behaviouralism

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behaviouralism

behavioural approach

a theoretical and empirical approach within US POLITICAL SCIENCE which emphasizes the importance of sociological and psychological determinants of political actions and behaviour rather than confining attention, as is traditional in political science, to narrowly political processes, e.g. constitutional arrangements, legislative procedures. See POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR; compare BEHAVIOURISM.

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51) Employing behaviouralist methodologies including an elaborate survey of a single Thai village, Herbert Phillips, for instance, assumed a priori that the 'dominant personality traits of the adult members' of this single village not only represented a homogenised composite of personality traits within that village, but deductively revealed a 'characteristically Thai' peasant personality with 'distinctive and expectable psychological characteristics'.

Thailand's last peasant

However, one could identify an earlier phase of interdisciplinary research with Morton Kaplan and Nicholas Katzenbach's monograph Political Foundations of International Law (as suggested by Martti Koskenniemi, "Law, Teleology and International Relations" (2012) 26 International Relations 3) and within the English School tradition that professed interdisciplinary research in the late 1960s and 1970s, against the behaviouralist revolution in US political science and IR.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations

Although the complete behaviouralist may deny the existence of value-judgments and normative understandings, nevertheless he does not escape, in his researches, the influence of his own value-judgments'.

The Possibility or Desirability of a Value Free Political Study, an Insight

A similar criticism was formulated by Henning Meyer who pointed out that the focus on interest politics associated with 'Third Way' big tent strategies was wrong because it was based on a rather simplistic behaviouralist view of the voter as utility maximiser (on this point see also David Marquand and Neal Lawson).

What next for European social democracy? The good society debate and beyond

On the quarrel between traditionalists and behaviouralist, Bull substantially reproduced and developed the historicist argument, stressing that IR is not an exercise in statistics and quantitative methods but rather a deep historical knowledge coupled with thorough conceptualisation of international politics.

Who still cares about the English School, and why?

These are best grouped in and subsumed under three holistic theories, perspectives or schools, namely dependency/underdevelopment or structuralism, the Marxist historicist and class conflict approach, and behaviouralist theories later equated with conflict management.

The security situation in Lesotho

Informed by assumptions in behaviouralist psychology, research on resilience tends to focus on the conditions that enable the development of coping strategies.

Colonial reckoning, national reconciliation?: aboriginal peoples and the culture of redress in Canada

American political science was heavily influenced by the behaviouralist revolution of the 1950s and it has become a dominant feature of the discipline there.

Exploring political science's signature pedagogy

The second view we refer to as the behaviouralist perspective, a framework that focuses on the human costs of work processes in call centres (Taylor and Bain, 1999).