Welcome to the website of the conference on Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics. This is one of a series of conferences that is part of the Yale Political Science Department’s initiative on Rethinking Political Order: The Nation State in the Emerging World. The conferences will result in a series of published books that are intended to exemplify and advance the best political science.

This conference will focus on choices researchers must make about problems and methods. Those who advocate “problem-driven” work claim that it is most important to start with a substantive problem visible in the political world and then seek out appropriate methods to address it. These scholars contend that only a “problem-driven” political science is likely to contribute much of practical or intellectual importance to the broader communities in which we work. Critics charge that practitioners of this approach still have little if anything to offer that is more rigorous than the best writings of journalists and historians. The first imperative today, they contend, must be to make political science more of a science. Consequently, they argue that, for now, political scientists must focus on developing more rigorous methods, restricting their terrain of study to topics to which those methods can fruitfully be applied.

The easy and perhaps correct response is to say that political scientists should do both things; but decisions about obtaining and committing professional resources create pressures for individuals, departments, institutions, and the profession as a whole to establish priorities.

In order to address these issues, the conference brings together a distinguished group of political scientists representing a diversity of sub-disciplines and methodological approaches. To learn more, click one of the links on the left.