The experimental method is at its best where a given phenomenon can be studied under conditions favourable to the investigation by excluding disturbing agencies.
It is observation under conditions arranged by ourselves. But such scientific experimentation is not possible in Political Science, for it deals with man and his political institutions.
“We cannot do in Politics,” says Lewis, “what the experimenter does in Chemistry. We cannot take a portion of the community in our hand as the King of Brobdigang took Gulliver, view it in different aspects and place it in different positions in order to solve social problems and satisfy our speculative curiosity.”
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Experiments in Physical Sciences can be tried over and over again till the final and required result is obtained. Experiments in Political Science, on the other hand, can never be repeated. No ingenuity of man can reproduce identical conditions. Bryce has aptly said that “conditions can never be exactly reproduced as Heraclitus says that one cannot step twice into the same river.”
Moreover, political institutions in every country are the logic of its own people and their requirements. We cannot transplant them in other lands. For example, we cannot have a replica of British institutions in India.
Even if we have them, their success cannot be guaranteed. Analysing the causes of success of direct legislation in Switzerland, James Bryce said the institution is “racy of the soil”. There are institutions “which, like plants, flourish only on their hillside and under their own sunshine.”
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There is, however, some truth in the oft-quoted saying that man is wiser after experience. We may not experiment in Political Science as we do in a Physical Science, but practical experiments in political institutions are being constantly made, consciously or unconsciously.
Every government makes experiments when it adopts a new policy or enacts a new law. Governmental policy changes and laws are amended or repealed if their public utility is not abundantly proved. All this amounts to experiments for the purpose of testing and improving.
Dyarchy, for example, was experimented within the Provinces of India under the Government of India Act, 1919, but its working soon disclosed the inherent defects in the system and it was discarded in the Provinces under the Government of India Act, 1935.
The Constitution of India is committed to prohibition and some State Governments experimented with it, total or partial. The Government of India appointed Tek Chand Committee to recommend a uniform policy based upon a rational evaluation of such an experiment.
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The Government of India enacted the Gold Control Order, which now stands more or less repealed, because the experiment did not fulfil the desired purpose underlying it. Various States adopted the scheme of separation of executive and judicial functions.
The experiment proved a success and the two wings of government are now separated in almost all the States. Munro describes the British Constitution “as the mother of constitutions and Parliament as the mother of parliaments.” It means that other countries borrowed from Britain parliamentary institutions what she was the first to experiment with.
By experimental method is, thus, implied that it is based on observation and experience. Its ‘laboratory’ consists of sovereign and independent States into which the world is divided. For the political researcher every change in the governmental structure, law or policy, has significance as it is the result of experiment.
When South Korea was invaded in June, 1950, politicians and political commentators urged that the mistake made in 1938 should not be repeated. But while doing so, they were not drawing exact parallels, nor claiming any infallibility in their predictions.
They were simply pointing out the existence of certain facts which seemed to them to warrant the assumption that the pattern of 1938 might be repeated, and warned of the consequences if their analysis was correct. “We deal with tendencies,” says Harold Laski, “we can predict on the basis of experience.
But our predictions are limited by the necessity of recognising that the facts are not within our control. We can influence and attempt and hope; the certainty and precision of the chemist, or even the physiologist, can never be ours.”