Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Hoover Institution The Methodical Study of Politics Abstract:
Many of the central puzzles that motivate research about politics concern choices made by government leaders, organizations, and ordinary citizens. Those concerned to establish the verisimilitude of specific conjectures about politics are likely to choose the case study method and archival analysis as the best means to evaluate the link between particular events and particular explanations. Those concerned to establish the general applicability or predictive potential of specific conjectures are likely to choose large-N, statistical analysis as the best means to evaluate the link between independent and dependent variables. Those concerned to establish normative arguments or to engage in social commentary will find other methods, such as post-structuralism and some forms of constructivism, more fruitful. Whatever the explanatory goal and whatever the substantive concern, researchers will benefit from efforts to establish the rigorous logical foundation of propositions as it is exceedingly difficult to interpret commentary or analysis about propositions that are internally inconsistent. Mathematical models provide an especially useful tool for assisting in ensuring logical consistency or uncovering inconsistencies in complex arguments. As most of human interaction is complex – and certainly political choices involve complex circumstances – mathematical modeling provides a rigorous foundation for making clear precisely what is being claimed. By linking careful analysis or social commentary to rigorously derived claims we improve the prospects of understanding and influencing future politics.
Gary Cox, University of California, San Diego Lies, Damned Lies and Rational Choice Analyses. Abstract:
What is rational choice? Green and Shapiro (1993) treat it as an empirically worthless but nonetheless highly pretentious theory. Shepsle (1995) treats it as the worst social scientific paradigm we have, except for all the rest. And I have elsewhere (Cox 1999) reduced it to game theory, called it a methodology, and analogized it to statistics--hence my title. In this essay, I consider rational choice both as a paradigm, identifying what I view as its "hard core," and as a methodology, elaborating some similarities of and differences between econometrics and game theory. In the discussion of methodology, I argue inter alia that much of the conflict seen between "problem-driven" and "rigorously scientific" research is illusory.
William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University Metaphysics, Method and Faith. Abstract:
Is it always feasible to distill method from the metaphysical faith in which it is set? Is it, correspondingly, feasible to specify a significant set of problems without touching, perhaps implicitly, the metaphysical faith informing their definition and the actual way they are pursued? The devil may be in the details. This paper will probe the problematic relations between metaphysics and method in a world where the former—once broadly construed to include a wide variety of basic theological and secular understandings of the world—is ineliminable from life. No closed set of determinations will be claimed; rather a loose constellation of connections between three interwoven elements will be explored. The paper will close with an attempt to articulate an orientation to method, set in a contestable image of being best described as “immanent naturalism.”
Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University Provisionalism in the Study of Politics. Abstract:
The fundamental objects of inquiry in political science are limited rational beings in the process—however constrained, complex, and poorly understood—of constituting their own political worlds. The methodological stance appropriate to the study of such an object must be fallibilist, sensitive to a wide variety of explanators, and open to the proposition that significant factors may not be measurable in any ordinary sense. In short, I shall argue and demonstrate with a short example, a good student of politics ought to have a provisional rather than an absolutist outlook. Absolutists of all stripes have divided the discipline of political science, to the detriment of the pursuit of knowledge. Political theorists, for example, have searched for incontrovertible standards of right while ignoring more the compelling normative issues a provisional stance would highlight (such as the conditions for realizing some of the goals of liberal democracy, rather than the ultimate liberal democratic formula for justifying the state in the first place). Determinist neo-naturalists, logical positivists, die-hard materialists, and many other absolutist students of politics have all suffered from the same basic misunderstanding of our object of inquiry, and thus failed to adhere to ordinary standards of empirical science. However, some of the best contemporary political studies are beginning to transcend absolutist divides; Keck and Sikkink (1998), for example, in their study of transnational advocacy networks, use focused comparisons to document the concrete political effects of normative ideals put into practice. Similarly, political theorists must combine historical scholarship with contemporary political philosophy and current political science. Only a discipline that integrates political theory and political science can do justice to the ineradicably normative and fundamentally provisional nature of politics.
John Ferejohn, Stanford University External and Internal Explanation Abstract:
Abstract not available.
Donald Green, Yale University The Illusion of Learning from Observational Research Abstract:
Although causal claims abound in the study of political behavior, most claims are backed by questionable non-experimental evidence drawn primarily from surveys. This paper proposes that the scholars in this field retrace their steps, subjecting these causal propositions to more rigorous evaluation in the form of randomized experiments, preferably conducted in real world settings. While acknowledging that some propositions fall beyond the scope of what can be feasibly or ethically subjected to experimentation, I argue that the range of what can be learned from field experiments is much broader than is often supposed. Not only should political scientists make more use of field experimentation, and in so doing push political science in the direction of real world interventions, they should take an active role in propagating what Donald Campbell has called the ethos of an experimenting society.
Margaret Levi, University of Washington Modeling Complex Historical Processes with Analytic Narratives Abstract:
The analytic narratives project represents an effort to clarify and make explicit the approach adopted by numerous scholars trying to combine historical and comparative research with rational choice models. In order to understand instances of institutional origin and change, analytic narrativists insist on the combination of deep knowledge of the case and an explicit theoretical model. These requirements do not, in themselves, differentiate analytic narratives from other well-crafted comparative and historical research, however. The focus of this paper is on what constitutes the analytic narrative approach and what, if anything, distinguishes it from other approaches for undertaking rigorous comparative and historical research. In the original book and in responses to critics (Bates et al., 1998; Bates et al., 2000b; Bates et al., 2000a), the authors have tried to outline the key elements of the approach, but there is systematization still to be done.
Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania Political Science as a Vocation. Abstract:
Recovering the history of political science, and the place of political science in history, should make us suspect the utility and the ethics of problem-oriented political science. While I am sympathetic to the view that political science is too often distant from the concerns of politics, problem-oriented political science appears deliberately ignorant of political history and the philosophy of science. Those moments when political science, as a discipline, has committed itself to addressing problems have not been the moments when the discipline shows itself best. I will address three such episodes: Reconstruction, colonialism, and the Cold War. I will argue that however carefully the academy protects dissidents, however large the field of academic freedom it grants to researchers, political science will always serve the state and corporate interests best, and that the temptation to serve power will be most powerful, and most seductive, where political science is conceived as properly dedicated to solving social, political, and economic problems. History chastens problem-oriented political science in another sense: through critical work on philosophy and scientific inquiry. We have learned that science is political, and that politics opens itself to inquiry. We know too that because science is conducted within politics, and because politics requires science, neither the work of science nor the work of politics may be entirely separated. Work on language (from Wittgenstein to Austen and Derrida), on institutions (from Weber to Foucault), on interest, on power and authority, has taught us that objectivity and methodological neutrality are chimeras. We can no longer rely on Weber’s guidance in the essays “Politics as a Vocation” and Science as a Vocation.” For political scientists, not only the enterprises, but the ethics of politics and science are fused. We are neither politicians nor scientists, but scholars impelled by the uneasily coupled imperatives of politics and science. How then do we confront the questions Weber raised in light of the work -and the history- that followed him? What is political science as a vocation? How do learn to learn for power? How do we learn to learn against power? Where do we seek guidance on how to study science, on how to learn? Where are we to find ethical guidance on where and when and how to serve power, and when to oppose it? Where are we to find the guidance necessary to navigate a science now visible as politics? Working from a critical examination of episodes in disciplinary history, I intend to furnish at least provisional answers to these questions.
Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York The Politics of Policy Science.  Abstract:
I will argue that while the scientific pretensions of policy research rest on a dubious intellectual foundation, these pretensions nevertheless encourage the increasing use of scientific research claims in the essentially political process of policy formation. The consequences are manifold, and harmful. Policy researchers are increasingly tethered to the trends of politics, and political discussion is obfuscated rather than illuminated. My examples will be contemporary.
Adolph Reed, New School University The Study of Black Politics & the Practice of Black Politics: Their Historical Relation and Evolution. Abstract:
My paper will reflect on American political science's evolving relationship with political engagement, from the founding of the discipline, through post-World War II enthusiasms that masked that relationship with scientism to the present period. I will explore the ways in which ideological assumptions about the way the political and social world work, as well as about the proper boundaries of the political, and thus of the field, have shaped that evolving relationship, including the several bouts of technical fetishism that have taken root in the field during the last half-century.
Alan Ryan, New College, Oxford Problems and Methods in Political Science. Abstract:
The platitude that we should adopt the methods best suited to our problems is trite but irresistible. So is the less platitudinous observation that sometimes new methods show up new problems or illuminate old ones in unexpected ways. This paper, however, is devoted to laying out a set of constraints on the demands of explanation in social science generally, and a fortiori in political science. Explanation is prima facie rational actor explanation: complete explanations of political behavior are rooted in the desires and beliefs of individual actors That this is only prima facie needs elaboration: a) in some but not all contexts so-called rational choice analysis is illuminating—roughly, in those contexts where actors are constrained to behave in utility-maximizing ways because other ways of acting are unattractive. b) we must distinguish ‘reasons’ and ‘real reasons’ for action; the latter are those that are causally efficacious in the context in question, whereas the former merely ‘rationalize’ the action. Absent this distinction, both self-deception and ideological blandishment are unintelligible. c) it is unclear how much clarification of the different sorts of reason-for-action is possible or useful—Weber’s distinction of Zweck- and Wertrational action is famous; I have tried to add a performative dimension in homage to Goffman, but incline to the view that dimensions may be added ad libitum to reflect the needs of analysis. d) many interesting issues have nothing to do with the form of explanation, but to do with the elements of any explanation: why do people see a situation one way rather than another; how do people come to have the beliefs they have; what are their values and how do they come by them? The approach sketched here may seem to slight – in no particular order – holistic, historical, and functional explanation. There is a response to the first two complaints, but none is necessary to the third: a) ‘holistic’ explanations in the Marxian or Durkheimian mode rely in the last resort on the ‘logic of the situation’ mode of analysis of 1. above; what holists believe is that the intervening processes of perception, evaluation and decision can be so taken for granted that a ‘situation-situation’ explanation will suffice. I hold that this claim is false in fact, but not offensive in logic. b) historical explanations also depend on ‘logic of the situation’ analysis; indeed, it is truer to say that all explanation is historical and that theories provide idealized histories than that situational logic explanation is unhistorical. c) ‘functional’ explanations invariably turn out to be one of three things: not explanations at all, explanations in terms of purpose, and explanations in terms of situational logic.
Rudra Sil, University of Pennsylvania Problems Chasing Methods? Or Methods Chasing problems? Research Communities, Trade-Offs, and the Role of Eclecticism
This paper is offers a Durkheimian “complex division of labor” as a way of preserving some sense of common purpose among scholars espousing quite different views on the status of “problem” and “method” in social science research. It makes four interrelated claims that form the basis for a pragmatic middle ground between competing perspectives on this question identified with Feyerabend and Laudan. (i) Social science as a collective endeavor is considered to be more problem-driven than method-driven if for no other reason but that common substantive prescriptions can emerge from alternative methods while sharp differences on foundational issues preclude meaningful agreements on methodological principles. For individuals, however, constraints of time and resource suggest real trade-offs between developing expertise on certain kinds of problems or experience in applying certain methods. Whatever the initial choice, however, intellectual and professional rewards depend on both substantive utility and methodological rigor as recognized by particular “research communities.” (ii) Given that research communities are founded on particular positions along a range of equally defensible (or indefensible) epistemological perspectives, even pluralist attempts to articulate generalized methodological principles and standards tend to impose upon others particular understanding of the nature of social reality, the purpose of social science, and the possibilities for causal knowledge. That is, calls for methodological unification are effectively hegemonic efforts aimed at identifying social science with research communities that share a particular epistemology. (iii) An alternative is to differentiate between social science and research communities in terms of the familiar distinction between society and community, with the common purpose of social science as a society depending on the awareness of the trade-offs encountered by research communities playing distinct, interdependent roles in a “complex division of labor.” Each of these roles proceed from different understandings of “problem” and “method” along the continuum between ideal-typical nomothetic and ideographic research, but each also offers different types of insight cast at different levels of abstraction. (iv) These arguments set the stage for an argument in favor of accomodating (not privileging) eclectic perspectives alongside existing research communities. As such, eclecticism is neither a rejection of the more “disciplined” work produced in research communities, nor a substitute for it; they merely depart from the established practices of any one research community and draw upon diverse research products -- and, therefore, different combinations of methods, theories, and empirics -- in framing and investigating problems. Although eclectic research lacks the security of a paradigm or research tradition in facing a wider range of methodological and conceptual challenges, and although the payoffs of stand-alone eclectic research are initially unclear, gambling some resources on such “undisciplined” research is justified when weighted against the risk that we may miss opportunities for making sense of real-world problems because of the quite different lenses through which separate research communities choose to analytically slice into these problems. Thus, Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism is moderated to suggest that problems of theory incommensurability are not absolute given the possibilities for translation by those less invested in particular research communities; and Laudan’s conception of “problem-solving progress” can be refined to emphasize his recognition of the role of “synthesis” or “amalgamation” in the identification of new problems and new lines of research.
Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania Identities, Interests, and the Tasks of Political Science in the 21^st Century Abstract:
The chief argument of this essay is that political science needs to make certain sorts of substantive concerns more central to our work if we are to speak to the most important problems of the world in the decades ahead; and though these problems can and should be addressed using a variety of methods, some of our methods commonly deemed less scientific will be indispensable for doing so. Specifically, we need to attend more to the processes, especially the political processes, through which senses of political memberships, allegiances, and identities are formed and transformed. To do so, we will need to rely more on approaches that provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values, and on identification of historical and contextual differences in identities and values. We will not be able to rely solely or even mainly on approaches that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality, or on efforts to seek to identify timeless, enduring regularities in political behavior, in abstraction from particular historical contexts. And, more trivially but not inconsequentially, we will also be well advised to reshape the field structure of our discipline.
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy. Abstract:
This essay imagines a conversation among three different communities of scholarship on democracy. One approach, what we might call scientific studies of political economy, tends to explore the relationship between economic development and democracy (or sometimes more broadly, regime type); it uses formal theoretical models combined with statistical models for empirical testing in an effort to come up with law-like rules or patterns governing political behavior. Another approach, framed by a philosophical commitment to understanding the relationship between words and politics, examines the conceptual conundrums and meanings associated with words such as democracy. Still another approach, often termed “interpretive,” investigates the substantive activities undertaken by individuals and/or groups comprising the political order—the everyday practices and systems of signification associated with democracy in particular places. Each of these approaches is dedicated to solving problems of abiding relevance to empirical politics, and each employs one or more methods to do so. Yet the kinds of questions, the terms of debate, the definitions of democracy, the importance of science, the role methods play, and the underlying epistemological commitments animating each differ in critical and recognizable ways. This paper considers the questions that are enabled or foreclosed in opting for one approach over the other. It asks: what are the political and scholarly stakes involved in thinking about democracy in ways that emphasize scientific methods or that tackle long-standing theoretical confusions? What are the relative consequences of embarking on a large-n analysis, on the one hand, or a case study, on the other? And perhaps most importantly: what combinations are possible and fruitful?