Behaviorism relates to a school of politics that developed in the 50s and 60s in the USA. This school represented a revolt against institutional practices in the study of politics and called for political analysis to be modeled upon the natural sciences. That is to say that only information that could be quantified and tested empirically could be regarded as 'true' and that other normative concepts such as 'liberty' and 'justice' should be rejected as they are not falsifiable.

Behaviourism has been criticised within politics as it threatens to reduce the discipline of political analysis to little more than the study of voting and the behaviour of legislatures. A virtual obsession with the observation of data, although providing interesting findings in these fields deprives the field of politics of other important viewpoints.

Methodological criticisms have also been leveled at David Easton's "massive" in the sense that the claim of behaviouralists to be Value Free in their analysis is impossible because every theory is tainted with an ideological premise that led to its formation in the first place and subsequently the observable facts are studied for a reason. An example of this 'value bias' would be that through this discipline the term 'democracy' has become the competition between elites for election 'a la' the western conception rather than an essentially contested term concerning literally rule by the people (the demos). In this manner behaviourism is inherently biased and reduces the scope of political analysis. Nevertheless it has still managed to introduce a new scientific rigour into political analysis and bequeathed a wealth of new information.