Behaviouralism as an Approach to Contemporary Political Analysis: An Appraisal

Limitations inherent in traditional orientations of analysing political phenomena are reasons behind the search for new paradigms aimed at increasing epistemic knowledge when analysing political issues in the 21st Century. Against the existing institutionalists, pluralists and elitists approaches, contemporary thinkers have adopted the behaviouralists approaches which has capacity to increase the empirical status of knowledge in contemporary political analysis. The traditional method of analysis in philosophy was used to analyse all current literature, arguments and archival materials on the subject of this paper. The paper critically evaluates most of the criticisms levied against the behavioural approach with the view to identifying the edge which the behavioural approach offers contemporary analysts in political science. The paper concludes that despite these criticisms, not all the examples of the approach are flawed. Behaviouralism has brought with it, new concepts, sophisticated tools of analysis and mathematical models which tend to make us all behaviouralists.