Approaches in Pol Sci

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Recommended: Describe the origin of behaviourism

Behavioralism
Behavioralism is one of the modern approaches, it appears in 1930. Like other modern approaches, Behavioralism emerges because a lot of political thinkers who believed that the traditional approaches are no longer sufficient for studying political science. And so, due to the needs of this new perspective, Charles Merriam of University of Chicago came up with the idea of a new approach, which is Behaviouralism.
Behavioralism is an approach that believes that political science needs to be handled and studied scientifically, instead of just focusing on norms and values. The approach also studied “how individual really behave in a group” instead of studying about “how they should behave”.
The hipster thing about behavioralism is that it didn’t follow the old and mainstream way of the traditional approaches, which mainly concern about the study of institutions and state. Instead it concern itself more on studying and examining about the behavior, actions and acts of individuals.
According to Nicolai Petro in his book The Rebirth of the Russian Democracy, Behavioralism utilizes these methods: sampling, interviewing, scoring and scaling and statistical analysis. Behaviouralism also treats and observes humans according with the above methods, as it is trying to make everything scientific.
David Easton, one of the advocates of Behavioralism has indicated some salient features of Behavioralism, which I then try to understand and theorize by myself:
Regularities: This feature means that in political behavior there are -no matter to what extent- similarities, and these similarities can be generalized. This helps researchers to be able to understand people’s political behavior easier and faster.

Verification: The behaviouralists usually did some verification, which is to verify and test things before they can accept it. They even have a saying: “what cannot be

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