If we cannot pinpoint which factors contribute how much to politics, how con politics be a science? Part of the problem here is the definition of science. The original meaning of science, from the French, is simply “knowledge.” Late, the natural sciences, which rely on measurement and calculation, took over the term. Now most people think of science as precise and factual, supported by experiments and data. Some political scientists have attempted to become like natural scientists; they quantify data and manipulate them statistically to validate hypotheses. The quantifiers make some good contributions, but usually they focus on small questions of detail rather than on large questions of meaning. This is because they generally have to stick to areas that can be quantified: public opinion, election returns, and congressional voting.
But large areas of politics are not quantifiable. How and why do leaders make their decisions? Many decisions are made in secrecy, even in democracies. We do not know exactly how decisions are made in the White House in Washington, the Elysee in Paris, or the Zhongnanhai in Beijing. When members of Congress vote on an issue, can we be certain why they voted that way? Was it constituents’ desires, the good of the nation, or the campaign contributions of interest groups? What did the Supreme Court have in mind when it ruled that laying off schoolteachers based on race is unconstitutional but hiring them based on race is not? Try quantifying that. Much of politics – especially dealing with how and why decisions are made – is just too complex and too secret to be quantified. Bismarck, who unified Germany in the nineteenth century, famously compared laws and sausages: It’s better not to see how they are made.
Does that mean that politics can never be like a natural science? Political science is an empirical discipline that accumulates both quantified and qualitative data. With such data we can find persistent patterns, much like in biology. Gradually, we begin to generalize. When the generalizations become firmer, we call them theories. In a few cases the theories become so firm that we may call them laws. In this way, the study of politics accumulates knowledge, the original meaning of science.