laws. Empirical particularistic studies, accurate description and measurement of observable phenomena, were seen to be the basis for a truly objective science of politics. Leaders in the field, like Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, eschewed rationalistic explanations, a priori reasoning, theories dependent on innate drives or instincts, or elaborate system-building. The meaning of political behavior was to be discovered in how politics operated in practice.
Edward Purcell has eloquently told the story of how this objectivism and an appreciation of cultural differences led researchers increasingly toward a moral neutrality and relativism that contradicted their personal commitment to democracy.53 Their empirical findings confirmed that elite groups were able to dominate the majority of the population in democratic polities, and studies of public opinion and voting behavior undermined claims that humans were informed judges of their own interests. Eventually, the shock of the Great Depression, the struggle against Nazism, and the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union stimulated a re-evaluation of democratic theory and encouraged a more positive evaluation of the actual practices of American democracy.
In the years following World War II the discipline grew enormously and found links to public influence and power. Challenged by McCarthyism, political scientists sought shelter behind their claims to objectivity and neutrality. Yet celebratory theories of pluralism and cultural consensus dominated the analyses of American politics. Elites still ran things, they argued, but no single elite group dominated in the free-for-all of contested politics and all groups could compete. Without examining the barriers of class, race, and gender that gave coherence to this congenial system, the critical edge of political studies diminished. Students of politics joined in the general anti-Communist patriotism of the day, developing the theory of totalitarianism that neatly homogenized Stalinism and Hitlerism and contrasted the T-model with Western democracy. Across the social sciences “Marx was replaced by Freud, the word ‘capitalism’ dropped out of social theory after the war, and class became stratification.”54 When Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom requested clearance to teach a course on planning in the late 1940s, the Yale economics department asked that they label it “Critique of Planning” instead.55 And the group of social scientists at the University of Chicago who chose the term “behavioral sciences” to describe their endeavor did so consciously, in order to appear neutral and not confuse congressional funders who “might confound social science with socialism.”56
Political science suffered from science envy, and the so-called Behavioral Revolution of the 1950s was an effort to emulate, once again, the certainty, even predictability, of the natural sciences. Rather than a radical new departure, the revolution was a re-emphasis on scientific methods and a turn away from historical, philosophical, or descriptive approaches. Once again “is” instead of “ought” would be the principal concern of the investigator; the object of study would be observed and observable behavior; the method would be rigorous, empirical, and theoretically informed; and the aim was to be significant generalizations and empirically testable theories.57 Among the dominant approaches to the study of politics and society were sociological theory descended from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto; culture and personality theory indebted to anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; and social psychological theory that led to numerous surveys and small group experiments. Political scientists took beliefs, ideas, values, and feelings seriously, and by the early 1960s the investigation of political culture was considered by many to be fundamental to an understanding of comparative politics.58
Although some reviewers believe that mid-century “political science produced almost no general scientific propositions of a high degree of conclusiveness,” the intense discussions within the discipline—between historical political theory and “the new science of politics,” on questions of values and political culture, for example—prepared the ground for a critical reaction in the late 1960s. The mobilization of the disenfranchised undermined the positive consensus about American politics, questioned assumptions about liberalism and actually-existing democracy, and inspired new interest in justice and egalitarianism. While Marxism and critical theory remained on the margins, younger scholars were fascinated by the social structural work of Barrington Moore, the critique of modernization theory presented by dependency theory, new comparative studies of capitalism and labor, and a left turn in political theory.59
Ironically, at the moment when Western Marxists were abandoning economic determinist models of explanation, and historians wrestled with anthropology and literary criticism, many political scientists found new value in a view of human and group choice borrowed from economics. Much of political science had emphasized the predatory activities of elites, the established structures and procedures of modern politics, the determining effects of political culture, or the complexity of political decision-making that makes the agency of citizens difficult if not impossible, whereas new departures toward rational choice theory centered the individual and his or her choices.60 Rational choice theory (closely related to social or public choice) and its associate game theory offered students of politics a theory that claimed to explain politics across time and space as the result of strategic, rational, goal-maximizing behavior within given structures and institutions.61 This methodological individualism questions the sufficiency of structuralist explanations, with their emphasis on constraints, and focuses instead on the choice of strategies adopted by actors to achieve their goals.62 The model does not account for the formation of goals (first order preferences), but is interested in the institutions and structures that shape strategies (second order preferences). The theory assumes only that people choose the means most likely to bring about their desired ends, that they can order their priorities, and that they hold consistent preferences.63 When theorists in this tradition looked at parties, nations, or classes, they treated them as unitary actors capable of rationally calculating their preferences and strategies toward utility maximization, in the manner of individuals. Although not all political science succumbed to rational choice theory, methodological individualism proved to be a muscular challenger to both the political culture approach and the post-behavioralist “inclination to stress institutional phenomena.”64 And in many ways rational choice appears to be at the opposite pole in the discipline from cultural interpretivist approaches.
The question for political science has not been whether to deal with culture. Political scientists had followed American anthropology into an appreciation of the diversity of cultural forms in the 1920s and had generally adopted its relativist and value-neutral approach, and from the 1950s they carried that interest further into political culture. The question was how to deal with culture. Some political scientists consider political systems to be products of and limited by their cultures, with an elective affinity of one to the other, and still others treat culture as an instrument available for elites to use politically. There is no consensus on whether culture is just a piece of information to be considered or an independent explanatory variable.
Rational choice has taken several different approaches to deal with the inconvenience of culture. At one end, transhistorical and deductive notions of human preferences ignore cultural specificities and determinations. Here analysts assume that all people want either wealth, status, or power and that other motivations can be reduced to these fundamental preferences. Others within the tradition recognize the importance of culture. Shared symbols, they argue, create a field of communication and trust and solve coordination and collective action problems. Cultural systems are political resources that can be employed by political entrepreneurs to mobilize otherwise divided populations without paying the start-up costs of organization. Yet, critics point out, reducing culture or constructions of identity to instrumental decisions, calculated strategic choices, loses much of the texture, complexity, and richness of actual politics. Such simplifications have led to a stark polarization in the discipline. As Lisa Wedeen argues,
Insofar as individualism presupposes agents who are forward-looking strategists forever calculating costs and benefits, there will be a serious ontological and epistemological divide between most rational choice and interpretivist theorists. Interpretivists, in my view, can rightly claim that individualist assumptions prevent rational
