POL10160 - Can the Study of Politics be a Science?

Vocabulary flashcards covering core topics in political science methodology, philosophy of science, and exemplary empirical research from POL10160 Class 3.

Scientific Knowledge (Chalmers 2013)

Knowledge aimed at creating understanding that is derived from facts of experience and based on empirical observations.

Duck-Rabbit Illusion

An ambiguous visual figure used to illustrate the philosophical question of how observations and facts are perceived and interpreted.

Normative Theory

Theoretical approaches concerned with value judgments, prescriptions, and statements about how political society ought to be.

Positive Theory

Descriptive or explanatory theoretical frameworks that aim to model how the world works, generating observable implications about relationships between variables.

Observable Implications

Empirical statements or predictions generated by positive theories, typically specifying expected relationships between variables.

Induction

The logical process of deriving general laws, hypotheses, or theoretical principles from specific empirical observations.

Verification

The process of demonstrating the truth or validity of a general statement or theoretical hypothesis through empirical observation.

Karl Popper (1902-1994)

Philosopher of science who argued that scientific theories must yield observable implications capable of being falsified through empirical testing.

Falsifiability

The core scientific requirement that theoretical statements must make predictions that could, in principle, be proven wrong by observational evidence.

Criteria for Scientific Research (King et al. 1994)

Four core standards defining scientific inquiry: the goal is inference, the content is the method, the procedures are public, and the conclusions are uncertain.

Naturalist Approach

A social science tradition focused on identifying general patterns, explaining human behavior across populations, and using non-normative quantitative or qualitative methods.

Interpretive Approach

A social science tradition focused on uncovering meaning and understanding human action within specific cases, predominantly using qualitative methods.

Cramer Walsh (2012) Study

An interpretive research project that investigated rural consciousness and political decision-making using participant observation among community groups in rural Wisconsin.

Place-Based Appeals Hypothesis (Jacobs and Munis 2019)

Hypothesizes that voter candidate approval increases (decreases) when a candidate's place-based message corresponds with (diverges from) the respondent's own sense of place.