Prediction and Planning: Some Problems in the Study of Political Behavior

• Published date: 01 September 1961
• Date: 01 September 1961
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/106591296101400362
• Subject Matter: Articles

49
Political Theory
PREDICTION AND PLANNING: SOME PROBLEMS IN THE STUDY
OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
VINCENT OSTROM AND ELINOR SCOTT
University of California, Los Angeles
,
Belief in the efficacy of public planning is one of the implicit, if not explicit,
elements of faith held by many political scientists. However, our faith in public
planning has not been accompanied by a comparable faith in our capacity to
make predictions generally about human behavior.
Prediction and planning are two basic attributes of the learning process.
Learning can occur only when there is constraint in the environment which
allows an organism to form stable expectations or implicit predictions. The
organism can then &dquo;learn&dquo; to modify its behavior accordingly in order to take
account of the events in its environment.
An organism’s ability to survive depends upon the degree of variety it can
induce in its behavior to overcome the variety in the environment which may
adversely affect its essential values. Man is confronted with the necessity of
learning a wide range of behavior since his environment includes other men who
have a comparable capacity to learn and to change their behavior.
The immense variety in human behavior which is possible, especially in
modern society, greatly exceeds the range of behavior which can be tolerated in
any interdependent community or society. The possible variety in human be-
havior is so great that stable patterns of social organization can be maintained
only by prescribing rules for constituting a system of predictable social relation-
ships. The development and maintenance of such a system of social order is the
basic function of a political system. A political system seeks to control events in
order to realize some preferred state of community affairs.
This emphasis upon the ends sought leads to a significant contrast between
the language of planning and the language of prediction. Instead of formulating
propositions based upon statements of...