Theories, models, paradigms
Faced with a thicket of rival approaches and theories, readers may be
tempted to demand who is right and who is wrong, or despairingly
conclude that they will return to the subject in thirty years’ time
when the ‘experts’ have made up their minds. Alas neither tactic is
likely to succeed, since no omniscient oracle is available to answer the
question and thirty years of waiting will probably increase the
complexity of the choice. What perhaps may help to clarify matters is
to try to separate out a number of activities that are frequently con-
fused in the effort to generate a science of politics. To do so, we need
to consider how scientists normally work.
Popper (1960) has convincingly argued that scientific laws are
useful general predictive propositions, which have been extensively
tested and not disproved. Few of the propositions advanced by
political scientists seem to meet this test. As we have already seen,
many of the propositions advanced by ‘empirical political theorists’
are difficult to apply to the real world of politics, do not make
unequivocal predictions, and certainly have not yet been extensively
tested. Some more limited propositions might be regarded as testable
hypotheses, the production of which constitutes a preliminary to the
creation of usable theories.
It used to be thought that scientists derived their hypotheses for
testing from the observation of as many ‘facts’ as possible (the
‘positivist’ view of science). More recent historians of science have
observed that in fact most innovative hypotheses come from a
combination of acute observation and the application of ‘models’ of
reality often derived from another area of science. Observers need to
have an idea of what they are looking for! A ‘model’ is a simpli-
fication of reality that enables us to suggest relationships between the
things we observe.
In politics numerous different models have been, and still are,
applied. For instance, as we shall discuss at greater length later on,
one of the dominating models in early modern (liberal) thought was
the legal model of a contract applied to relationships between citizens
and rulers or the state. Medieval thinkers tended to prefer an organic
model of the state – e.g. seeing the parts of a state as being like the
parts of the human anatomy. Easton/Deutsch’s application of a
cybernetic (information system) model in the age of the computer
thus becomes unsurprising in the ‘postmodern’ age.18 POLITICS