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TopCritiques Of Easton
Easton’s system’s theory suffered from a few serious deficiencies, however.
Critics charged that Easton’s model failed to operationalize and test key variables and was not designed to address questions of interest to social scientists related to the collapse of domestic political systems, structures of domestic authority, such as regimes types, or changes in the nature of policy outputs or societal inputs.
Scholars criticized Easton’s model for remaining at the ‘theoretical level’ and neglecting to apply his key concepts. Easton had failed to follow through on his objective to design a theory capable of empirical verification. “Direct empirical application” and operationalizing Easton’s variables remained as an unfulfilled “vital, separate enterprise” according to H.V. Wiseman (1965). Basically, the model remained untestable and unverifiable.
Easton had maintained that the system was dynamic and would adapt to pressure, and thus would nearly always persist. He clearly asserts that regime change would be insufficient to bring about the end or beginning of a system, and instead should be viewed as an example of the system successfully adapting to stressful disturbances. While Easton stated that termination of the system was neither impossible nor unusual, and suggested that it would entail the system’s “complete breakdown and evaporation” he can find few examples throughout history and none in the last century (Easton, 1965b, pp. 82-83). Easton’s extremely broad definition of the system was responsible for this finding of persistence. As long as individuals participated in some sort of political activity, the political community, and thereby the political system would persist. Even civil wars, revolutions, or military defeats would be unable to destroy a society’s political system, as long as a political community remained. (Easton, 1965b, pp. 82-85).