David Easton

David Easton (June 24, 1917 – July 19, 2014) was a Canadian-born American political scientist who significantly shaped the discipline. He is renowned for his application of systems theory to political science and for providing a widely used definition of politics as the "authoritative allocation of values for a society." Easton was a key figure in both the behavioral and post-behavioral movements within political science, particularly during the 1950s and 1970s. His work established the concept of the "system" as a crucial theoretical tool for analyzing political phenomena. Policy analysts have benefited from his five-stage model of the policy-making process: input, conversion, output, feedback, and environment. Easton held a professorship at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1997 and later became a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He also served as president of the American Political Science Association.