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Political science 219
our unit of inquiry, the number of cases is too small to suggest conclusions of a
general kind: but ‘collective decisions’ are as the sands of the seashore for mul-
titude, and there will still be an inexhaustible store of cases for investigation and
conceptual experiment, even if we define ‘political’ so as to exclude many deci-
sions. But it should be possible to proceed empirically to establish whether it
is or not convenient to mark off political decisions from others.
If one presses on through these conceptual difficulties (all of them worth
analysis), one meets new difficulties and new opportunities in empirical study.
These difficulties are of two kinds:
I. The history of any collective human decision is extremely complex, even in
the simplest real-life situation. How is one to bridge the gap between decisions
made by a group under laboratory conditions and decisions taken ‘live’ in a real
political situation ? It would seem appropriate to take laboratory concepts and
to use them (very tentatively) as tools of analysis in ordering the mass of ‘in-
formation’ which is relevant to any real-life decision. But little has been done
yet on these lines.
2. If one views the study of collective decisions as a whole, considerations of
strategy indicate that we should avoid the study of big decisions until we begin
to understand small decisions; and indeed ‘access’ to small decisions (provided
that we do not insist on getting a truly random sample) is easy - whereas access
to top level decision-making is (almost by definition) extremely hard, in that
top policy-makers are bound to defend their privacy against invasion, or at
least to impose censorship. He who investigates top level political decisions is
entangled in politics; there are rules of objectivity which safeguard his standards
in research, but publication may be impossible unless he has great skill in
writing in Aesopian language between the lines.72
For these reasons one cannot expect a quick breakthrough in the empirical
study of collective decisions; nevertheless, there is much to be said for an
approach which cuts across the puzzles of classification indicated in earlier sec-
tions of this chapter, and across the present structure of the social sciences.
2. Orientation
There is another division which runs through all categories of research: the
distinction between work which is discipline-oriented and work which is prob-
lem-oriented.
On the one hand, there are those scholars who work primarily for a scholarly
audience and treat the discipline of political science primarily as analogous to a
natural science. There is, they would claim (or there ought to be), a body of
propositions linked conceptually and subject to empirical proof or refutation,
and these propositions should constitute a scientific edifice which is continually
altered and extended, very occasionally rebuilt.
On the other hand, there are those who think primarily in terms of practical
problems demanding attention. Particular problems - for instance, nuclear
strategy, the politics of developing countries, the administration of metropolitan
areas - press upon those actually engaged in politics and upon the public in
general. These problems are certainly within the scope of political science (and of