), who
was also an editor of The Economist, famously distinguished between
Britain’s “dignified” offices (e.g., the monarch) and its “efficient” offices
(e.g., the prime minister).James Bryce (1838–1922), who taught civil law
at the University of Oxford, produced one of the earliest and most influential
studies of the U.S. political system in The American Commonwealth (1888).
The Belorussian political scientist Moisey Ostrogorsky (1854–1919),
who was educated at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, pioneered
the study of parties,elections, and public opinion in Democracy and
the Organization of Political Parties (originally written in French;
1902), which focused on the United States and Britain. In Paris, André
Siegfried, teaching at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Collège
de France, introduced the use of maps to demonstrate the influence of geography
on politics. At first few Britons turned to behavioralism and quantification,
instead continuing in their inclination toward political philosophy. In
contrast, the Swedish scholar Herbert Tingsten (1896–1973), in his
seminal Political Behaviour: Studies in Election Statistics (1937),
developed the connections between social groups and their voting tendencies.
Before World War II the large areas of the world that were colonies or
dictatorships made few important contributions to the growth of political
science.
Post-World War II trends and debates
Perhaps the most important irreversible change in political science after World
War II was that the scope of the discipline was expanded to include the study
of politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—areas that had been largely
ignored in favour of Europe and North America. This trend was encouraged
by the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for
influence over the political development of newly independent countries. The
scholarship produced in these countries, however, remained largely derivative
of developments in Europe and the United States. Researchers in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, often in partnership with European and American colleagues,
produced significant studies on decolonization,
ideology, federalism, corruption, and political instability.
In Latin America a Marxist-oriented view called dependency theory was
popular from the 1960s to the ’80s. Greatly influencing the study of
international relations in the United States and Europe as well as in
developing countries, dependency theorists argued that Latin America’s problems
were rooted in its subservient economic and political relationship to the
United States and western Europe. More recently, Latin American political
scientists, influenced by methods developed in American universities, undertook
empirical studies of the sources of democracy and instability, such as Arturo
Valenzuela’s The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes(1978). African, Asian, and
Latin American political scientists also made important contributions as
teachers on the faculties of American and European universities.
Outside the United States, where political science initially was less
quantitative, there were several outstanding works. Like Lasswell, the German
philosopher Theodor Adorno(1903–69) and others adopted Freudian insights
in their pioneering study The Authoritarian Personality(1950), which used
a 29-item questionnaire to detect the susceptibility of individuals to fascist
beliefs. The French political scientist Maurice Duverger’s Political
Parties(1951) is still highly regarded, not only for its classification of
parties but also for its linking of party systems with electoral systems.
Duverger argued that single-member-district electoral systems that require only
a plurality to win election tend to produce two-party systems,
whereas proportional-representation systems tend to produce multiparty systems;
this generalization was later called “Duverger’s law.” The French sociologist Michel
Crozier’s The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1964) found that Weber’s
idealized bureaucracy is quite messy, political, and varied.
Each bureaucracy is a political subculture; what is rational and
routine in one bureau may be quite different in another. Crozier thus
influenced the subsequent “bureaucratic politics” approach of the 1970s.
In the post world war period, politics was dominated by behaviouralism and
postbehaviouralism which drawed heavily upon psychological aspects into
political behaviour of people. So political culture, politicl
development, modernisation, got toi much significance in the study
of politics.
Enduring debates in political science
Political scientists, like other social and natural scientists, gather data and
formulate theories. The two tasks are often out of balance, however, leading
either to the collection of irrelevant facts or to the construction of
misleading theories. Throughout the post-World War II era, political scientists
developed and discarded numerous theories, and there was considerable (and
unresolved) debate as to whether it is more important to develop theories and
then collect data to confirm or reject them or to collect and analyze data from
which theories would flow.
Perhaps the oldest philosophical dispute has to do with the relative importance
of subjectivity and objectivity. Many political scientists have attempted to
develop approaches that are value-free and wholly objective. In modern
political science, much of this debate takes place between structuralists and
cultural theorists. Structuralists claim that the way in which the world is
organized (or structured) determines politics and that the proper objects of
study for political science are power, interests, and institutions, which they
construe as objective features of political life. In contrast, cultural
theorists, who study values, opinions, and psychology, argue that subjective
perceptions of reality are more important than objective reality itself.
However, most scholars now believe that the two realms feed into one another
and cannot be totally separated. To explain the apparent inertia of Japan’s
political system, for example, a structuralist would cite the country’s
electoral laws and powerful ministries, whereas a cultural theorist would look
to deeply rooted Japanese values such as obedience and stability. Few in one
camp, however, would totally dismiss the arguments of the other.
Likewise, although some political scientists continue to insist that only
quantified data are legitimate, some topics are not amenable to study in these
terms. The decisions of top officials, for example, are often made in small
groups and behind closed doors, and so understanding them requires subjective
descriptive material based on interviews and observations—essentially the
techniques of good journalists. If done well, these subjective studies may be
more valid and longer-lived than quantitative studies.
Prior to the development of reliable survey research, most political analyses
focused on elites. Once a sizable amount of research had become available,
there was a considerable debate about whether rulers are guided by citizen
preferences, expressed throughinterest groups and elections, or
whether elites pursue their own goals and manipulate public opinion to achieve
their ends. Despite numerous studies of public opinion, voting behaviour, and
interest groups, the issue has not been resolved and, indeed, is perhaps
unresolvable. Analyses can establish statistical relationships, but it has been
difficult to demonstrate causality with any certainty. This debate is
complicated by two factors. First, although there is a considerable body of
survey and electoral data, most people ignore politics most of the time, a
factor that must be considered in attempting to understand which part of the
“public” policy makers listen to—all citizens, all voters, or only those
expressing an intense view on a particular matter. Political analyses based on
elites are hindered by a dearth of reliable elite-level data, as researchers
are rarely invited into the deliberations of rulers. Accordingly, much is known
about the social bases of politics but little of how and why decisions are
made. Even when decision makers grant interviews or write their memoirs, firm
conclusions remain elusive, because officials often provide accounts that are
self-serving or misleading.
Political science has had difficulty handling rapid change; it prefers the
static (stable political systems) to the dynamic. If historians are stuck in
the past, political scientists are often captives of the present. For some the
collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the theories and methods of political
science are of only limited utility. Despite decades of gathering data and
theorizing, political science was unable to anticipate the defining event of
the post-World War II era. Critics charged that political science could
describe what is but could never discern what was likely to be. Others,
however, maintained that this criticism was unfair, arguing that such upheavals
can be predicted, given sufficient data. Still, the demise of the Soviet Union
spurred some political scientists to develop theories to explain political
changes and transformations. Examining the collapse of authoritarian regimes
and their replacement with democratic governments in Greece, Spain, Portugal,
Latin America, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union during the last three
decades of the 20th century, they sought to develop a theory of transitions to
democracy. Others argued that no such universal theory is possible and that all
democratic transitions are unique.
At the beginning of the 21st century, political science was faced with a stark
dilemma: the more scientific it tried to be, the more removed it found itself
from the burning issues of the day. Although some research in political science
would continue to be arcane and unintelligible to the layperson and even to
other scholars, many political scientists attempted to steer a middle course,
one that maintained a rigorous scientific approach but also addressed questions
that are important to academics, citizens, and decision makers alike. Indeed,
some political scientists, recognizing that many “scientific” approaches had
lost their utility after a decade or two, suggested that the discipline should
cease its attempts to imitate the natural sciences and return to the classic
concerns of analyzing and promoting the political good.
