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Behaviouralism has given empirical methods, tools, and techniques to Political Science, and has made the latter more complete. Its inter-disciplinary nature has helped to understand the basic urges, needs, and demands of man in a better way. It has led scholars to move towards substantive areas and stable units of political life.
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Political Science is gaining the status of a hard core science, which bestows self-respect, confidence, and courage among scholars. Their findings are becoming more fruitful, more precise and more exact and ultimately leading them toward the cherished goal of a scientific political theory.
Some of the behaviourahsts hope to evolve a ‘Science of Politics’ patterned after natural sciences. In it, they do not want to give any place to values or non-scientific methods. However the tendency of ‘scientificing’ everything human at this early stage, called as ‘scientism’, could be avoided. The grace and utility of Political Science is not in becoming a prototype of Physics, but to go the other way, and remain a human social science.
Till today, behaviouralism has not succeeded in achieving its mission of ‘Science of Polities’ or ‘Science of Man’, but its eyes are fixed on that goal. In fact, the growth of this discipline is in a transitional stage. It is moving from older sense of ‘Political Philosophy’ to contemporary status of ‘Political Science’, with an aspiration to become ‘science of politics’ in future. As such, Heinz Eulau affirms that Science of Politics is both a possible as well as a desirable venture.
Even traditionalists and traditional Political Science have come under its irresistible influence of quantifiable model of science. They have started recasting their subject matter, methodology, and conclusions. While studying human personalities, they make use of interview and questionnaire techniques, content analysis, and other statistical devices. Now they look favourably towards attitude measurement, scaling techniques, sampling methods and others.
The traditionalists do not hesitate to learn and borrow from other empirical disciplines like Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology and others. A good number of topics, which previously belonged to the traditional areas, have been renovated to behavioural orientation. Similarly, many topics like attitudes, perceptions, values, and other motivations, previously subjected to speculative thinking only, are gradually coming out of traditional fields. The behaviouralists are taking them over, and producing brilliant empirical studies, and exposing actual realities to public eye.