Political Analaysis

subject matter, claims

Political Science has entered a reflexive debate about both the nature of its ? and the kinds of ? it can legitimately make.

political reality, political knowledge

Hay frames the political science reflexive debate as more than a methodological quarrel. It concerns what counts as ? and what counts as defensible ?.

The Political Question

The Two Foundational Questions:

What is the nature of political reality?

Where are the boundaries of the political?

What units constitute the political world?

What counts as a political explanation?

The Science Question

The Two Foundational Questions:

What can we know about political reality?

How certain can our claims be?

Can political inquiry be objective?

Should it emulate the natural sciences?

Feminist Scholars

There are three primary drivers behind the “return to fundamentals” in Political Science and outline the core issues currently under debate:

1. ? rejecting the mainstream.

Neo-statist and neo-institutionalist perspectives

There are three primary drivers behind the “return to fundamentals” in Political Science and outline the core issues currently under debate:

2. ? challenging the dominance of rational choice theory and behavioralism.

Constructivist and postmodernist

There are three primary drivers behind the “return to fundamentals” in Political Science and outline the core issues currently under debate:

3. ? positions challenging neorealism and neoliberalism within international relations theory.

Ontology

The three stages of Political Inquiry:

It is the science or philosophy of being. It concerns claims about the nature of social and political reality.

- What exists?
- What is political reality made of?

Ontology

According to Normal Blaikie:

Refers to the claims or assumptions that a particular approach to social [or, by extension, political] enquiry makes about the nature of social [or political] reality - claims about what exists, what it looks like, what units make it up and how these units interact with one another.

Ontological Question

What type of question is this?

What is the polity made of, and how do its components relate?

Are political outcomes driven primarily by individuals, structures, institutions, ideas —- or interactions among them?

Are political realities directly observable, or is there a distinction between appearance and underlying reality?

Are political patterns universal, or historically and culturally contingent?

Har argues that such foundational ontological commitments cannot simply be settled by accumulating empirical evidence.

atomist

Why Ontology Matters for Explanation:

An ontological ? privileges individuals their needs, capacities and motiviations.

structuralist

Why Ontology Matters for Explanation:

An ontological ? gives explanatory priority to social relations, processes and structures.

admissible

Why Ontology Matters for Explanation:

Different ontologies therefore make different forms of explanation ?

adequate explanation

Why Ontology Matters for Explanation:

The analyst’s assumptions about reality are not philosophical decoration; they shape what the analyst will look for and what will count as an ?

Epistemology

The Three stages of Political Inquiry:

It concerns the conditions under which knowledge of political reality can be acquired.

Epistemology

The Three stages of Political Inquiry:

It asks how much certainty can legitimately be claimed and whether the findings can be generalized beyond their immediate context.

Epistemology

The Three stages of Political Inquiry:

It also asks how competing explanations can be compared and defended.

Epistemology

The Three stages of Political Inquiry:

If there is no neutral vantage point outside the political world, clims to complete objectivity becomes considerably more difficult.

Epistemology

The three stages of Political Inquiry:

? - the science or philosophy of knowledge. It concerns itself with such issues as the degree of certainty we might legitimately claim for conclusions we are tempted to draw from our analyses, the extent to which specific knowledge claims might be generalised beyond the immediate context in which our observations were made and, in general terms, how we might adjudicate and defend a preference between contending political explanations.

Epistemology

The three stages of Political Inquiry:

According to Normal Blaikie:

Refers to the ‘claims or assumptions made about the ways in which it is possible to gain knowledge of reality’.

epistemologist, ontologist

The ? asks ‘what are the conditions of acquiring knowledge of that which exists?’ compared to the ? who asks ‘what exists to be known?’

Epistemology

The three stages of Political Inquiry:

Key Concerns: It addresses the degree of certainty we can claim for our conclusions and how we should choose between competing explanations.

Methodology

The three stages of Political Inquiry:

It relates to the choice of analytical strategy and research design that underpin substantive research.

- How should inquiry proceed?
- What research strategy follows?

Methodology

According to Norman Blaikie:

It is the ‘analysis of how research should or does proceed’

Ontology, Epistemology, Methodology

Direction of Dependance

Hay insists that the three are closely related but irreducible. What are those three?

Ontology

What is out there to know about?

Epistemology

What can we hope to know about it?

Methodology

How can we go about acquiring that knowledge?

Colin Hay

Who is the Author for the reading “What’s ‘Political’ About Political Science?”

Normal Blaikie

In the reading of Colin Hay, who did he cite in his definition for Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology?

Politics

It concerns power and its effects on resources and the transformative capacities of agents, agencies and institutions.

Political Analysis

? is better understood as a collection of analytical strategies that may rest on incompatible assumptions

Politics as Arena

This view identifies politics by where it happens. It restricts the “political” to the public sphere, the state, and governmental activity. From this perspective, activities in the private or domestic sphere are, by definition, not political.

Government and governing

• State institutions

• Public sphere

• Conventionally ‘political’ variables

Politics as Process

This view identifies politics by how it happens. It sees the “political” as ubiquitous, occurring in all social contexts, both public and private. It focuses on the uneven distribution of power, wealth, and resources.

Extra-governmentals relations

• Private as well as public settings

• Economic, social, and cultural forces

• Power relations across social contexts

FALSE

TRUE OR FALSE: According to Colin Hay, politics may be everywhere, and everything is exhaustively political.

Power

According to Colin Hay, it is about context-shaping: the capacity of actors to redefine the parameters of what is socially, politically and economically possible for others

Naturalism

Claims an essential unity of method between natural and social sciences; Assumes common scientific standards can apply across domains; Does not necessarily entail strict positivism.

Positivism

Models social inquiry on natural science; Privileges observable evidence and empirical testing; Historically associated with objectivity and valu

Rationalism

Reason and deduction; General axioms precede explanation; Appearance may differ from underlying reality; Modern parallel: rational choice / some realist approaches.

Empiricism

Experience and observation; Induction from cases toward generalization; Reality assumed accessible through the senses; Modern parallel: behaviouralism.

Falsification

Science progresses not by proving theories true but by exposing them to severe tests and eliminating false claims.

Theory, Deduction, Observation, Test, Revise

Enumerate the steps of the Positivist Logic

Karl Popper

He rejects induction as the defining logic of science and proposes falsifiability, refutability, or testability as the criterion of scientific status.

Politics as Power

Power is defined as “transformatory capacity”

Hay favors an inclusive conception in which political inquiry identifies and interrogates the distribution, exercise and consequences of power.

Rationalism

Originating with Descartes, this tradition emphasizes reason and deduction. It relies on “intellectual intuition” to identify underlying, unobservable structures but is criticized for basing its “objective” knowledge on untestable axioms. 

• Reason and deduction.

• General axioms precede explanation.

• Appearance may differ from underlying reality.

Empiricism

This tradition privileges experiences and observation, assuming that reality is directly accessible through the senses. It uses inductive logic to move from specific observations to general laws.

• Experience and observation

• Induction from cases toward generalization.

• Reality assumed accessible through the senses.

• Modern parallels with behavioralism.

Induction

Conventionally held to distinguish science from pseudoscience and metaphysics. For classic positivists, the scientific method is characterised by ? - the movement from observation and experiment to scientific law.

• The idea that science moves from specific observations to universal laws.

Falsification

Popper’s alternative

scientific theory, at best, is composed of a set of provisional truth claims constantly in the process of being refuted. Truth is never absolute, though falsification is.

• Science should focus on refuting or eliminating false hypotheses.

Eliminating false hypotheses

Positivism

A Response to the Ethical Problem: It denies or minimizes the normative content behind objectivity and truth

Radical Relativism

A Response to the Ethical Problem: It embrace theory/valueladenness but risk losing grounds for critique

Goodin and Klingemann

These duo emphasize disciplinary maturation through differentiation, integration and an increasingly shared methodological tool kit.

ordered eclecticism

Goodin and Klingemann’s ‘_______________’ asks scholars to combine approaches intelligently; Hay reminds us that approaches may rest on incompatible conceptions of reality and knowledge

Charles S. Pierce

Who was the main philosopher and scientist discussed in the work “Why Theorize and Can You Learn to Do It?”

art of inquiry

Charles Pierce regarded his experience as instructive for scientists—an example of the _______________.

Abduction

This concept asks: What possible explanation would make sense of what I have observed?

Abduction

It is the imaginative move from a puzzling phenomenon toward a tentative explanation.

It is the heart of creative theorizing.

Observation

Three Movements of Inquiry: Notice a phenomenon or puzzle.

Abduction

Three Movements of Inquiry: Generate a plausible explanation.

Testing

Three Movements of Inquiry: Confront the idea with facts.

Creative Theorizing

The goal is disciplined creativity: imagination followed by rigorous scrutiny.

Theorizing

It is presented as something researchers do, not merely something they read. It begins with close observation of a phenomenon. It involves naming and conceptualizing what has been observed. It requires building a tentative theory by giving the emerging idea body and structure.

See, Imagine, Test, Revise

Enumerate the Four Authors’ Conception of Science (Piercean Foundation) in the reading that involves Charles Pierce

Mainstream

This means that they are the dominant trend analytical perspectives.

Roy Bhaskar

Who said this about the limits of naturalism?

“It is the nature of the object that determines the form of its science…. to investigate the limits of naturalism is ipso facto to investigate the conditions which make social science, whether or not it is actualised in practice, possible.”

Positivist Approach

There are three ways scholars can deal with the ethical and epistemological challenges:

- Ignores the normative content of analysis, relying on the “comforting rhetoric” of objectivity and “truth” to avoid ethical questions.

Relativist/Postmodernist Approach

There are three ways scholars can deal with the ethical and epistemological challenges:

Openly embraces the value-laden nature of inquiry but often denies the possibility of generating any social scientific knowledge or grounding a critical theory for change.

The “Third Way”

Also Known as Critical Political Analysis)

There are three ways scholars can deal with the ethical and epistemological challenges:

Replaces the idea of “science” with interpretation. It acknowledges that there are no privileged vantage points and that all explanations are competing narratives based on different ontological and ethical assumptions.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Aim/Contribution

To model (mathematically) the implications of human rationality for political conduct.

• To use mathematical formulas to calculate and show how self-interested people will make decisions in political situations. 

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Aim/Contribution

To import the rigour and predictive power of neoclassical economics into political science

• Traditionally, political science relied heavily on description, history, and philosophy. In contrast, neoclassical economics is famous for using tight, mathematical equations to predict how consumers and markets behave. ? theorists argued that political systems function a lot like economic markets. By treating voters as "consumers" and politicians/parties as "firms" competing for votes, they hoped to bring the same scientific "rigour" and ability to predict outcomes to the study of politics.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Aim/Contribution

 To produce a deductive science of the political on the basis of a series of simplifying assumptions

• Rather than starting with observation and looking for a pattern (which is inductive analysis), a deductive approach starts with general assumptions and uses logic to derive specific, testable predictions.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key assumptions:

Individual actors are the basic units of analysis. 

• To explain politics, you must look at the decisions of individual people (like voters, politicians, or lobbyists) rather than looking at big groups, institutions, or classes as if they were single entities.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key assumptions:

They are rational, efficient and instrumental utility maximisers who seek to maximise personal utility net of cost alone.

People are entirely self-interested, efficient calculators. They constantly run a mental cost-benefit analysis and always choose the option that gives them the highest personal reward for the lowest cost.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key assumptions:

They have a clear and ‘transitive’ hierarchy of preferences such that in any given context there is only one optimal course of action available to them. 

• This means an individual’s preferences are logically consistent. If a voter prefers Party A over Party B, and Party B over Party C, they must prefer Party A over Party C. Their preferences cannot loop or contradict themselves. 

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key Themes:

The aggregation of individually rational behaviour

themes frequently produces collectively irrational outcomes

• When everyone does what is best for themselves individually, the final result is often terrible for everyone as a group.
  

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key Themes:

Social welfare is often compromised by collective action problems and ‘free-riding’

• Groups fail to achieve goals that would benefit everyone (like clean air or public safety) because individuals prefer to sit back and let others do the hard work and pay the costs.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key Themes:

The narrow pursuit of self-interest ensures that public officials cannot be trusted to deliver collective welfare (public choice theory)

• Politicians and government workers are just as selfish as everyone else, so we cannot trust them to selflessly look out for the public good.
  
  

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key Themes:

The behaviour of political parties in liberal democracies is predictable given the structure of the electoral system and the distribution of voter preferences.

• We can mathematically predict what political parties will do because they are simply competing for votes based on the rules of the election and how voters are spread out.

Rational Choice Theory

What perspective?

Key Themes:

Even where actors share a common collective interest, ‘free-riding’ is likely to militate against collective action in the absence of other incentives.

• A collective action problem occurs when a group of people would mutually benefit from cooperating, but individuals have a "perverse incentive" to avoid participating. This is called "free-riding".
  
  

Rational Choice Theory

Its purpose is to produce a deductive and predictive science of the political, modelled on precisely the same assumptions that have proved so influential in neo-classical economics.

Free-riding

This happens when, despite a situation in which cooperation will secure mutual advantage, actors have a perverse incentive not to participate in such collective action

Tragedy of the Commons

Example of Free-riding:

(Identified by Garrett Hardin in 1968)

It is argued that the systematic exploitation and pollution of the environment is set to continue since individual corporations and states, despite a clear collective interest, choose not to impose themselves the costs of unilateral environmental action.

Their logic is entirely rational. They know that environmental regulation is costly and, in an open international economy, a burden on competitiveness.

• Accordingly, in the absence of an international agency capable of enforcing compliance of all states and all corporations and states do not burden themselves with additonal costs and taxes. 

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis proceeds very differently, basing its approach to political analysis not on the deduction of testable hypotheses from simplifying assumptions about human nature, but upon extrapolation and generalisation from observed empirical regularities. 

Behaviouralism

 Has the tendency to emphasise the observable and those variables which might be more easily quantified.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Aim/Contributions

To use rigorous statistical techniques in the analysis of political data.

• To analyze politics using hard mathematical data, measurement, and statistical tools rather than relying on philosophical speculation, abstract models, or purely historical descriptions.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Aim/Contributions

To develop an inductive science of the political capable of generating predictive hypotheses on the basis of the quantitative analysis of human behaviour at an aggregate level.

• To build a predictive political science by gathering real-world data on large groups of people, finding consistent patterns in their behavior, and generalizing those patterns into probabilistic laws.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Assumptions

The logic of induction is sound – general ‘covering laws’ can be inferred from specific empirical observations".

• You can discover broad, general rules about politics simply by gathering specific real-world facts and looking for overall patterns.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Assumptions

Political behaviour exhibits regularities over time which allow law-like statements to be generated inductively.

• Human political actions follow consistent, recurring habits over time, allowing scientists to make law-like predictions.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Assumptions

The neutral and dispassionate analysis of raw political data is possible

• Researchers can collect and analyze political facts objectively, without letting personal values or theoretical biases distort the data.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Assumptions

There is no separation of appearance and reality

• What you can directly see and measure in politics is what actually exists; there are no hidden or invisible forces operating behind the scenes.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

No a priori theoretical assumptions should be allowed to inform political analysis

• Research must begin with real-world observations, without letting pre-existing theoretical frameworks or assumptions dictate what you look for.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

All theoretical propositions and assumptions must be exposed to rigorous and systematic empirical testing before they are deployed deductively.

Any claim, guess, or assumption about politics must be tested against hard empirical data before it can be used to make broader claims.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

Ethical judgements must not be allowed to inform, distort or interfere with the systematic collation, recording and analysis of empirical evidence.

• Researchers must maintain strict objectivity and keep their personal morals, values, and political biases out of data collection and analysis

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

Theoretical hypotheses take the form of probabilistic predictions based on the assumption that exhibited regularities in the data analysed are generalisable beyond the immediate context and time period in which the data was collected

• Because human group behavior shows consistent patterns over time, patterns found in a data sample can be used to make probabilistic predictions about future or different contexts.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

Political power is synonymous with decision-making and may, as a consequence, be operationalised quantitatively

? defines political power purely through visible, observable choices—such as votes cast in elections, courtroom decisions, or legislative votes

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Key Themes

Political outcomes can largely be derived from an analysis of political inputs

• To explain what a political system produces (political outcomes or outputs), you only need to measure the societal pressures going into the system (political inputs)—such as voter preferences, public opinion polls, and interest group lobbying.

Correlation

Behaviouralism

Key Concepts:

Indicates that two observed variables move together or show a statistical pattern in a data sample.

Causation

Behaviouralism

Key Concepts:

? - means one variable directly brings about or produces the outcome in another.

Decision-Making

Behaviouralism

Key Concepts:

The visible, directly observable choices made by political actors in public arenas (such as votes cast in legislative halls or courtroom decisions)

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Silences and Limitations:

Problem of differentiating causation and correlation

Just because two political facts move together in a dataset does not mean one actually caused the other.

Behaviouralism

This approach to political analysis:

Silences and Limitations:

Tends to restrict itself to ‘visible’ variables and to those which can readily be quantified

• The approach focuses only on things that can be easily counted (like votes or survey scores), while ignoring crucial political forces that are invisible or unquantifiable.