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

Political science 213
eighteenth century England, and the historian has advantages in that written
sources are more easily available to him. But the same question can be asked
about contemporary assemblies, and it is a natural first step in political science
in Western democracies to study the elected as well as the electors. Up to a
point their lives lie open to inspection, since they cannot refuse to tell the voters
who they are; and (up to a point) their actions are noted in assembly votes which
are ‘on the record‘ for public criticism or commendation.
The United States of America has over IOO legislative assemblies; two for the
federation, and two for each of all but one of the 50 States. Thus every univer-
sity has at hand good material for students, and much excellent work is done at
a low level of generality. Similarly, on a much smaller scale, in all other coun-
tries where there are assemblies claiming some freedom of speech. There are
still very large gaps; but political science has done pretty well in making availa-
ble lively and carefully documented descriptions of the life of individual assem-
blies. Certain ‘syndromes’ can be specified for American assemblies65 : but
little has been done to extend this work by following it up elsewhere.
There are good practical resasons for this gap; there are also the theoretical
reasons that it is not possible to create an artificial assembly (comparable to an
artificial small group) and that real assemblies even in times of revolution are
tangled in historical idiosyncracies which cannot be peeled off neatly so as to
leave a comparable model. Certainly politicians acquire by experience some
skill in judgement about assemblies; and some political scientists might do
more to use and analyse this knowledge.
Ecology and attitude. But at present the trends of research are towards deeper
study of the fields in which it is easy to get comparable data: the position of
legislators in social structure, and the pattern of their careers in structure/
function terms; the attitudes of legislators as expressed in their own political
language and also in answer to questionnaires and depth interviews; factorial
analysis of voting records as a means of plotting the latent structure of an as-
sembly. This is (in general) mature and scholarly work, and enables one to put
sharply the case about the character of political science. Some of the work is
based on non-statistical data, but much can be expressed in the language of
variables. It is to that extent scientific as well as historical, and its results are
refutable generalizations about the behaviour of a single complex of people.
These are observed regularities about a single case; not deterministically bind-
ing but subject only to rather rare exceptions. Beyond the single case, generali-
zations are weaker; the less comparable the cases, the less easy is it to move from
the singular to the general. It would be rash to compare the House of Commons
with an elected assembly in Africa, even though the latter has adopted the
Standing Orders of the British House. It would not be rash to compare one
African assembly with another; for instance, Tanzania with Kenya. But the
result of doing so is to bring out singularities; the ways in which comparable
assemblies differ seem more interesting than what they have in common. The
sense of ‘interest’ is partly a matter of ‘idiographic’ curiosity: but it also reflects
a feeling for deeper generalizations about the varieties of political behaviour
which we are not at present competent to express in nomothetic terms.