Policy analysts have utilized his five-fold scheme for studying the policy-making process: input, conversion, output, feedback and environment.

The idea appeared in sociology and other social sciences but it was Easton who specified how it could be best applied to behavioral research on politics.

He was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine in 1997.

Inter alia this involved a compulsory course for new graduate students, which dealt with 19th and 20th century foundations of modern political science.

Easton was a member of the executive committee of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (1962–64); chairman of the Committee on Information and Behavioral Sciences Division, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (1968–70); and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (1957–58).

[4] Like other early behavioralists, Easton initially sought to gain control over the masses of data being generated by social science research in the early 1950s, which they thought was overwhelming social scientists with quantitative and qualitative data in the absence of an organizing theoretical framework.

[5] Easton's vision was one of a "general theory" of political science that would consist of a deductive system of thought so that a limited number of postulates, as assumptions and axioms, a whole body of empirically valid generalizations might be deduced in descending order of specificity and provide predictive causal explanations of political behavior.

[10] This new revolution was not a change in the methods of inquiry but a change in orientation that grew out of a deep discontent with the direction of contemporary political research and which advocated more attention to the public responsibilities of the discipline and to relevant research on contemporary political problems and issues.

In recent years he has turned to structural constraints as a second major element underlying political systems.