than focusing on conventional liberal democratic institutions, they
were creating the basis for a scientific approach:This is not only a matter of conceptual vocabulary [sic]; it is an intimation
of a major step forward in the nature of political science as science...
towards a probabalistic science of politics.
(Almond and Coleman, 1960)This attempt has been very successful in that thousands of writers
have employed the vocabulary suggested, virtually every modern
country has been described in these terms, and a vocabulary separated
from that of everyday political discourse has been widely adopted by
professional political scientists. Unfortunately there is little evi-
dence that the vocabulary is used any more precisely than its ‘old-
fashioned’ predecessors (Sartori, 1970), or that the assumptions
implicit in the approach are any less arguable than (or, indeed, very
different from) the liberal institutional approach. For instance, there
has been no substantial agreement on what functions are necessary to
maintain a political system (Dowse, 1972) or on the desirability of
understanding politics in terms of the maintenance of the stability of
existing sovereign states. Luard (1990) argues for a global perspective- see Chapter 2.
A good illustration of some of the problems of employing this
newer vocabulary is to consider the concept of ‘political system’. This
is used rather loosely by most of the functionalists to indicate that
politics is not merely limited to traditional constitutional institutions
but that they are influenced by social and economic conditions within
a country. As Nettl (1966) has pointed out, this usage often assumes
that the system is an entity that exists and carries out some defined
role – such as ‘the allocation of value’. Alternatively the idea of sys-
tem may be used more as a conscious analogy with engineering
systems as with Deutsch (1963) who sees the political system as a
steering mechanism for society – a flow of information through
decision-making mechanisms which can be improved.
Systematic sociological thinkers such as Talcott Parsons (1957) see
that ‘functions’ are highly theoretical processes analytically distin-
guished from a messy empirical reality. The problem then becomes to
see what predictions such a theory is making. The ‘emptiness’ of
system theory is perhaps most clearly seen if the writings of David
16 POLITICS