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Political science 179
4. Recent changes
These traditional methods were sharply attacked in the years after 1945, par-
ticularly in America and particularly by scholars who came to political science
from other social sciences or from the natural sciences.’7 Hence the controversy
over the ‘behavioral movement’ which divided American political scientists in
the 1950s. To those of us who were personally remote from the controversy the
the issues raised on both sides seemed to be both profound and insoluble,
except by trial and error, and there was general relief when Professor Dah1
declared a truce in his well-known article, ‘an epitaph for a monument to a
successful protest’.Is
Even now, twenty years later, political science still seems to move mainly
within this framework, relating hypotheses to the great postulates of ordered
change and social interdependence, and using literary models as a basis for
comparison.
But there have been three major changes which are irreversible.
a. The language of variables. The kst of these is that political scientists (to
some extent taught by Professor Lazarsfeld himself) have learnt to talk the
language of variables. This has enforced attention to the proper formulation
and testing of hypotheses; has taught political scientists to argue from the
ground up, as well as from the sky down; and has drawn political science closer
to the main body of the social sciences.
b. Rigour in the use of models. The second is a growing conviction that mod-
els - if they are used - should be used scrupulously. There was at first a certain
repugnance to the use of models set out symbolically, but it has now been rec-
ognized by almost everyone that the magic resides in rigour, not in symbolism.
Symbolism may or may not be useful, depending on the situation. But in any
case symbols, if badly defined and ill-used, can be as vague as words. The prob-
lem in practice is not that of words versus symbols, but that of deciding con-
sciously the degree of rigour appropriate to the subject, the data, and the re-
sources available.
c. Data. The most difficult problems now concern the availability and relia-
bility of data. There has since 1945 been a ‘data revolution’, in the sense that
very large quantitites of data can be stored and analysed electronically. It is
not technically difficult to store all the available political data for the whole
world in a data bank and a computer, linked to other computers and to other
data banks; and inquiries made on the basis of data banks may be quite
traditional in character, as they have been in general so far. But there are
serious problems about the reliability and completeness of data.
Professor Karl Deutsch’g lists seven main categories of statistical data; data
about political elites, public opinion data, statistics for popular voting, statis-
tics for voting in assemblies, content analysis data, aggregative data produced by
governments as part of the administrative process, historical data; to which he
adds two other categories - statistics taken from other social sciences and second-
ary statistics arising from computer analysis of the primary data. He estimates
(conceding wide margins of error) that the stocks of data available in 1965 were
equivalent to 16 m. IBM cards, increasing to 29 m. by 1975, when they would be