ABSTRACT
Political scientists have often been inclined to reserve the title of ‘theory’ to normative inquiries, while the analysis of politics ‘as it is’ is viewed as descriptive rather than theoretical. But behavioural theory has gone further: it has begun to embark on general studies of the political process. The difference between a political historian who studies an event and a behavioural theorist who wishes to discover laws of political activity is thus a matter of degree and of conscious recognition of the need to define the basic elements of political life. The concept of power – and the associated concepts of influence, domination, authority, - seems to correspond to our common experience of inequality among individuals. Thus behavioural theory does remain partial: it tends to explain how the system works, rather than the existence of the system itself; it has to be complemented by some form of investigation into structures.
