Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:07:52.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Qualitative Foundations of Political Science Methodology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2005

George Thomas
George Thomas
Affiliation:
Williams College (gthomas@williams.edu)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The last decade has seen a contentious dialogue between quantitative and qualitative scholars over the nature of political science methodology. Even so, there has often been a consensus that quantitative and qualitative research share a “unified logic of inference;” that the differences between these “traditions are only stylistic and are methodologically and substantively unimportant.” All of the books under review here share these convictions. Yet the most remarkable feature of these works taken as a whole —and the focus of this review essay—is the more capacious view of the scientific enterprise on display. John Gerring's Social Science Methodology, David Collier and Henry Brady's Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Charles Ragin's Fuzzy-Set Social Science all focus on aspects of the scientific process beyond the testing of hypotheses—science being “a systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, generalizing, nonsubjective, and cumulative” way of discovering the truth about the world (Gerring, p. xv). If science is the systematic gathering of knowledge, testing hypotheses—the central concern of statistical inference—is an important part of this. But it is only one part. Before we can turn to testing hypotheses, we must be clear about concepts, theories, and cases. And here both Barbara Geddes's Paradigms and Sand Castles and the Elmans' Bridges and Boundaries complement the other works by attending closely to these issues even when the larger goal remains the testing of theory.George Thomas is assistant professor of political science at Williams College (gthomas@williams.edu). The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics, Mark Blyth, Brian Taylor, and, especially, Craig Thomas for helpful comments.

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 855 - 866
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adcock, Robert, and David Collier. 2001. Measurement validity: A shared standard for qualitative and quantitative research. American Political Science Review 95 (3): 529–46.Google Scholar
Bennett, Andrew. 2003. A Lakatosian reading of Lakatos: What can we salvage from the hard core? In Progress in international relations theory, ed. Colin Elman and Mirhiam Fendius Elman, 455–94. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bennett, Andrew, Aharon Barth, and Kenneth Rutherford. 2003. Do we preach what we practice? A survey of methods in political science journals and curricula. PS: Political Science and Politics 36 (3): 373–78.Google Scholar
Blyth, Mark. 2002a. Great transformations: Economic ideas in the twentieth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Blyth, Mark. 2002b. Institutions and ideas. In Theory and methods in political science, ed. David Marsh and Gary Stoker, 293–310. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blyth, Mark. 2003. Structures do not come with an instruction sheet: Interests, ideas, and progress in political science. Perspectives on Politics 1 (4): 695–706.Google Scholar
Bridges, Amy. 2000. Path dependence, sequence, history, theory. Studies in American Political Development 14 (1): 109–12.Google Scholar
Caporaso, James A. 1995. Research design, falsification, and the qualitative-quantitative divide. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 457–60.Google Scholar
Ceaser, James W. 1990. Liberal democracy and political science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Collier, David. 1995. Translating quantitative methods for qualitative researchers: The case of selection bias. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 461–66.Google Scholar
Eckstein, Harry. 1975. Case study and theory in political science. In Handbook of political science, vol. 7, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, 79–138. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Elman, Colin, and Miriam Fendius Elman. 2003a. Lessons from Lakatos. In Progress in international relations theory, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, 21–68. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Elman, Colin, and Miriam Fendius Elman, ed. 2003b. Progress in international relations theory: Appraising the field. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gerring, John. 2003. APD from a methodological point of view. Studies in American Political Development 17 (1): 82–102.Google Scholar
Green, Donald P., and Ian Shapiro. 1996. The pathologies of rational choice theory: A critique of applications in political science. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hall, Peter. 2003. Aligning ontology and methodology in comparative research. In Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences, ed. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, 373–404. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. 1999. The Federalist papers. New York: Mentor Books.
Jervis, Robert. 1998. System effects: Complexity in political and social life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jervis, Robert. 2000. Timing and interaction in politics: A comment on Pierson. Studies in American Political Development 14 (2): 93–100.Google Scholar
King, Gary. 1995. Replication, replication. PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (3): 443–99.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1995. The importance of research design in political science. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 475–81.Google Scholar
Laitin, David. D. 1995. Disciplining political science. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 454–56.Google Scholar
Laitin, David. D. 2003. The Perestroikan challenge to social science. Politics and Society 31 (1): 163–85.Google Scholar
Lijphart, Arend. 1971. Comparative politics and the comparative method. American Political Science Review 65 (3): 682–93.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. 1999. Nominal, ordinal, and narrative appraisal in macrocausal analysis. American Journal of Sociology 104 (4): 1154–96.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. 2003. Strategies of causal assessment in comparative historical analysis. In Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences, eds., James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 337–72. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. 2003. Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mansfield, Harvey Jr. 1990. Social science versus the Constitution. In Confronting the Constitution, ed. Allan Bloom, 411–36. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press.
Pierson, Paul. 2000a. Not just what, but when: Timing and sequence in political processes. Studies in American Political Development 14 (2): 72–92.Google Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2000b. Increasing returns, path dependence and the study of politics. American Political Science Review 94 (2): 251–67.Google Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2003. Big, slow-moving, and … invisible. In Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences, ed., James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 177–207. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in time: history, institutions, and social analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ragin, Charles C. 1987. The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ragin, Charles C. 2004. Turning the tables: How case-oriented research challenges variable-oriented research. In Rethinking social inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards, eds. David Collier and Henry Brady. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Rogowski, Ronald. 1995. The role of theory and anomaly in social-scientific inference. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 467–70.Google Scholar
Sartori, Giovanni. 1984. Guidelines for concept analysis. In Social science concepts: A systematic analysis, ed. Giovanni Sartori, 15–85. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Shapiro, Ian. 2004. Problems, methods, and theories in the study of politics, or: What's wrong with political science and what to do about it. In Problems and methods in the study of politics, eds. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, Tarek E. Masoud, and 19–41. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Skocpol, Theda, and Margaret Somers. 1980. The uses of comparative history in macrosocial inquiry. Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (2): 174–97.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The politics presidents make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Skowronek, Stephen. 2003. What's wrong with APD? Studies in American Political Development 17 (1): 107–10.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen, and Karen Orren. 2004. The search for American political development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Rogers M. 1996. Science, non-science, and politics. In The historic turn in human sciences, ed., Terrance J. McDonald, 119–59. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, Rogers M. 2003a. Substance and methods in APD research. Studies in American Political Development 17 (1): 111–15.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 2003b. Progress and poverty in political science. PS: Political Science and Politics 36 (3): 395–96.Google Scholar
Tarrow, Sidney. 1995. Bridging the quantitative-qualitative divide in political science. American Political Science Review 89 (2): 471–74.Google Scholar
Thelen, Kathleen. 2000. Timing and temporality in the analysis of institutional evolution and change. Studies in American Political Development 14 (1): 101–8.Google Scholar