Behavioralism is an approach to political science that insists the study of politics should focus on observable, measurable human behavior rather than on abstract ideas about how governments ought to work. It dominated American political science during the 1950s and 1960s, fundamentally changing how scholars studied everything from voting patterns to legislative decision-making. If you’ve encountered the term in a textbook or lecture, it’s important to know that behavioralism in political science is related to, but distinct from, behaviorism in psychology.
The Core Idea Behind Behavioralism
Before behavioralism took hold, political scientists spent much of their time analyzing constitutions, legal frameworks, and philosophical arguments about what government should look like. Behavioralists wanted to shift that focus entirely. Their argument was straightforward: if political science wants to be a real science, it needs to study things you can actually observe and count. That means looking at what people do in politics, not just what institutions or documents say they should do.
In practice, this meant studying individual political behavior. How do people vote? What shapes their opinions? Why do some citizens participate in politics while others stay home? Behavioralists pursued these questions using the same tools as other social sciences, particularly psychology. They set up independent variables (the presumed causes, like income level or education) and dependent variables (the presumed effects, like voting choice), then looked for statistical relationships between them. The goal was to build a science of politics grounded in data, not speculation.
This commitment to observability was a direct reaction to what came before. Earlier approaches to studying politics often relied on intuition, historical narrative, or philosophical reasoning. Behavioralists didn’t necessarily reject those methods outright, but they insisted that any claims about political life should be backed by empirical evidence. If you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t belong in a scientific study of politics.
Where Behavioralism Came From
The roots of behavioralism trace back to the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century. Charles Merriam, a political scientist there, began pushing as early as the 1900s and 1910s for a more empirical, data-driven approach to studying politics. His early work on primary elections and municipal revenues in Chicago reflected this instinct: go out, collect information, and analyze what’s actually happening rather than theorizing from a distance.
Merriam’s student Harold Lasswell carried this further, applying psychological concepts to political questions. His 1927 study of propaganda techniques during World War I was an early example of treating political phenomena as something that could be systematically analyzed using social science methods. Together, Merriam and Lasswell helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what became, by mid-century, a full-scale “behavioral revolution” in political science. By the 1950s, behavioralism wasn’t just one approach among many. It was the dominant framework shaping how departments trained graduate students, how journals evaluated research, and how the discipline defined serious scholarship.
How It Changed Political Science Methods
The most lasting impact of behavioralism was methodological. It introduced rigorous quantitative techniques to a field that had been largely qualitative. Political scientists began designing studies with carefully controlled conditions, recording observable outcomes, and running statistical tests to determine whether their findings were meaningful or just coincidence. Survey research, in particular, became a central tool. Large-scale public opinion polls and voting studies gave researchers hard numbers to work with for the first time.
This emphasis on objectivity and replicability was borrowed directly from the natural sciences. The idea was that if two researchers followed the same methods with the same data, they should reach the same conclusions. Earlier approaches to political study had struggled with exactly this problem: theories were often ambiguous, hard to test, and produced findings that other scholars couldn’t reproduce. Behavioralism aimed to fix that by requiring clear definitions, measurable variables, and transparent procedures.
The shift also changed what counted as an interesting research question. Rather than asking “What is justice?” or “What is the best form of government?”, behavioralists asked questions like “What predicts voter turnout in midterm elections?” or “How does media exposure affect political attitudes?” The questions became narrower but more answerable.
Behavioralism vs. Behaviorism
The two terms are easy to confuse, and they are related, but they refer to different things. Behaviorism is a school of thought in psychology arguing that psychology should study only observable behavior, not internal mental states. Behavioralism borrowed that same basic commitment to observable evidence and applied it to the study of politics. Both movements shared a distrust of relying on things you can’t directly see or measure. But behavioralism was never just psychology applied to politics. It was a broader intellectual movement about how to make the study of government and political life more scientific.
Why It Drew Criticism
By the late 1960s, behavioralism was facing serious pushback. The core complaint was that in its pursuit of scientific rigor, the approach had become disconnected from the political questions that actually mattered. The United States was in the middle of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and widespread social upheaval. Critics argued that political scientists were busy refining statistical models while ignoring the urgent moral and political crises around them.
In 1969, the political scientist David Easton, who had been one of behavioralism’s key figures, declared that a “post-behavioral revolution” was underway. He described it as driven by deep dissatisfaction with research that was striving to mimic natural science methodology at the expense of relevance. Post-behavioralists attacked the abstractness and “methodological purity” of existing scholarship, arguing that political scientists needed to engage with real-world social problems rather than retreating into data for its own sake.
The criticism had a philosophical dimension too. By focusing only on what could be observed and measured, behavioralism deliberately set aside normative questions: questions about values, ethics, and what governments should do. Critics saw this as a serious blind spot. Politics is fundamentally about competing visions of the good life, they argued, and a science of politics that ignores those questions is missing the point. Some went further, suggesting that the behavioralist emphasis on describing existing patterns of behavior carried an inherent conservatism, since it studied the political world as it was rather than imagining how it could be different.
Its Legacy in Modern Political Science
Behavioralism is no longer the dominant paradigm it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but its influence never went away. The quantitative methods it introduced are now standard practice across political science. Survey research, statistical modeling, and the expectation that claims should be supported by empirical evidence are all part of behavioralism’s legacy. Most political scientists today use these tools without thinking of themselves as “behavioralists” per se.
What changed was the exclusivity. Modern political science is more methodologically diverse. Scholars combine quantitative analysis with qualitative case studies, historical research, normative theory, and institutional analysis. The post-behavioral critique succeeded not in dismantling empirical methods but in reopening the door to questions about values, justice, and political purpose alongside data-driven research. The discipline kept the tools behavioralism introduced while abandoning the idea that those tools were the only legitimate way to study politics.