Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Political science 1-75
This certainly happens to some extent; for instance, in the development of
research into the authoritarian personality in politics.I3 But States do not make
good laboratories; first, because there are relatively few of them and each of
them is of undefined complexity; secondly, because great care and precision are
needed to frame hypotheses and tests effectively, whereas the ‘market’ for political
science demands usable generalizations in plain language, produced quickly.
As will be seen later, there have been serious attempts to overcome these difficulties,
and the comparative study of politics has made great advances in
scientific sophistication in the last fifteen years. But on the whole the object of
the comparative study of individual cases has hitherto been to obtain insight,
rather than to establish laws.
2. Normative
Here one must establish two distinct senses in which political science can be
regarded as a normative science.
a) The first sense is that political science is especially concerned with the
study of norms of various kinds. Every political system has an ecological and
economic setting; but the system itself, the set of political institutions, exists
primarily as a system of norms. Some of these norms are legal in form, others
are not; some are peculiar to politics (for instance, the norm of obedience to
‘constitutional’ authority), others are common to the social sciences; some are
restricted in scope (for instance, some special norms about the conduct’ of
elections), others (such as those affecting human rights) involve general ques-
tions about the nature of man. There is a difficult problem of how to identify
these norms, and how to explain their origin, stability and decline: but this
involves no challenge to objectivity.
b) But (secondly) political science may also be normative in the sense that it
offers advice to rulers and citizens about their conduct. This is not to say that
all individual political scientists offer advice; but many of them do, and even
investigations which are on the face of it descriptive and factual may be pursued
primarily because a question of public policy is involved. In such cases it may
be extremely difficult to identify the normative element and to define its effects;
often the author himself is not fully aware of the recommendations latent in his
research.
There is a large measure of agreement within the discipline about the scholar’s
obligation to identify his own bias and to follow strict rules about the collec-
tion and marshalling of evidence. In these respects political science does not
differ at all from other branches of science and scholarship : nevertheless, there
are sharp differences of opinion about the social r6le of the political scientist.
Some are drawn to the discipline by the hope that increase of political know-
ledge wil give men greater control over their political destinies ; political science
is to be justified by practical benefits, at all levels from that of world politics to
that of efficiency and humanity in public offices. At the other extreme, there
are those who object vigorously to this confusion of rbles, and regard it as a
breach of the scholar’s obligation to seek understanding and to publish it, leav-
ing others to choose from his work what they need for their own purposes.