David Easton is a Canadian political scientist who was born in Toronto, Ontario, came to the United States in 1943, and is currently Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California. Irvine, he is a former President of the American Political Science Association, a past President of the International Committee on Social Science Documentation, and was for many years active in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
At the forefront of both the behaviour list and post-behaviouralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline’s most widely used definition of politics and is renowned for his application of systems theory to the study of political science. During his career he has served as a consultant to many prominent organizations and authored numerous influential scholarly publications.
Easton has been described as one of the “first generation of behavioural revolutionaries” in the discipline of political science. Like other early behaviouralists, Easton initially sought to gain control over the masses of data being generated by social science research in the early 1950s, which they thought was overwhelming social scientists with quantitative and qualitative data in the absence of an organizing theoretical framework.
Easton argued for development of a proper science of political studies that would produce reliable, universal knowledge about social phenomena, and that the purpose of scientific rules of procedure was to make possible the discovery of a highly generalized theory of politics.
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Easton’s vision was one of a “general theory” of political science that would consist of a deductive system of thought so that a limited number of postulates, as assumptions and axioms, a whole body of empirically valid generalizations might be deduced in descending order of specificity and provide predictive causal explanations of political behaviour.
Easton’s book The Political System drove home the failure of 1950s political science to build anything resembling coherent theories of politics or to develop systematic techniques for gathering and analyzing data, with which such theories might be constructed. The most widely known and used definition of politics was provided by Easton in his identification of the political system with the “authoritative allocation of values for a society.” This provided many political scientists with a useful guideline for delimiting the content of political science.
Some years later, after Easton became President of the American Political Science Association, he led the charge of a new post-behaviouralist revolution, arguing that political science research should be both relevant and action-oriented, so it might better serve the needs of society by solving social and political problems revealed during the 1960s.
This new revolution was not a change in the methods of inquiry but a change in orientation that grew out of a deep discontent with the direction of contemporary political research and which advocated more attention to the public responsibilities of the discipline and to relevant research on contemporary political problems and issues.
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According to John Gunnell, this was the official birth announcement of the public policy enterprise in political science which became the basis of the self-image of orthodox political science in the 1970s. With this shift came a distinct de-emphasis of concern for establishing a general unified theory as the core of the discipline, and a retreat from any pointed confrontation with the history of political theory.
Easton is renowned for his application of systems theory to political science, and for his definition of politics as the “authoritative allocation of value” in A Framework for Political Analysis and A Systems Analysis of Political Life, both published in 1965.
Easton’s principal research interest is in elaborating a systems analytical approach as a central means of understanding how political systems operate. In recent years he has turned to structural constraints as a second major element underlying political systems. He has written about the influence of political structure on various aspects of political life, on the state and development of political science, and on the political socialization of children.
In a reputational study of political scientists published in 1978, Easton ranked fourth among those most prominent during 1945-1960, and second most prominent among those in the period 1960-1970. In a subsequent reputational study based on number of times an author’s publications were cited in publications of others, Easton ranked seventh among the twenty most significant political scientist contributors in the period 1970-79.