Behavioral Revolution and New Institutionalism

In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic and rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior swept the discipline. A focus on studying political behavior, rather than institutions or interpretation of legal texts, characterized early behavioral political science, including work by Robert Dahl, Philip Converse, and in the collaboration between sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and public opinion scholar Bernard Berelson.

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a take off in the use of deductive, game theoretic formal modeling techniques aimed at generating a more analytical corpus of knowledge in the discipline. This period saw a surge of research that borrowed theory and methods from economics to study political institutions, such as the United States Congress, as well as political behavior, such as voting. William H. Riker and his colleagues and students at the University of Rochester were the main proponents of this shift. Criticisms of the use of this rational choice theorizing has been widespread, even among political scientists who adopt quantitative methods.

This trend toward formalization has continued and accelerated, even as the behavioralist revolution has subsided. At the same time, because of the interdependence of all social life, political science also moved towards a closer working relationship with other disciplines, especially sociology, economics, history, anthropology, psychology, public administration, law, and statistics without losing its own identity.

Increasingly, political scientists have used the scientific method to create an intellectual discipline involving quantitative research methods, as well as the generation of formal economics-style models of politics to derive testable hypotheses followed by empirical verification. Over the past generations, the discipline placed an increasing emphasis on relevance and the use of new approaches to increase scientific knowledge in the field and provide explanations for empirical outcomes.

Kenneth R. Mladenka, a political scientist at Texas A& M University, was among the academics who proceeded to bring acceptance of the newer urban studies component of the discipline. In the 1970s and 1980s, he found that urban scholars were not as prominent on the editorial boards of the major political science journals, and that traditional scholars, called empiricists, regard most urban research, dependent on case studies, paradigms, qualitative analysis, and theoretical perspectives, as less reliable than the traditional emphasis of the discipline. The urban scholars such as Mladenka stress " local settings where global, national, and voting behavior outcomes happen at street level and where day-to-day lives are affected."