The Political Science Interpretivist

Introduction If positivists had a mantra, it would be “validation demands transparency and replication.” The ideal is that if all the data from a study is posted online, and a thorough account given as to how that data was acquired, then other political scientists can examine everything, and determine how valid the method and its conclusions really are. This mimicking of natural science methods may seem reasonable, at first, but in this, and succeeding, posts I will discusses its disastrous consequences for the political science profession. I will examine each element of the ideology. In general, my position is that this is the Wrong Conceptual Framework for the subject matter of political science – human beings engaged in political behavior. Why this paradigm persists in political science is another worthy matter of analysis. This post will consider the replication myth. Is Replication Possible? For natural science, replication is one of the keys to validation. Suppose an anim

In the early years of this century, the adherents to the positivistic paradigm, among them the elites of political science, were becoming concerned. The aging protestors from the 1960s revolt against the profession’s silence on the Vietnam War, racism, gender and economic inequality, and other social issues, were attracting too much attention from younger grad students and new PhDs. Fidelity to positivism was fragmenting. There was a rise in the usage of mixed methods and interpretivism.  Criticisms continued about the profession’s fawning efforts to imitate the methods of natural science, like physics, even as awareness grew that human beings and their political behavior are not analogous to either atomic particles or billiard balls in motion. Indeed, one spur of the 60s protests was that, under the guise of “scientific value neutrality,” members of the political science profession were hiring out as strategy consultants to the war mongers and corporate profiteers.* As the foundatio

Political Science today is a methodological free for all – well, not quite. The center of power in the profession is the editorial boards of the major journals. They determine what ideas will represent the profession. The research papers articulating that viewpoint are favored for publication in the prominent journals. From those journals, hiring committees at the leading university political science departments take their cues. New Ph.Ds. that comply with its constraints have an advantage for hiring, and later tenure, in the prominent universities. Awards for books and papers primarily go to the methodologically correct. Research grant funds also favor the Alpha methodology. Thus, the dominant paradigm persists because the power centers are committed to its persistence. The filigree of the profession are free to do as they please. Two unifying principles of the controlling conceptual framework in political science are 1) imitate the methods of positivistic natural science; and 2