Provide a comparative analysis of behavioural and institutional approach to the study of Political theory

Behavioural approach

The behavioural revolution, associated with David Easton, Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, and Sidney Verba, wanted political studies to be empirical, theory-oriented, and, where possible, quantitative. The unit is observable behaviour: voting, attitude, socialisation, demand and support in Easton’s political system. Easton defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values. Almond and Verba’s civic culture linked stable democracy to attitudes, not only to constitutions.

The philosophical mood was suspicion of armchair state-theory. Concepts should be operationalised. Charles Merriam and the Chicago school had prepared this turn. Behaviouralism promised cumulation and comparison across countries. Its critics, including Christian Bay and later post-behaviouralists whom Easton himself partly joined after 1969, said it evacuated justice, power, and the state, and that it smuggled a conservative status quo into “value-free” science.

Institutional approach

Classical institutionalism described constitutions, parliaments, federal bargains, and legal powers — the world of Dicey, Bagehot, and comparative government textbooks. It could be formal and legalistic. New institutionalism, from the 1980s, answered behaviouralism without returning to mere legal description. James March and Johan Olsen argued that institutions are collections of rules and routines that define appropriate action. Douglass North treated institutions as the rules of the economic game. Historical institutionalists study path dependence and critical junctures. Rational-choice institutionalists study how rules structure strategic interaction.

• Here the unit is the durable constraint: an electoral system, a Supreme Court, a Planning Commission, a party law. Individuals still act, but not on a blank field. Theda Skocpol’s “bringing the state back in” belongs to this recovery.

Comparison

Behaviouralism is actor-centred, often survey-centred, and strong on micro-foundations of consent and cleavage. It is weaker on why two countries with similar attitudes produce different rights, and on how a written constitution channels conflict. Institutionalism is structure-centred, strong on path dependence, courts, and federal design, and weaker if it forgets that rules are staffed by socialised human beings.

For political theory the stakes are clear. A purely behavioural science can lose the normative meaning of authority. A purely formal institutionalism can miss the living culture that makes a parliament work or fail. Easton’s later post-behavioural plea for relevance, and the new institutionalist turn, are both admissions that the study of political theory needs behaviour inside institutions. Indian politics illustrates the pair: voting surveys explain coalitions; Articles 370 and 356, the Finance Commission, and the Election Commission explain why some games are even playable.