An Economic Theory of Democracy

An Economic Theory of Democracy is a standout example of the behavioralist school of social science, which was at the peak of its influence when Downs published the book in 1957. Behavioralism is an approach which seeks to quantify social activity, and politics in particular, within the terms of objective scientific principles and facts.

In the 1950s, there were several factors which came together to promote behavioralist thought. The strongest influence was the aftermath of the Second World War and the enormous impact it continued to have on culture, society, and politics, and on socio-political ideas. The extremes of the Nazi regime in Western Europe and Communism in Eastern Europe were viewed by political elites in the US as the result of ideological excess, prompting a search for a rational approach to politics which could undermine the efforts of demagogues to disrupt global order and peace. Behavioralism borrowed from economics and psychology to inform its rational view of politics. By the 1950s, the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others had helped to introduce psychoanalysis into the academic mainstream, and a theory of the mind as a key to human decision-making promised a scientific approach to politics that, proponents felt, could be universally applied to all societies and political regimes.