But that could stack the deck. If you assume that society is the basic of politics and that values and opinions are the important facts, you will gather much material on values and opinions and relatively title on the history, structure, and policies of government. Everything else will appear secondary to citizens’ value and opinions. And, indeed, political science went through a period in which it was essentially sociology, and many political scientists did public-opinion studies. This was part of behavioral tide; survey research was seen as the only way to be “scientific” because it generated quantifiable data.