Читать книгу Political Science For Dummies - Marcus A. Stadelmann - Страница 32

Behavioralism is the study of human beings and their behavior. Behavioralism was a direct response to the failures of traditionalism and was an attempt to turn political science and the social sciences overall into real scientific disciplines. For decades, people looked down on the social sciences because they weren’t considered real or hard sciences like biology, chemistry, and physics. The reason was that political scientists didn’t test theories, brought their own values into their research, and couldn’t create universal theories.

A universal theory is a general explanation of behavior and events that has to be able to explain over time (ahistorical) and its explanations have to hold true everywhere. Universal theories are the backbone of the natural sciences and consist of universal laws. A universal law is a relationship that holds true everywhere and also over time. For example, x has to cause y everywhere and over time.