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To update the view of human nature that undergirds eighteenth-century British/American political economy, this article reviews literature from diverse subfields of psychobiology. Findings on the structure, function, and evolution of the human brain confirm the duality between reason and passion that is at the core of the science of Hobbes. Contemporary findings across fields indicate that people become emotionally attached to objects, including verbal abstractions, through experiences with pleasure and pain. In contrast, human reasoning is essentially scientific. The duality between passionate motivation and humanity's unique capacity for reasoning makes political science important. By applying the scientific method to the subject of politics, people can design institutions that channel quasi-rational behavior toward outcomes that are mutually beneficial, rather than mutually destructive. Defining human nature correctly is the key to political science, and Smith's addition of the passion of sympathy to Hobbes's narrow definition of human motivation is essential.

Consistent application of the assumption that individuals are motivated by self-interest leads to a populist policy prescription today. To increase political freedom under conservative (limited) democracy - and rates of economic growth under competitive capitalism - it is necessary to distribute income (money) directly to workers. Adam Smith's dual definition of self-interest (in terms of self-serving passions, as well as self-serving economic rationality) provides the primary basis for this policy prescription. Empirical support for Smith's dual definition of self-interest is provided by 20th-century findings on the structure and evolution of the human brain

The bad news is that critics of the quantitative movement in policy and political science are right (so far). Widely accepted quantitative models of politics promote cynicism and counter‐productive uses of government power. Mainstream social science provides a perverse basis for policy analysis. The good news is that there is no sound scientific reason for the schism between so called "empirical" and "normative" theories of politics. Traditional theories of politics, which show how government power can be used to serve the public interest, can be quantified and tested as empirical theory. The resulting scientific normative theory provides a constructive foundation for policy analysis.

AbstractThe systems theoretic concept of emergent properties provides a useful empirical and theoretical focus for political science. Significant political events, such as treaties, reforms and wars, involve super‐ and sub‐additive changes in performance—changes that cannot be accounted for by simple aggregations or projections of prior trends. These events are poorly represented by common empirical methods, such as regression and other quasi‐experimental designs; and this mismatch explains some past failures of basic and applied research. Happily, more appropriate quantiative representations, which I usually call capacity expansion (contraction) models, are available and in use.

A selective review of the literature on equal educational opportunity supports an argument for explicit use of normative models in research. The argument has two parts. First, we show that confusion over the Coleman Report (1966) was due to a mismatch between the implied reform objective and the statistical approach. The objective was to reduce black/white differences in educational achievement, but the statistics explained individual differences in achievement. Second, we partly develop and apply a normative dynamic model of the objectives of school integration over time. Normative dynamic models could be used in conjunction with behavioral data to operationalize theoretical concepts such as accountability, symbolic politics and non-decisions.

Policy research on educational equity from 1965 to 1975 challenged the "conventional wisdom" about schools, suggesting that families, not schools, produce education, & that the black-white achievement gap is not explained by school differences. But these counterintuitive conclusions are drawn from studies of individual differences in achievement, & the radical political perspective articulated by that mode of analysis belittles & distorts relationships that moderates find significant. A moderate-style statistical articulation, which focuses primarily on between-race & between-SS differences, produces findings that are largely consistent with the "conventional wisdom" when applied to data from James S. Coleman's 1966 study of schools (Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington DC: US Government Printing Office). Despite measurement problems, schools & other environmental variables statistically explain the bulk of the black-white achievement gap. 3 Tables, 4 Figures, 53 References. HA.