toward a science of politics?
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Abstract In the first half of the essay we summarise the main contributions in the essays in this issue by Coleman, Colomer, and Taagepera, and identify key commonalities in their suggestions for making political science more ‘scientific’. We argue that most of their concerns are well taken, but that the remedies they propose may not be applicable in all domains within political science. In particular, it is largely in the area of voting and elections, where clearly demarcated input and output variables can be identified, that their suggestions seem the most applicable. In the second half of the essay we trace the rise and fall, over the past 100 years, of movements in the US to make political science more scientific. We conclude by identifying similarities between these essays and the recent EITM movement in US political science.
Keywords
philosophy of social sciences; methodology; logic of inquiry; scientific study of politics
P
olitical science in the United States can be characterised by an ongoing schism between advocates of thick description, detailed knowledge of historical, cultural and social context, and a constructivist approach to social meaning and human agency, and those who seek to make theoretical sense of a complex world via formal modelling involving simplifying assumptions (often of the rational choice sort) and/or the use of sophisticated statistical tools involving large data sets. A similar debate can be found in Europe, even if the tone and specifics of the debate are not quite the same on both sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, the position of the three essays in this journal
can be seen as strong reinforcement for the side of this debate that insists that the word ‘science’ in political science needs to be taken seriously. On the other hand, our three authors argue, in different ways, for the fundamental inadequacy of most of the work in the discipline done by those who proclaim their allegiance to the scientific model. One (Coleman) emphasises that seemingly sophisticated statistical analyses can be fundamentally misleading about causal processes in the absence of controlled experiments; another (Taagepera) that what passes for theory in political science is at best pretheoretic from a scientific perspective – merely identifying variables that might be european political science: 6 2007
(143 – 155) & 2007 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/07 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
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relevant and suggesting a directionality to their possible effects; while the third (Colomer) reinforces the notion that the simplistic linear additive regression models that make up so much of everyday quantitative social science bear little resemblance to the kinds of parsimonious and theoretically integrated theories we find in the physical sciences. The challenge of the authors in this mini symposium is at both the theoretical and the practical level. For them (as for me) theory building and testing involves far more than the identification of variables that are statistically s
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