David Easton

Bio: David Easton is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Political system. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 45 publications receiving 13401 citations. Previous affiliations of David Easton include University of California, Irvine.

A systems analysis of political life

Abstract: In A Framework for Political Analysis I spelled out in considerable detail the assumptions and commitments that would be required in any attempt to utilize the concept “system” in a rigorous fashion. It would lead to the adoption of what I there described as a systems analysis of political life. Although it would certainly be redundant to retrace the same ground here, it is nonetheless necessary to review the kinds of basic conceptions and orientations imposed by this mode of analysis. In doing so, I shall be able to lay out the pattern of analysis that will inform and guide the present work.

A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support

Abstract: It has been said about the United States that it is now suffering ‘a crisis of regime’. Europe, we have been told, is in little better condition: ‘all over Europe the First World War broke up the structure of society which, before 1914, had provided the necessary basis of confidence between government and governed. There no longer exists, except in a few places such as Switzerland, that general acceptance of the conduct of national affairs that adds to the vigor of government and society alike.’1 These are the kinds of practical political problems to which the concept of political support, as found in systems analysis, has been directed.

A framework for political analysis

Abstract: PrefaceThis book is the second in a projected tetralogy on empirically oriented political theory. The Political System was the first to appear and in it I argued the need to revise drastically our conceptions of the tasks of political theory. The dominance of historical and ethical theory had at that time virtually crushed out any small shoots of empirical theory that had reached the surface prior to World War II. Since the publication of that volume the same argument need no longer be pressed. Empirical theory has grown apace and promises an even more luxuriant growth for the future.At the conclusion of The Political System I had half committed myself to a succeeding work on a substantive theory of political life and the present work is a partial fulfillment of the basic structure of ideas that I then had in mind. But I had thought that this task could be completed in two additional books; since then it has become apparent that at least three will be required.The present and second work takes up where the last left off. It seeks to present what its title proclaims: a framework for the analysis of political systems. It sets out the form within which a substantive theory of political life can be cast. It is a form that can best be described as a systems analysis, but the phrase needs to be accepted with considerable caution. It has many shades of meaning and the one to be attributed to it here should be derived operationally; that is, it should be inferred exclusively from the text and not from the varied meanings given it by others in the whole area of the systems sciences.In this book I have set out to develop a logically integrated set of categories, with strong empirical relevance, that will make possible the analysis of political life as a system of behavior. I begin by identifying and elaborating the assumptions underlying an interpretation of politics as a system of behavior. On these assumptions, I then proceed to build a structure of concepts. But the reader is to be alerted against looking for anything more than the barest indication of how these concepts might be applied in practice. Here I have set up the briefest of scaffoldings. In a third book that will succeed this one in short order, I propose to put these concepts to work. But from the present introduction it will quickly become apparent that what I am seeking is a way of unveiling the basic processes through which a political system, regardless of its generic or specific type, is able to persist as a system of behavior in a world either of stability or of change. I shall be probing what I shall call the life processes of political systems as such, not the processes unique to any given type of system, democratic, dictatorial, bureaucratic, traditional, imperial or otherwise.What will also become apparent in due course is that my attention will focus largely on the processes in systems, not on the structural forms through which these processes are served. Our need to understand structures is vital; but they can be analyzed successfully, it appears to me, only after we have thoroughly and unambiguously laid out the kinds of functions characteristic of political systems. To do otherwise is to put the cart before a nonexistent horse. Hence it is to a fourth and final theoretical work that I shall postpone the task of exploring the kinds of categories that would be necessary to enable us to understand variations in structure.A brief outline of the central concepts of the present volume appeared in "An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems." Two circumstances that followed on the appearance of this article have greatly encouraged me to continue along the line of thought there initially set forth. First, the article itself was soon reprinted in a number of collections of readings in political science and sociology and was reproduced for consumption abroad in Americana (1956-7) and in the Italian edition of The Political System. Second, I was gratified to see the extent to which, in a few brief years, scholars have found the ideas interesting enough to apply in their own empirical as well as theoretical research. In fact, because of this friendly reception at so early a stage in the development of my thinking, what I have to say in this book has lost some of the novelty it might otherwise have had.

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

Abstract: While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions, have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to each. Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all traditions and substantive fields.

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Abstract: Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy

Abstract: The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.

The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life

Abstract: Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order.

Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

Abstract: This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.