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The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art James Harold
The Oxford Handbook of PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
The Oxford Handbook of PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
Edited by HAROLD KINCAID and
JEROEN VAN BOUWEL
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kincaid, Harold, 1952– editor. | Bouwel, Jeroen van, editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of philosophy of political science / [edited by Harold Kincaid and Jeroen Van Bouwel].
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029518 (print) | LCCN 2022029519 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197519806 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197519820 (epub) | ISBN 9780197519837
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029518
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029519
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197519806.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Marquis, Canada
Harold:
To Don Ross, for many years of intellectual inspiration and friendship
Jeroen:
To my parents, Marie-Thérèse Greefs and Jo Van Bouwel, for supporting me unconditionally.
2.
Harold Kincaid and Jeroen Van Bouwel
PART 1. ANALYZING BASIC FRAMEWORKS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
Jonathan Michael Kaplan
3.
4.
5.
Don Ross, Wynn C. Stirling, and Luca Tummolini
6.
N. Emrah Aydinonat and Petri Ylikoski
7.
Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
8.
Andrew Bennett and Benjamin Mishkin
PART 2. METHODS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE,
9. Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy
Sharon Crasnow
10. Qualitative Research in Political Science
Julie Zahle
11. Interpretivism versus Positivism in an Age of Causal Inference 221 Janet Lawler and David Waldner
12. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA): A Pluralistic Approach to Causal Inference
Federica Russo and Benoît Rihoux
13. Mixed-Methods Research and Variety of Evidence in Political Science
Jaakko Kuorikoski and Caterina Marchionni
14. Generalization, Case Studies, and Within-Case Causal Inference: Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA)
Gary Goertz and Stephan Haggard
15. Process Tracing: Defining the Undefinable?
Christopher Clarke
16. Process Tracing: Causation and Levels of Analysis
Keith Dowding
17. Randomized Interventions in Political Science: Are the Critics Right?
Peter John
18. Lab Experiments in Political Science through the Lens of Experimental Economics
Andre Hofmeyr and Harold Kincaid
PART 3. PURPOSES AND USES OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
19. Philosophy of Science Issues in Clientelism Research
Harold Kincaid, Miquel Pellicer, and Eva Wegner
María Jiménez-Buedo
PART 4. POLITICAL SCIENCE IN SOCIETY: VALUES, EXPERTISE, AND PROGRESS
Season Hoard, Laci Hubbard-Mattix, Amy G. Mazur, and Samantha Noll
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Amy Mazur who provided enthusiastic support for this Philosophy of Political Science (PoPS) project and helped organize and fund the workshop held at Washington State University in the fall of 2019, at which a major subset of the chapters was presented. We thank the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs (Steven Stehr, Director), Foley Institute of Public Policy (Cornell Clayton, Director), and the Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professorship of Political Science for funding along with the School of Economics, University of Cape Town, as well as the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University. Also, thanks to Sofia Blanco Sequeiros, Francesco Guala, and Erik Angner for their reviewing work, and to all the contributors to the volume, almost all of whom also did some reviewing, which was one way to increase interactions between political scientists and philosophers. Jeroen would like to thank his sons Adrian and Max for their entertainment (especially during the COVID-19 lockdowns) and Linnéa for continuing encouragement and support.
3.1
List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
Figures
5.1
5.2
6.1
27.2 Realist and liberal theories’ factors affecting war and peace
27.3 Points of contention between naturalism and antinaturalist constructivisms
27.4 Disagreement on meta-theory among most influential figures in realism and liberalism
27.5 Key scientific realist and empiricist criteria used by top dozen political realist and liberal authors
List of Boxes
2.1 Heritability
2.2 Heritability, causation, and malleability
List of Contributors
N. Emrah Aydinonat (PhD, Docent) is a researcher working at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Economic Methodology. His research interests include the practices of modeling and explanation in the social sciences and the theories of institutions. Aydinonat is the author of The Invisible Hand in Economics (Routledge, 2008).
Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University and author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). He is also coeditor, with Jeffrey Checkel, of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge, 2014) and President of the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods, which organizes the annual Institute on Qualitative and Multimethod Research (IQMR) at Syracuse University.
Fred Chernoff is Harvey Picker Professor of International Relations, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. His most recent book is Explanation and Progress in Security Studies (Stanford, 2014). His publications have appeared in such journals as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, and Mind. He holds doctoral degrees in political science (Yale) and philosophy (Johns Hopkins). He has held faculty posts at Yale, Brown, and Wesleyan Universities, and research positions at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London), Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (Oslo), and the Rand Corporation.
Christopher Clarke is a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge (CRASSH) and an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam (School of Philosophy). He works on the nature of causal explanation and causal inference, especially in political science and economics.
Sharon Crasnow is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Norco College in Southern California. Her research is on methodological issues in the social sciences with a focus on political science. She has published work in this area in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Synthese. She also works on feminist philosophy of science and epistemology and is a coeditor (with Kristen Intemann) of The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science.
Keith Dowding is Distinguished Professor Political Science and Political Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has published over a hundred articles in leading political science and political philosophy journals and over a dozen books including The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science, Rational Choice and Political Power, and It’s the Government, Stupid
Gary Goertz is Professor of Political Science at the Kroc Center for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than fifty articles and chapters on topics of international institutions, methodology, and conflict studies. His methodological research focuses on concepts and measurement along with set theoretic approaches, including “Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals,” (2007), “Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology” (2008), “A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences” (2012), and “Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms, and Case Studies: The Research Triad” (2017). The completely revised and rewritten edition of his (2005) concept book “Social science concepts and measurement” was published by Princeton in 2020.
Stephan Haggard is Krause Distinguished Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego. His publications on international political economy include Pathways from the Periphery: The Newly Industrializing Countries in the International System (Cornell University Press, 1990); The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (Institute for International Economics, 2000); and Developmental States (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His work with Robert Kaufman on democratization, inequality, and social policy includes The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton University Press, 1995); Democracy, Development and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2008); Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (Princeton, 2016) and Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge, 2020). His work on North Korea with Marcus Noland includes Famine in North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2007); Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011); and Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (Stanford University Press, 2017).
David Henderson is Robert R. Chambers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research interests include the philosophy of social science and epistemology—and the present work brings together these interests. His works include Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences (State University of New York Press, 1993) and (with Terry Horgan) The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recent work has been focused on social norms and epistemic norms—for example, “Are Epistemic Norms Fundamentally Social Norms?” (Episteme, 2020). He coedited and contributed to The Routledge Handbook in Social Epistemology (2019, with Miranda Fricker, David Henderson, Peter Graham, and Nikolaj Pedersen) and (with John Greco) Epistemic Evaluation: Point and Purpose in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Catherine Herfeld is an assistant professor of social theory and philosophy of the social sciences at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research falls into the fields of philosophy and history of the social sciences, in particular economics.
Season Hoard is Associate Professor jointly appointed in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs and the Division of Governmental Studies and Services (DGSS) at Washington State University. She has a PhD in political science from Washington State University, and her areas of expertise include gender and politics, comparative politics, public policy, and applied social science research. Dr. Hoard helps provide applied research
and program evaluation support for governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations in the United States. She has numerous publications focused on applied research methods and public policy, including recent publications in American Political Science Review, Community Development, Politics and Life Sciences, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Biomass and Bioenergy and the International Journal of Aviation Management.
Andre Hofmeyr is Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, and the Director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN). He is an experimental economist who specializes in decision theory, game theory, experimental economic methodology, and structural econometrics. He is an associate editor of Cognitive Processing, and has recently published articles in Experimental Economics, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Methodology, and Southern Economic Journal, along with a commentary forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Laci Hubbard Mattix is Assistant Professor (career track) in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. She specializes in political theory and philosophy. Her work intersects critical theory, feminist theory, and ethics. She has published numerous book chapters on these issues as well as articles in Essays in Philosophy and Transportation in the City.
María Jiménez-Buedo is an associate professor at the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at UNED in Madrid. She works in the philosophy of the social sciences, with an emphasis on methodological issues. Her recent work focuses on experimental methods in the social sciences.
Peter John is Professor of Public Policy at King’s College London. He is interested in how to involve citizens in public policy and in randomized controlled trials. His books include Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017), How Far to Nudge (Edward Elgar, 2018), and his coauthored Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think Experimenting with Ways to Change Citizen Behaviour (Manchester University Press, 2019, 2nd ed.).
Jonathan Michael Kaplan is a professor in the philosophy program at Oregon State University, where he has taught since 2003. His primary research areas are political philosophy and the philosophy of biology. Recently, he has worked on the relationship between contemporary genomic technologies and arguments surrounding claims about the biological nature of human “races,” as well as on issues emerging from recent research on the social determinants of health.
Harold Kincaid is Emeritus Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. His research concerns issues in the philosophy of science and philosophy of social and behavioral science as well as experimental work in economics on, among other things, risk and time attitudes, trust and addiction. He is the author or editor of thirteen books (starting with The Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research, Cambridge, 1996) and many journal articles and book chapters. Recent or forthcoming work includes the Elgar Companion to Philosophy of Economics with Don Ross (Elgar, 2021) and articles or book chapters on objectivity in the social sciences, improving causal inference in economics, the role of mechanisms in the social sciences, agent-based models, classifying mental disorders, the risk-trust confound, and prospect theory.
Jaakko Kuorikoski is an associate professor of practical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His main areas of specialization are philosophy of economics and philosophy of social sciences, and he has published widely on scientific explanation, modeling, simulation, and causal reasoning.
Janet Lawler is a doctoral student in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, working on theories and implications of how new technologies alter public space and discourse.
Caterina Marchionni is University Researcher in the unit of practical philosophy and a member of TINT at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in the methodology and epistemology of science, in particular of economics and the social sciences. Caterina has published widely on scientific explanation, modelling, and interdisciplinarity. .
Johannes Marx is a professor of political theory at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research falls into the fields of political philosophy, philosophy of social sciences, agentbased modeling, and political economy.
Amy G. Mazur is Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor in Political Science at Washington State University and an Associate Researcher at LIEPP at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative feminist policy issues with a particular emphasis on France and comparative methodology. Her recent books include The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research (with Dorothy McBride, Temple University Press, 2010) and Gender Equality and Policy Implementation in the Corporate World: Making Democracy Work in Business (edited with Isabelle Engeli, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She has published in French Politics, European Journal of Politics and Gender, Comparative European Politics, Revue Française de Science Politique, Politics and Gender, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, PS: Political Science, and Politics, Groups and Identities. She is currently co-convening, with Isabelle Engeli (Exeter University), the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Network (GEPP) as well as GEPP-Equal Employment and GEPP-France. She is Lead Editor of French Politics and a fellow-in-residence for the Global Contestations of Gender and Women’s Rights at Bielefeld University.
Benjamin Mishkin is a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgetown University where he studies American foreign policy, civil-military relations, and bureaucratic politics. He also maintains interests in the study of political violence and qualitative methods.
Samantha Noll is an assistant professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs (PPPA) at Washington State University. She is also the bioethicist affiliated with the Functional Genomics Initiative, which applies genome editing in agriculture research. Her research agenda focuses on teasing out ethical, social, and environmental implications of agriculture biotechnology, food systems, and other technological innovations. Noll publishes widely on values and agriculture, local food movements, and the application of genomics technology.
Robert Northcott is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. He has published extensively on the philosophy of economics and other sciences, and on causation and causal explanation. He is currently working on a book that will develop a systematic position on
the methodology of nonlaboratory sciences. He was founding coeditor of the Elements series in Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press), and is Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
Miquel Pellicer is Professor for Inequality and Poverty at the University of Marburg. He works on inequality, political behavior, and development. His articles have appeared, among others, in Perspectives on Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Development Economics
Julian Reiss is Professor and Head of the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method at Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is the author of Error in Economics (2008), Philosophy of Economics (2013), Causation, Evidence, and Inference (2015), and seventy journal articles and book chapters on topics in general philosophy of science and philosophy of the biomedical and social sciences. He is a past president of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM).
Benoît Rihoux is a full professor in comparative politics at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium), where he chairs the Centre for Political Science and Comparative Politics (CESPOL). His substantive research interests comprise among others political parties, political behavior, organizational change, social movements, gender and politics, and professional ethics. He plays a leading role in the development of configurational comparative methods and QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) and coordinates the interdisciplinary COMPASSS global network (http://www.compasss.org) in that field. He has published multiple pieces around QCA: review pieces, empirical applications in diverse fields, and a reference textbook (Sage, 2009; with Charles Ragin). He is also strongly involved in research methods training as joint Academic Coordinator of MethodsNET, the Methods Excellence Network (https://www.methodsnet.org/home).
Don Ross is Professor and Head of the School of Society, Politics, and Ethics, University College Cork (Ireland); Professor in the School of Economics, University of Cape Town (South Africa); and Program Director for Methodology at the Center for Economic Analysis of Risk, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University (United States). His current areas of research are the experimental economics of risk and time preferences; the economics of addiction and gambling; economic behavior in nonhuman animals; scientific metaphysics; and economic optimization of road networks in Africa. He is the author of many articles and chapters, and author or editor of fourteen books, including Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation (MIT Press, 2005); Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised (with James Ladyman, Oxford University Press, 2007); and Philosophy of Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is currently writing a book on the evolution of human risk management (with Glenn Harrison) and another on generalization of conditional game theory for application to economic choice experiments (with Wynn Stirling).
Federica Russo is a philosopher of science and technology based at the University of Amsterdam. She has a long-standing interest in social science methodology, and she wrote extensively about causal modelling, explanation, and evidence in the social, biomedical, and policy sciences. Among her contributions, Causality and Causal Modelling in the Social Sciences. Measuring Variations (Springer, 2009), Causality: Philosophical Theory
Meets Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Phyllis Illari), and Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine: Principles and Procedures (Springer, 2018, a coauthored monograph of the EBM + group). Together with Phyllis Illari, she is editor-in-chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Attilia Ruzzene is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergamo. She obtained her first PhD in economics at the University of Torino and a PhD in philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She has been teaching courses on the philosophy of science, economics, and social sciences at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Witten/ Herdecke University, and University of Bologna.Her research currently focuses on a variety of qualitative perspectives for the study of organizational phenomena which include causalmechanistic reasoning, the practice approach, and visual analysis. She has long lasting interest in issues related to causal inference in case-study research and the use of case-study evidence for policy making.
Stephen Schneider is a fellow at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works in the area of political psychology and has published articles examining how lay attributions for traits and behaviors influence tolerance, how threat influences conspiracy theory endorsement, and what role the behavioral immune system plays in support for refugee resettlement programs among others.
Wynn C. Stirling is an emeritus professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University. His current research interests are game theory, stochastic processes, and control theory. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah in 1969 and 1971, respectively, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1983. Dr. Stirling is the author or many articles and chapters, is a co-author of Mathematical Methods and Algorithms for Signal Processing (Prentice Hall, 2000), and is the author of Satisficing Games and Decision Making (Cambridge, 2003), Theory of Conditional Games (Cambridge, 2012), and Theory of Social Choice on Networks (Cambridge, 2016). He is working with Don Ross on a book on applications of conditional game theory to economics.
Luca Tummolini is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian Research Council in Rome and Associated Researcher at the Institute for Future Studies in Sweden. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena in 2010. His research interests are in social interaction and the cognitive mechanisms that enable humans to flexibly coordinate and collaborate with one another: from shared deliberation in small groups to conformity with population-wide regularities like conventions and social norms. He is also interested in using game theory to develop a common framework between the cognitive and the social sciences. He has published in philosophy, psychology, economics, and computer science journals. He is the author of more than fifty articles and coeditor of three books.
Jeroen Van Bouwel is a senior researcher at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science and a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science at Ghent University. His research areas include philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology, and the relations between science and democracy. He has published work in these areas in, inter alia, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Economics & Philosophy, Social Epistemology,
Perspectives on Science, History and Theory, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, and numerous collected volumes, handbooks, and encyclopedias. His books include The Social Sciences and Democracy (Palgrave, 2009, editor) and Scientific Explanation (Springer, 2013, coauthored with Erik Weber and Leen De Vreese).
David Waldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His empirical work focuses on the intersection of political and economic development; his methods writings focus on qualitative causal inference.
Eva Wegner is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Marburg. Her research focuses on political behavior and accountability in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, the International Political Science Review, and Party Politics, among others.
Petri Ylikoski is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of Helsinki. His research interests include theories of explanation and evidence, science studies, and social theory. His current research focuses on the foundations of mechanism-based social science, institutional epistemology, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence.
Julie Zahle is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Bergen. Previously, she taught at Durham University and University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 2009. Her research areas include the philosophy of qualitative methods, values and objectivity in social science, the individualism-holism debate, and social theories of practices.
Jesús Zamora-Bonilla is a philosopher and economist, and a professor of philosophy of science at UNED (Madrid). He is the coeditor of The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Social Sciences, and author of numerous papers on rationality, normativity, scientific realism, verisimilitude, economics of scientific knowledge, and other topics, published in journals like Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Journal of Economic Methodology, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Economics & Philosophy, Theoria, Episteme, and Perspectives on Science.
Chapter 1 Putting Philosophy of Political Science on the Map
Harold Kincaid and Jeroen Van Bouwel
1. Why Philosophy of Political Science ?
Over the last several decades, research in political science has expanded enormously, leading to much improved statistical testing (abetted by vast increases in computational technologies), innovative methods for dealing with small-N data, sophisticated formal models, experimental work on political behavior, biological and psychological perspectives on voting behavior, identification of exposed biases in political analysis, and much more.
This rich body of research raises numerous philosophical issues. However, these philosophy of science issues raised by political science have only gotten scattered and little organized attention; there is no field that labels itself Philosophy of Political Science. This is in contrast to, for example, economics which has two journals (Journal of Economic Methodology and Economics & Philosophy) and an international organization (International Network for Economic Methodology). The general philosophy of social science also has a solid institutional embedding with the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Sage) and several formal groups (like the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and the Asian Network for Philosophy of the Social Sciences). Sociology and anthropology are addressed in Turner and Risjord (2006) Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series, and history has its own journals such as the Journal of the Philosophy of History and History & Theory
The philosophical issues raised by political science research are just as pressing and vibrant as those raised in these more organized fields; some of the issues are unique to political science, and others are general philosophy of social science issues that have not been much considered in relation to political science research. To give those issues the attention they deserve, this volume seeks to increase the currently scarce interaction between philosophers of science and political scientists and aims at fostering a field that labels
itself Philosophy of Political Science, creating a fruitful meeting place for further development of ideas in philosophy of science and political science.1
2.
How Does This Volume Approach
Philosophy of Political Science ?
In this volume an intellectually diverse group of philosophers of science and political scientists takes on a set of these Philosophy of Political Science (PoPS) issues. When we started compiling this volume we made a decision to focus on empirical political science and not on normative political theory. Normative political theory has of course received much philosophical attention. Thus, we decided rather to stick to issues that are traditionally covered by philosophy of science and not venture into political philosophy.2 The list of topics included reflects in part the interests of those willing and able to contribute (with COVID-19 hitting the world when the final versions of the manuscripts were being written and reviewed). However, we are confident that the volume addresses key issues in PoPS and that it will increase the interaction between philosophers of science and political scientists—it has already done so in the organizing of the volume.3
Our emphasis on the increased interaction between political scientists and philosophers of science flows from the perspective that motivates and structures this volume, namely a naturalist philosophy of science. Naturalism means here that philosophy of science is continuous with and part of science, and, therefore, close to and informed by actual scientific practice. It denies that there is something special about the social world that would make it unamenable to scientific investigation. Neither is there something special about philosophy that would make it independent or prior to the sciences, including social sciences.
Following this naturalist approach, we consider PoPS to be a meeting place. On the one hand, it helps to increase philosophy of science sophistication in political science. The many political scientists interested in methodology (broadly conceived) might advance their research by being more cognizant of developments in philosophy of science. On the other hand, our naturalist approach says that philosophers of science must look carefully at actual political science research and learn from it to further develop their own ideas (for example think about the use of “diversity,” “representation,” “democratic,” and so on, in discussions of scientific practice). Furthermore, political scientists have also been quite innovative in thinking about methodology, and philosophy of science has not generally built on these advancements to its detriment. For example, the application of Boolean and fuzzy set analysis to complex causality and classification (Ragin 1987) has not found its way into philosophical discussions of these issues.
We have asked contributors to use examples from and stick closely to the actual practice of political science, a test against which the philosophy of the discipline can be developed and evaluated. Moreover, many of the contributors are practicing political scientists, and several chapters have been written by combined forces of political scientists and philosophers. Furthermore, by getting the contributors to comment upon each other’s work, we ensured that the political scientists got feedback in developing the philosophy of science issues and that the philosophers’ take on the political science is on track, thus
strengthening the emerging community of philosophers of political science. Finally, in line with our approach, we emphasize that philosophy of science is something scientists themselves sometimes do, just as science is something that philosophers of science may do. This makes for PoPS to be part of ongoing scientific controversies and part of the process of settling those issues.
3. What are the issues in Philosophy of Political Science?
What are the issues that PoPS might address? From the Political Science side, there are many aspects one can focus on. Political science is a complex system that involves a community of scientists engaged in research using scientific methods in order to produce new knowledge. As a label, “political science” may refer to a social institution, the research process, the (community of) researchers, the method of inquiry, the end product, i.e., political science knowledge, and other aspects.
That multilayered system has itself gone through a historical development, from the statism at the time of the discipline’s early professionalization, via the pluralism of the 1920s and the behavioralism of the 1950s, to the Caucus for a New Political Science of the late 1960s and the Perestroika of the early 2000s with their challenges to primacy of valuefree quantitative and formal modeling (cf. Dryzek 2006). Political science also crystallized into various subdisciplines like comparative politics, international relations, domestic politics, political theory, public administration, political economy, and so on. These are some key transformations in the internal history of the discipline. In addition, there is also the boundary work that goes on, and the conflicts and opportunities that arise in interacting with other disciplines that study the social world, such as sociology, economics, history, or anthropology, a much discussed issue for the social sciences more generally (Wallerstein 1996). Given that political scientists have been venturing both into the more so-called nomothetic approaches (for example, in political economy) as well as into more ideographic ones (for example, in diplomatic history or ethnographic studies more generally), and combinations thereof, intersections with adjacent disciplines have been many. The details of the history of the political science discipline and the internal and external demarcation from its neighboring disciplines is beyond our purview here, but the point is that there are many aspects of the practice of political science that deserve a philosophical analysis—both in political science’s historical development as well as in its contemporary formations.
From the Philosophy of Science side, we can build on work by philosophers of science with the goal of helping political scientists to address philosophical and methodological issues that arise in the practice of research. Recent philosophy of science as a discipline has mainly focused on the quality of scientific knowledge, but has also paid attention to the processes and conditions of the production and application of that knowledge. Analyzing those processes and conditions may involve looking at particular research methods, the social-epistemic make-up of a discipline, the relations between different scientific fields, the aims or requirements steering the scientific research, and the use of scientific knowledge, not only its efficacy but also its legitimacy. Legitimacy questions concerning the application
of scientific knowledge might concern, for example, possible harmful side-effect of applying specific findings, comparison with alternative methods for reaching similar aims, or the fair sharing of the benefits of scientific research. Typical topics in contemporary philosophy of science are the process and value of experimentation, evidence amalgamation, evidencebased deliberation, the transferability of case-based knowledge, mechanisms, causal pluralism, the accuracy and adequacy of scientific models, expertise and lay citizen’s input, values in science and policy making, and so on (cf. Humphreys 2016).
We favor a naturalist approach in line with most of contemporary philosophy of science. It is more productive to directly engage with the study of human behavior, institutions, and society, rather than rely on philosophical intuitions and ponder a priori—autonomously from scientific investigation—how to study the social world and wonder whether the social sciences can become “real” sciences. Contemporary philosophy of science supports an approach that studies scientific practices and remains informed about and participates in developments in the sciences. This approach requires more constructive interactions between philosophers and scientists, which may include joint research, peer review, and mutual criticism.
What would such constructive interactions look like in the case of political science? What would the dialogue between them—the typical Philosophy of Political Science issues— be like? Let us start with a (obviously nonexhaustive) list of possible issues:
• What should be the aims of political science?
• What are and should be the most important topics of political science research?
• What are the characteristics of good political science knowledge?
• Can political science knowledge be objective?
• How do we establish facts about the political world?
• What methods are most appropriate for political science research?
• What steps should the research process take in order to get to the best knowledge possible?
• How should we measure progress in political science research?
• Should there be restrictions in the application of political science knowledge?
• How should the community of political scientists be organized in order to obtain the best political science knowledge possible?
• What kind of interdisciplinarity is most beneficial for political science research?
• What is the role of values in political science?
• Is political science biased? If so, where and how?
• What is the best route to fruitfully involve other scientific disciplines, researchers or citizens?
• How could the epistemic benefits of political science research best be shared?
If we structure these possible issues and understandings of PoPS in relation to different stages of the research process, we can distinguish (at least) five questions:
(a) Where to look (from)?
(b) What to study?
(c) Why study?
(d) How to study?
(e) Who to involve in studying?
Question (a), where to look (from), is linked to the different frameworks, lenses, perspectives, approaches, research traditions, and vantage points we encounter in the study of politics, including the meaning and use of concepts in political science, the choice of the unit and level of analysis, the theoretical characterization (philosophical anthropology) of the agent, and the understanding of agency-structure relations among other things. These topics are central in part 1 of the volume, “Analyzing Basic Frameworks in Political Science.”
Question (b), what to study, asks what the important research questions in political science should be as well as how to make those decisions, who decides what research questions should (not) be prioritized, how a particular object of study is to be delineated, and what the scope of inquiry should be? The selection of research questions is, inter alia, discussed in part 4.
Question (c), why study, concerns what the purposes/aims/goals of research are. The answer(s) to that question could be, for example, to explain political phenomena, to predict, to give policy advice, to understand the limits on (possible) political change, to preserve or to criticize the status quo, to create new forms of political community, and so on. Robert Cox (1981, 128) emphasized that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose,” where he saw a clear divide between political science research with a “problem-solving” purpose—ensuring existing political arrangement to function smoothly—and research with a broader, “critical” purpose reflecting on how the political order came into being, changed over time and may change again in desired ways in the future. Another researcher considering different aims of political science research is Steve Smith (1996, 13): “Theories do not simply explain or predict, they tell us what possibilities exist for human action and intervention; they define not merely our explanatory possibilities, but also our ethical and practical horizons.” Therefore, making the epistemic and other interests underlying the research questions explicit might help us understand the dynamics of political science as a discipline. Some of these kinds of topics will be discussed in part 3, “Purposes and Uses of Political Science.”
Question (d), how to study, asks what is the appropriate method to answer research questions (also taking into account the purposes of researching those specific questions)? There are obviously some links between (b) “what to study” and (d) “how to study.” For example, some specialists working with a specific method are driven to apply the method to as many as questions as possible (and select topics to study accordingly), and others have urgent questions but are lacking an appropriate or a well-developed method to answer them and have to rely on unsatisfying existing methods. We think a broad agreement could be found that having a toolkit containing a lot of well-developed methods would be best in order to answer as many questions as possible in the best way possible, but once you get to the details of what that implies, a lot of trade-offs have to be made. This as well as other related topics are discussed in part 2, “Methods in Political Science, Debates, and Reconciliations.”
Question (e) concerns who to involve in the study, who participates in the research and how is the community of political science researchers best organized in order to best answer the research questions at hand? When addressing a research question, do you stick to the institutionalized discipline of political science or do you include other disciplines, other social scientists? Are there sharply defined boundaries of the political science discipline,
do you involve lay citizens, whose values should be prioritized, how to foster constructive criticism, how to discuss the applications of the research results, and so on? These type of questions, closely related to the field of social epistemology, have received a lot of attention recently and are some of the topics discussed in part 4, “Political Science in Society: Values, Expertise, and Progress.”
We believe that a systematic reflection on questions (a) to (e) will help us to understand what is involved in providing successful accounts of political phenomena.
4. The Structure of
the Volume
Let us now sketch briefly how this volume contributes to that systematic reflection by giving a short introduction to its different parts
Part 1: Analyzing Basic Frameworks in Political Science
Part 1 discusses various broad frameworks used in the study of political phenomena. By frameworks we mean things such as perspectives that help organize inquiry by providing categorizations and identifying the main causes to be studied. Frameworks can be allencompassing, determining vocabulary, theoretical relations, legitimate questions, scientific standards, appropriate methods and so on, or can be as simple as just an unordered list of variables to focus on. The different frameworks represented in this section generally fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum. They identify variables to be studied and potential relations among them. The chapters of Part 1 critically discuss some such frameworks in political science, analyzing their commitments and potential evidence. Sociobiological approaches, explanation via norms and game theory, rational choice, institutional analysis, collective action, and notions of mechanisms are the main topics.
Kaplan (Chapter 2) and Henderson and Schneider (Chapter 3) discuss biological approaches to political behavior. Kaplan, a major contributor to debates in philosophy of biology over genetic explanations (Kaplan 2000), focuses on biological explanations of political attitudes. He sorts out various differences in claims by proponents of “genopolitics” and then relates them to the general problem recognized in biology and philosophy of biology of explaining complex, environmentally dependent traits in genetic terms. Henderson and Schneider likewise consider biological (not necessarily genetic) explanations of political attitudes. They do so by using ideas from the large literature on the role of mechanisms in explanation, largely developed in the philosophy of biology. Surveying a substantial body of political science research focusing on biological and psychological underpinnings of political attitudes, they outline the implicit mechanistic models that are being proposed. The result is a hopefully clearer understanding of the debates and potential explanatory virtues and weaknesses.
Explanations of political phenomena via the behavior of maximizing individuals are the frameworks taken up by Herfeld and Marx (Chapter 4) and Ross, Stirling and Tummolini (Chapter 5). Herfeld and Marx look at a multiple interpretations of rational choice theory in political science and different explanatory purposes it might fill. Assessments of rational
choice theory need to in particular consider whether rational choice accounts are supposed to be psychologically realistic theories and whether they are accounts of individual or group behavior. The differences matter. Ross et al. discuss norms from a game theory perspective, particularly a conditional game theory perspective where norms are produced as preferences of individuals that are influenced by their interaction with others. Those preferences need not be strictly self-interested ones and are the traits of networks, not individuals alone. These chapters show how explicitly and rigorously analyzing the characteristics of the agent making rational choices matters greatly and small differences in philosophical anthropology might lead to very different findings in political science.
Frameworks relying on collective and institutional analysis are discussed in Chapter 6 by Aydinonat and Ylikoski and in Chapter 7 by Zamora-Bonilla. Aydinonat and Ylikoski discuss the problem of accounting for endogenous institutional change, looking particularly at broad equilibrium game theory perspectives. Game theory accounts of endogenous change have clear difficulties, and explaining institutional change is in general an open challenge for political science. Zamora-Bonilla continues the section with a historical survey of analytic approaches to collective choice, insightful in grasping how political scientists can conceive of necessarily collective decisions in very different ways as seen from different formal theoretical frameworks.
Thus, Part I moves from frameworks focusing on the most individual factors, namely, genetic makeup and other biological characteristics to increasingly social and collective approaches to political behavior. The general thrust is that all the approaches are partial and at best incomplete, with concrete assessments depending on specific details according to varying contexts. In the closing chapter of Part 1, Bennett and Mishkin (Chapter 8) address the plethora of viable alternative frameworks to explain political phenomena by introducing a taxonomy organizing nineteen kinds of theories about causal mechanisms. Reviewing within-agent, agent-agent, agent-structure, structure-agent, and structurestructure theories on ideas, material power, and institutions, they present the reader with a helpful guide to ensure no sensible alternative explanatory framework is being left out in researching political phenomena.
Part 2: Methods in Political Science, Debates, and Reconciliations
Part 2 considers a variety of issues in political science methodology. There has been an explosion of interesting methodological work in political science in the past two decades. Over the same time, there has been a general convergence in philosophy of science that is both postpositivist and post-Kuhnian, rejecting both simple-minded science as logic assumptions and pictures of science as nothing but rhetorical narratives. The chapters in Part 2 are largely about tying these two trends together in useful ways. Debates over concept delineation and measurement is part of any methodological debate. Crasnow in Chapter 9 takes up explicating and measuring one of the most fundamental concepts of political science—democracy. She carefully lays out the multiple decisions that have to be made, the role that values seem inevitably to play, and routes to objectivity. Pragmatic validation of measures in terms of robust generalizations is one appealing route.
