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180 W. J. M. Mackenzie
increasing at the rate of 5 m. a year. The cost of storing and processing would be
$1 m. a year now, increasing to $5 m. in 1975.
These dollar costs seem much too low: but even if they were doubled or
trebled the sums involved would be trivial by the standards of natural science,
and not large in relation to the amounts already spent by governments on
aggregative data and by various agencies on survey data. The cost envisaged
by Professor Deutsch is not the total cost of data; but the cost of storage and
processing, designed to squeeze all that can be squeezed from data which already
exist.
Most political scientists would agree that this is worth doing, so long as the
cost is not borne by the discipline itself from its existing resources: subject,
perhaps, to two other provisos.
i) Emphasis on statistics may have a ‘skew’ effect on research interests. It is
an obvious corollary of the doctrine of stages that the fewest and least reliable
data are those from the poorest countries: and that even with rich countries
the data are least good for areas (family life, for instance) which have not yet
been fully drawn into ‘modernized’ society. Both these sectors are of tremendous
political importance, and statistics do not take us very far in analyzing them. It
is important nevertheless to get research going by such techniques as we can
apply at once: this will in due course demand the provision of numerical data.
ii) As a matter of historical accident, we have begun to talk first of world data
banks of political indicators. These data are of course to be correlated with
economic and social data: but there are apparently no similar plans for econo-
mic and social data banks. It would be scientifically correct that the whole
problem of world data should be treated as a single problem, giving no special
priority to political science.
But supposing the cost were to be borne from funds already allocated for
political research, there would undoubtedly be a dispute about the allocation of
priorities. As will be seen in the second main section of this article, there are
areas of research for which the support of data banks is not important;
serious research can be pursued (and is being pursued) without recourse to ‘the
language of variables’.
JII. ECOLOGY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
It was suggested earlier in this chapter (p. 167) that differences of approach to
political science could to some extent be measured on these three dimensions;
that of attitude to the scope of the discipline, that of the objectives of study, and
that of basic assumptions and methods. These are to some extent matters of
individual choice, to some extent they are settled by the tendencies of schools
and research groups. But there are also national differences, and (at first sight
at least) these differences reflect forms of academic organization rather than
ideologies.
One may distinguish three cases.