Kavanagh. Why Political Science Needs History

7/28/2019 Kavanagh. Why Political Science Needs History

1/18

Studies (1991), XXXIX, 479-495

Why Political Science Needs HistoryDENNIS KAVANAGH*

University of Nottingham

This paper examines the changing relationship between the study of history and thestudy of political science. It reviews the tensions which produced a divorce between thetwo subjects, particularly in the United States when behavioural political science wasdominant. It then examines five areas in which history has enriched the study ofpolitics: as a source of material; as a demonstration of the links between the presentand the past; as a body of knowledge to test theories; as a means of analysing politicalconcepts and as a source of lessons. It concludes that the links between the two subjectstoday are strong, but that the contribution of history is more as a body of knowledgethan as a set of distinctive methods.

tical science, it is often observed, is a borrowing discipline. Outsiders may

ally results in the proliferation of sub-fields and approaches. Developmentto differentiation, but the sheer variety of approaches - historical,

ical, economic, sociological, legal and institutional, to name but some-More seriously, approaches rooted in other disciplines have often resulted in

have argued that study of the present or of the recent past is an inherently


2/18

480 Why Political Science Needs Historyargue s that the academ ic study of politics should be historical because we neebe awa re of the detail of the concrete and to u nd ersta nd political activity tradition?Th e view ado pte d here is that the study of politics is app rop riately regarde dso much as a discipline with a distinctive method but more as a field of swhich is amenable to various approaches. In the real world political acticon nec ts with histo ry, law, cu ltur e, society and so on . It is necessary to tak e tphenomena into account in any explanation of politics and to use oapproaches, where they can be helpful. To argue for the usefulness ofhistorical approach does not involve a claim that it is the only or the approach. This paper suggests that the contribution of history, as the systemstudy of the past, to political science has been more as a body of knowledge tas a set of methods. The concepts and models of sociology and economicsmore evident in contemporary political science methods. In consideringadvantages of the study of history to political science the paper first exploresfactors that led to tensions between the two. It then reviews some of the waywhich historical approaches have been constructively employed. Finallyconsiders some areas which illustrate the fruitfulness of the relationship betwhistory and political science.

Political Science Versus HistoryMore than most other fields - history certainly - politics has been preoccuwith its status as a science. As a field of academic study in the late ninetecentury, politics was closely related to history; historians often doubleauthorities on politics and political institutions were often studied as evolover time. This fashion was challenged in the US in the interwar years. beh aviou ralists, inspired by Charles M erriam at the University of Chicago i1920s, sought to emulate the developments in other social sciences, particulpsychology. History was dropped, emphatically as a source of methods partly as a body of knowledge. Being 'scientific' entailed the search for mobservable and measurable data, hypothesis testing, model building eventually, predictability. There was, understandably, an emphasis contemporary political behaviour. The early behaviouralists also hoped thatnew political science would serve as a tool for encouraging practical probsolving, civic edu catio n, and social and institutional reform. H istory app earehave little to offer to the early behaviouraUsts. Another reason for encouradivo rce w as tha t political science was striving to establish its statu s as a discipin its own right. O ne can leave aside the naive view of science which lay behindoriginal beh aviour al thrust but ackno wledg e th at the reformers were also firean understandable impatience with the chronological, descriptive and fo


3/18

DENNIS KAVANAGH 481

eld had becom e as distant as astrophysics'.* M ore recently, Nevil J oh nso n,resenting a typical strand of the British app roa ch , has m our ned the se paration

is pro ba bly less true of the w ork of Am erican s tha n a t any time inIn adopting so-called scientific approaches (largely defined in terms of thein the US) Britain and W estern E uro pe lagged behind the US , Asuniversity subject in Britain , politics was until the m id-tw entieth ce ntury tau gh t

The reaction to behaviourahsm (post-behaviouralism) in the 1970s included

cal accep tance of pluralist de m ocr atic va lues. Th e decline of scientism and

Types of Historyorians wou ld claim th at their task is to advan ce u nder standin g of past events

ding to J. H. He xter, describe, na rra te and deal 'not with why-qu estions at

orian was guided a t all times by his sources then the tru th w ould em erge from

' R. Jenson, 'History and the political scientist", in S. Lipset (ed.). Politics and the Social(Oxford, Oxford Un iversity Press, 1969), p. 1.


4/18

482 Why Political Science Needs Historyhistory has gone beyond Ranke. The French Armales School reacted agawhat it regarded as an excessive interest in I'histoire evenem entielle', particulpolitical and constitutional history. In studying 'total history' and turningsocial and economic factors, it embraced social science methods, stressedinfluence of such du rab le forces as climate and ge ogra phy . It studied 'forgotsubjects l ike m arriage, childhood or de ath. The 'm ac ro ' philosophies of histwith their universal theories of progress and decline, are perhaps the neares'scientific' history. Such historian s perceived ph eno m en a being interconnectea seamless web and history as unfolding in a particula r direction . It was claithat in the past certain principles of universal validity could be detected wenabled one to ma ke predictions abou t the future. P opp er's at tack o n historicdiscredited such philosophies of history:

An approach to the social sciences which assumes that historicalprediction isachieved by discovering 'the rhy thms', or 'the patterns ', or 'the laws', or 'thetrends' that underline the revolution of history.'"Despite different conceptions of history, for present purposes we understan historical a pp ro ach to politics to be studies which systematically describeanalyse phenomena that have occurred in the past and which expco ntem po rar y political phe nom ena with reference to pas t events. Th e em phason explanation and understanding, not on formulating laws. By contpolitical science uses generic concepts to study patterns of relations, whichassumed to recur over time and across place, between, for example, institutigroups, individuals, events and states. The distinction is not a sharp one. Shistoria ns increasingly use generic conc epts (such as feudalism, totalitarianliberahsm and fascism) and the work of, for example, Michael Mann," PAnderson" or Ferdinand Braudel ," formulates proposi t ions about the pMuch political science is concerned more with description and analysis tdev eloping 'law s'. But as a general state m ent the claim here is tha t there is a bpreoccupation with the particular in history and with the general in polit

science.

Uses of History to Political ScienceIn the real wo rld of scholarsh ip, the distinction between the work of professihistorians and political scientists often breaks down. Apart from sjjecialisthistory and in political science, there are political scientists who write histordraw on the work of historians (for example, W. D. Burnham, Kenneth WSammy Finer and S. M. Lipset) as well as historians who do political sci(such as Ch arles Tilly and Lee Benson). Th e sheer am ou nt of wo rk w hich use


5/18

DEN NIS KAVANAGH 483

History as Source of Materiall of the ma terial used by political scientists is derived from the pas t, distant o r

effects of the Fre nch Re vo lution , of the 1832 Reform A ct, of the 1914 -war and so on, but we also rely on them to give m eanin g to the pas t. In so far ase have collective m em ories of the past, they are largely shaped by historian s an d

work, I have in mind as examp les Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism,'* Linz andThe Breakdown of Democratic Regimes,'^ Huntington 's Politicaler in Changing Societies,''' Lipset's The First New Nation,'^ or the works ofgnificant gain s from com binin g th e app roa ch es of poUtical science and history ,t the use of history does raise both m ethodological and substantive pro blem s.

concerns the status of con tem por ary history, the other con cem s the attem ptIn Britain, simply because of the 30-year mle limiting access to govemmentents, one tends to think of con tem po rary history as covering events whiche mak es do w ith biogra phies and m em oirs of key participa nts, media coverage,oral history. H istor ians c an be dismissive of such sources , as they can be ab ou twspap)er ac co un ts of politics. A m ore serious p oint is tha t the passa ge of time,rom releasing mo re official d oc um en tatio n, also allows a perspective on the

ok very different from how they look ed in 1989. The retum of 30 La bour M Ps in06 looked m or e significant after 1918 tha n it did before.There may be different 'rational' approaches to contemporary history. Inm applies to history post-1914. In F ran ce, whereas the term wasr long applied to all history since the outb rea k of the Fren ch Re vo lution , there


6/18

484 fVhy Political Science Needs Historyeither history or political science. There is no 30-year rule to contend withthey have w ritten m any rigoro us studies of post-1945 events and PresidenciIn Britain more historians object to contemporary history, but the objectionnot confirmed to historians, Johnson has complained about ' the fallacm isplaced h istory ', in which the present 'pa ssing sh ow ' of actors a nd activitdescribed and analysed by political scientists without a full understanding ooutcome. We may, for example, study the premierships of Gladstone or LGeorge but not that of Mrs Thatcher. We may study the decline of the LibParty between 1914 and 1931 but not that of the Labour Party in the 1980s,events and practices concerning, say, Lloyd George, have been completedsettled, but this is no t so for M rs Tha tch er. W e should no t study a topic 'wh enactor is still at w ork , no r even when the events or circu m stanc es in which he oplayed a part lie in the recent past, and therefore, project themselves intopresent',^'One can agree with such reservations only up to a point. The passage of may cultivate a more detached outlook and an awareness of how events evove r the lon g term , but there is no final verdict. All history is a pro du ct of itstime. This is usefully illustrated in the keen deba te am on g histo rians (m ainlynot exclusively, German) about the collapse of the Weimar Republic," Epost-1945 histories of Weimar were dominated by the rise of Nazism andrevulsion against the Third Reich. A number of historians traced the continof authoritarianism back to Bismarck, Frederick the Great and Martin LuHowever, the fact that democratic government has now survived in the FedRe public for over 40 years (lasting three times longer th an the Third Reichgradually altered historical perspectives. This has been reflected in the mrecent literatu re which trea ts the fate of W eim ar as representative of the probof a welfare state in economic depression. Needless to say, this perspectiveitself been influenced by the crisis of welfarism in the 1970s and i980s.-'If historians and political scientists vacate the field then, outside acadpolitical actors and co m m en tato rs are ready to grind their axes. M uch of theof Th atche rism an d of Bennery in the L ab ou r P arty , rested on a selective viepost-1951 British history. Increasingly, a flood of self-serving memoirs bwitness to the attem pts by particip ants to man age political history. Ab ove await for some natio nal 'final w ord ' of the historians w ould m ean that, in theof post-war Britain, one would be ignoring such significant events as Britrelations with the European Community, the changing fortunes of the LaParty, the country's loss of great power status and relative economic declinIt is also wo rth a ddin g a cautio nar y note ab ou t pub lic and o ther ofiScial papNot all significant activities are recorded or filed, the telephone has almcertainly reduced the im po rtan ce of letter-writing and som e sensitive documare held back, A Public Record Office archivist notes that British governm


7/18

DEN NIS KAVANAGH 485inds its way to the P R O , " Fo r exam ple, the Suez archives in Janu ary 1987

The future historian will have an enormous amount of material to work with,it no t in the form of oflicial d oc um en ts. Ora l histo ry, or interviews with

entaries with key figures in recent history. The Ins titute of C on tem po raryitish History has man aged to persuad e key partic ipan ts in major events to talkal ma terials for studies of th e recru itment, p)ersonalities, as well as their styles of w ork . They m ay also c onta in

ding, issue preferences of key political ac tors as well as their m otiva tions andte papers of particip ants a nd observers), such as the downfall of Asq uith inor Lloyd George in 1922, are good examples ofthe interaction of history

The diaries - private and published - of key political figures merit somement, not least becau se in recent years there has been a tendency for them tofferent pu rpo ses - as an aid to writers of m em oirs (such as H aro ld M acm illan),

English Constitution, disclosing

owing the m ood a nd atm osp here o fth e 'high politics' ofth e day. These diaries


8/18

486 Why Political Science Needs Historyhas served in a ministry or sat in a Cabinet will testify to the authenticity ofDiaries. As page succeeds page, one recalls: "This is exactly how it was". *A further problem concerns the point at which what happened in the pasconsidered to have marked a decisive change. Some history may be neglecbecause it is too far away in time or circumstances have changed too muIdentifying the point is a m atter of dispute and will vary from case to case. Fone perspective Germany shows great continuity in the twentieth century, from another 1945 is a turning point. One might regard either the eseventeenth century or 1912 as the key turning points for understanding presday Northern Ireland.

History as an Aid to UnderstandingA knowledge of history provides opportunities for deepening our understandof contem porary politics by acquiring a greater awareness of the context in windividual and group political behaviour occurs; helping us to perceive immediate and medium-term consequences of actions and events; and provida salutory warning against gross generalizations, as well as assisting in formulation of more qualified generalizations. Many country-centred politstudies, for example, when covering the political culture, party systconstitution and ideology, are often strongly historical. Studies of institutionsperhaps best regarded as the study of patterns of behaviour built up over timeattempting to describe and analyse one looks for regularities in, for examppolitical practices or roles which are created over time.A particularly useful application of the comparative historical approachLipset and Rokkan's Party Systems and Voting Alignments.^^ The sdemonstrates how voters until recently have been faced with 'packages' -parties, programmes and social groupings attached to political parties - whhave been produced by such major events as the Reformation, the FrenRevolution and the Industrial Revolution. These, in turn, generated conflbetween religions and between church and state, between rural and urinterests, between territorial and cultural groups, and in this framework polienters via the historical reconstruction. What has been lacking so far, howevestudy of how and why some cleavages have been translated into party systeand others have not. In other words, the translation of cleavages is not automait requires the choices of elites to achieve this.^'Studies of right-wing extremism in the US show how persistent phenomenon has been." The Moral Majority of the 1980s and 1990s followsthe footsteps of earlier P rotestant crusades against slavery, alcohol and Cathoimmigration; such movements have found more support among centre-bri


9/18

DE NN IS KAVANAGH 487parties - Federalists, Whigs and Republicans - than the left. In contemporaryFrance , attitudes to cen tral-loc al go vem m ent relations often fall into a G irond inor Jacobin m ou ld. The curren ts on the French political right can be traced backto the three 'right s' that emerged between 1778 and 1815 - Bo nap artist, c ounter-revolutionary and parliamentary. '"In comparative history much is also to be learnt, for example, about thedifferent stren gths of socialism cro ss-na tion ally ," why there is no socialism in theU S " or the role of a fragment of European culture in the US and other news tates ." Fo r L ipset, experiences pred ating 1914 determined wh ether or no tworkers formed class-based parties and, where they did, whether they wererevolutionary or reformist. For Hartz, the emigration of groups fromseventeenth-century England to North America became immobile, once thefragment or part of the culture was removed from the 'whole' in the originalcountry and nourished the American liberal tradition. The work of Rokkan hasemphasized the historical features th at hav e shaped th e electoral systems in forcetoday in West European states. With the expansion of the suffrage in the latenineteenth an d early twen tieth centurie s, elites m ade crucial choices ab ou t how totranslate popular votes into seats in the legislature. Systems of proportionalrepresentation w ere first ado pted to protec t m inorities and subsequently to limitthe power of working-class parties.'^One might put this more strongly and say that explanations for manysignificant present-day political features are located so far back in time that wedepend on historians for much of our materials. In the so-called consociationaldemocracies of Switzerland, the N ethe rland s, Belgium and A ustria, traditions ofpluralism and political accommodation are deeply rooted in the past. All fourstates lay within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire and escaped thecentralization that was occurring in other states between the twelfth andsixteenth centuries. In so far as conciliar practices prevented deep subculturalcleavages from causing the brea kdo w n of the the system, an explana tion of whyand how the practices emerged is crucial. If one tries to explain why politicalparties of the right in N or th em Eu rop e have so often fragmented into religious,agrarian and conservative groups, and why in central and southern Europe theyhave been closely linked to the Catholic Church, or why the divisions in Ulstertoday are so intense, then one has to go back to the R eform ation and the fault-lines left within and between European states.

The literature on pohtical developm ent, as state and nation building, has beenenriched by what might be called the return of history. Study of the politicaldevelopment of non-westem societies (and area studies) was largely inspired bythe creation of new states in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the early work wascross-sectional, with data collected at one point in time,' ' largely attitudinal and" R. Rem ond, La droite en France (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1969)." See, for exam ple, G. M ark s, Unions and Politics: Britain, Germany and the United States in the


10/18

488 Why Political Science Needs Historysubject to sophisticated statistical analyses. The criteria of modernity and otkey concepts were largely borrowed from sociology and anthropology. TAmerican Social Science Research Committee on Comparative Policonsidered that political development could be studied in terms offivecriseintegration, legitimacy, penetration, participation and distribution. The ealiterature contained interesting arguments about the effects of sequencespopular participation and the rights of organized political opposition achieving stable democracy," about levels of socioeconomic developmeabout political culture,'* and about the relationship between increased politiparticipation and effective political institutions."In no other area, however, was the neglect of history so potentiaunfortunate. It soon became clear that theories of political development hadbe checked against past experience. Change had to be studied over a lonperiod of time and the experience of the great European states had to be brouin. By the end of the 1960s the Com mittee on Comparative Politics, in its worpolitical development, shifted to the study of European states and to history athe work of historians. The volume edited by Charles Tilly contains studiesclassic state-building activities like tax collection, police, food supply, finaarmed forces and administration in Europe and the US.*" The most significfactor to emerge was that key state-building developments in European staoccurred against a background of virtually continuous warfare. The ediremarked: 'We consider the historical experience to be more important thcontemporary observation in the formulation or verification of some kindsgeneralisations about large-scale political changes'.*'

The volume Crises of Political Development in Europe and the Unitedfound that the Committee's earlier statements about crises and their sequencas well as other universal models of development, dissolved when confronwith the particular histories of particular states.*- Also notable was the confesunease of many of the country specialist historians in relating the 'exceptionhistories of their countries to the concepts and framework developed by socscientists. Thefivecrises were no longer key concepts but were employed mora vocabulary and framework for the comparative analysis of European polithistory. In some states, such as Britain and the U S, legitimacy and participatwere handled relatively early; in others, such as Germany and Russpenetration by the bureaucracy was handled early. But there was a geneawareness that choices made in the past shaf)ed subsequent paths development; decisions at one particular time excluded some options afacilitated others.development", American Sociological Review, 28:2 (1965), 253-64 .

" R. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 1971) and B. Moore, SoOrigins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, Beacon, 1966).


11/18

DE NN IS KAVANAGH 489Study of the historical development of states is separate from the renewed

f-serving cha rac ter of m any s tate bu rea uc rat s and public employees, as well aslic choice app roa che s and corp oratist theories.^'

Generating and Testing Frameworksany dynamic analyses of political systems and frames of reference are derived

ed the past to arrive at a view ofthe future. M ore m odestly, one thinks oftics, derived from the seventeenth and ninetee nth ce nturies respectively, or ofeer's mod els of Wh ig, Tory and collectivist politics to describe the evolution ofritish politics in the past two c en tur ies." A no ther example is W . H . Gre enlea f sThe British Po litical Tradition.*^ He sees not so much a polarization as astence between collectivist and individualist va lues and how over time there

S a shift in emphasis between the two sets of values. Thatcherism and the NewRight, on th is readin g, is only the latest stage in a co ntinu al interp lay between two

Political scientists are m ore likely than histo rian s to ransack the past - ofteneated as case studies - to derive and test prop osition s. Thus Barrington M oo re's

British case the early com m ercialization of th e rura l sector was crucial, as was theole of the middle class in creating the path to industrialization andepresentative democracy: no bourgeoisie, no democracy. In Germany andere more dominant. In Russia and China modernization was achieved by aviolent revolution.** Lipset's study of whether the eariy stages of working-classpolitics in several countries take a radical or reformist character suggests twopropositions. The first is that the more rigid the status demarcation lines in asociety, the more likely the emergence of a radical working-class party. The

second concerns the way in which the economic and political elites respond to


12/18

490 Why Political Science Needs Historydemands of workers for economic and political rights. Where the working cladenied full political and economic citizenship, strong revolutionary movemusually developed; the more accommodating elites were to such demands, theradical the working-class political parties. S. E. Finer's study of miliintervention in politics also samples a large number of cases. Noting that m iliintervention in its modem form is two centuries old, he claims that it wasFrench Revolution and empire which nourished factors which in turn produthe conditions conducive to military intervention."'An interesting question to consider is how political scientists might actusample history. What are the criteria for selecting cases? The holding constanvariables to test hypotheses is central to Max Weber's view of the histormethod. One approach to comparative study is to follow John Stuart Mmethod of difference (comparing instances in which a phenomenon occursthose in which it does not) and isolate a few dissimilarities. By holding svariables constant, one is better able to isolate the differences. Such an approis seen in Lipset's comparative studies of Anglo-American societies. Anoexample is Louis Hartz's Founding of New Societies, which studies the impfragments of European societies which emigrated to the new states of AustrCanada, South Africa and the US."* Alternatively, one can try and maximisevariance, particularly on the dependent variable, so that one is able to considbroad range of causes. This is the approach adopted by Barrington Moore instudy of alternative paths to industrial modernization."'

In reading such studies, one is struck by how reliant political scientists arthe accounts provided by historians.'" Consider four topics on which historhave cast a good deal of light and which also are of great interest to poliscientists: why the U S adopted a New Deal in the 1930s; why the French FoRepublic collapsed; why the Liberal Party declined so abruptly after 1918;why the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in 1917. For political scientists tfour cases are significant for theories about, respectively, public policy androle of government, the breakdown of regimes, the decline of political parand revolution. Yet in understanding these cases we are dependent on histofor their description and analysis of the interplay and relative impact of decisions and manoeuvres, domestic social and economic factors, internatitrends and political issues. To claim that history is too important to be left tohistorians means that we should not compete with historians in describingpast but should recognize tha t h istorians provide us with so much of the matfrom which we select for our own analytical purpose.

The traffic is not all one way. H istorians in the future will have to take accof studies of the post-1945 period collected by social scientists. There now exsubstantial body of survey data on British general elections since 1964 andelections over a longer period ," even though this was employed to explain shterm changes in voting behaviour. What would historians of nineteenth-cen


13/18

DEN NIS KAVANAGH 491

earchers emp loy panel surveys to examine changes in attitudes a nd beha viourr relatively sh ort pe riod s. Butler and Stokes com pa red the voting choices of aon three occasion s - 1963, 1964 and 1966. Co nve ntion al w isdom held th at

Republican p arties h as also been explained in terms of chang es in generations orhe physical replacement of the electorate. Anderson's The Creation of aocratic M ajority sees the party 's hegemony durin g the New Deal period as a

History and the U nderstanding of Political Conceptsand study is largely by the analysis of texts. According to John Plamentez

ne reads the texts 'over and over again; without bothering to relate them to thedentified with Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School, encourages theolitical theorist to seek to understand the author's intentions. In turn such auest dem and s the historian 's knowledge o fth e political and intellectual contextt the time of writing - what people were prepared to believe and what authorsean t. Sk inne r's app ro ac h is to focus 'on the m ore general social and intellectualmatrix out of which their work arose', for 'political life itself sets the mainroblems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appearproblematic and a corresponding range of questions to become the leadingsubjects of debate' . '* To understand the author's meaning and intentionsrequires a study of the vocabulary and assumptions operative at the time ofwriting. For Skinner such an approach is a way of exploring the interactionsbetween pohtica! thought and political behaviour, producing 'a history ofpolitical theory with a genuinely historical character'."The historical appr oa ch has also been applied to the study of how key concep tslike represe ntation, s tate, dem ocracy and so on change over t ime. By studying the

-' D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London, Macmillan, 1969).' N. Nie, S. Verba and J. Petrocick, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, MA, Harvard


14/18

492 Why Political Science Needs Historyconceptual history of ideas in current usage we may gain a richer understanof their meaning. Some concepts may have a dominant contemporary meabut still retain elements of earlier usages which colour their use in deIdeology, for example, today is generally thought of as a belief-system. It also, however, refer to 'false consciousness' or distorted belief, as well interest-driven beliefs, '* both past usages of the term. Concepts usually chgra du ally. A t a tim e of"political crisis, how ever, th e cha nge can be speeded uhappened during the French Revolution, the English civil war and the AmerRevolution. Ball and Pocock have recently illustrated how such key termsovereignty, republic, representation, liberty, constitution and federalism virtually re-coined in the US during debates over the ratification ofconsti tution. 'Poli t ical innovation and cenceptual change went hand in ha

History as a Source of LessonsDecision-makers learn from their own experiences {personal history) and w hat is hap pen ing in their ow n and oth er coun tries. Lesson-draw ing may benatio nal and cross-national.** But there is also no do ub t th at decision-maand commentators draw ' lessons' , for better or worse from their understanof the past. In France, the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques was founde1872, with the objective of educating the servants of the state to make bpolicies, in part by learning lessons from the study of past decisions. The approach is found in some of the courses provided by the Keenedy SchooGovernment at Harvard. American cases of ' learning' are discussed in EMay ' s Lessons of the Past''' and Nuestadt and May's Thinking in Time."

Sometimes, the analogies may be misleading, perhaps because the eaexperience is not fully explained and analysed. One thinks of Eden, in 1regard ing N ass er's seizure of the Suez Ca nal as a replay of Hitler's aggressioof the reasoning behind French and British appeasement of Hitler in the 1which viewed his policies as a reaction to the 'unjust' peace treaty imposeGermany at Versail les. The 'appeasement ' case is perhaps one of the overworked, as any group engaged in what it regards as self-defence of its rpoints to the disastrous consequences of 'appeasement ' of the oppoPromoters of particular ' lessons' of history may have their own agendpro m ote: both K rushchev and G orbac hev regarded the exposure of the crimStalin as crucial for mobilizing support for their programmes of politicaleconomic reform.

It is useful in this contex t to exam ine what is bro adly called po litical eco nin western states. Different economic policy responses across states in the At this point I have drawn on David Miller, 'The resurgence of political theory'. P


15/18

DE NN IS KAVANAGH 493

be a crucial factor explaining the resort to co rpo ratist forms of decision-

on-makers in, say, G erm an y (the fear of inflation), Jap an (the em phasis onnsual decision-m aking) o r Sweden (the 'social co ntr act ' app roa ch to policy-

Perhaps nowhere has the lack of historical perspective been more regrettableate, statistical m eth od s. The size o fthe coefificients between selected po licy

to the study of policy o utcom es had obv ious attractio ns; they readilyge nu m be r of cases over time and spac e. Du ring the 1970s there was a veritable

nt of studies o fth e policy o utp uts of Am erican states and in the 1980s therere m ore cross-n ational studies of the political and environ m ental co rrelates of

It is understandable that such a welter of contradictory findings from sotnany studies invites a reaction close to despair. The body of hterature pointsto no clear-cut conclusions. Sotne studies show that some factors have aninfluence on some policy outcomes, while other studies show the reverse.Although follow-up studies provide some elaboration and specification ofearlier find ings, what emerges is a set of almost idiosyncratic find ings,confined to particular periods, places, policy output, political and/orenvironmental variable(s) and even research approaches and statisticaltneasures . . . This is rather chastening, given the large number of studies, theelaborate collections of data , and the statistical ingenuity employed.**

Overall, the studies betrayed the worst excesses of behaviouralism and thehistory. Clearly, the findings ofthe aggregate statisticaludies are but the beg inning, a map pin g, rather than the end of an explanation ofdeterm ines po licies. W ha t is called for are m ore detailed h istorical studies of


16/18

494 Why Political Science Needs Historythe development of particular policies in a country or a sample of countries.gain an understanding of precise linkages (why and how) in the process testing the general relationships suggested in the aggregate statistical a ppr oac hthe particularity of the historical approach is more promising. Among the eaw ork s recognizing th at the study of ch ang e over time is a useful w ay of gettincausation and relationships are Hugh Helco's comparative study of development of income maintenance programmes in Sweden and Britain othe past century," work on the emergence of welfare states in Britain, FranGermany, Sweden and the US,** and research on the imp act of Keyne s's ideapolicy in different countries."The historical method may be particularly important in explaining pocontinuities over time as consequences of decision-makers' preference incrementalism and for policy-making routines which are deeply embeddedthe political proc ess. If policy is a form of learning , the mo st im po rta nt influeis likely to be past policy and its consequences. Indeed, so much public policterms of laws, budgets and programmes, is actually inherited rather than choby gov ernm ents. The 'o ve rloa d' of gove rnm ent s pend ing in the 1970s had lesdo with new programmes than the growth in costs of inherited programmes.Claim s for the role of history as a practical guide can be pushed too far. Thmay be a problem with the historical data. According to Meehan:

The accounts may be inaccurate or inadequate; historians do not alwaysrecord the kind of information that social scientists require, nor is thisinformation put in a form in which it is readily accessible and useful."One has only to think of the many 'verdicts' of history which succesgenerations of revisionists have made. J. R. Strayer's careful judgement is the historia n's kno wledge is useful 'no t for m akin g predictions b ut because aunderstanding of human behaviour in the past makes it possible to find famielements in present problems and thus makes it possible to solve them mintelligently'.^^ History is not therefore a recipe book of obvious lessonscourses of action. In so far as it educates the policy-maker or student tounderstanding of the successes and failures of how actors behaved in broasimilar situations in the past, then it may help to develop better policy.

ConclusionThe range of studies reviewed shows that the break with history as an approand a body of knowledge h as been incom plete and v aries across political sciesub-fields. It has been particularly severe in much study of the 'input' activwhich have attracted the interest of behaviouralists: research into vot


17/18

DE NN IS KAVANAGH 495

ics, show s how time specific an d variable m any of the findings haveIn recent years there has been a greater awareness of the relevance of history

er could be written on why history n eeds social scienc e," In the casem od em British history, Rob ert Skidelsky, David M arq ua nd and Paul

A review of the output of contemporary political science shows that the linksm etho d. M uch of the work reviewed above is historical in so far

erstand the past in its own right. The historical app ro ac h is often presented as

possible area s for study. W ha t it seems to provide abo ve all is a


18/18

Kavanagh. Why Political Science Needs History

Documents

Transcript of Kavanagh. Why Political Science Needs History