Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

by Ian Shapiro (editor), Rogers M. Smith (Editor), Tarek E. Masoud (Editor)

The study of politics seems endlessly beset by debates about method. At the core of these debates is a single unifying should political scientists view themselves primarily as scientists, developing ever more sophisticated tools and studying only those phenomena to which such tools may fruitfully be applied? Or should they instead try to illuminate the large, complicated, untidy problems thrown up in the world, even if the chance to offer definitive explanations is low? Is there necessarily a tension between these two endeavours? Are some domains of political inquiry more amenable to the building up of reliable, scientific knowledge than others, and if so, how should we deploy our efforts? In this book, some of the world's most prominent students of politics offer original discussions of these pressing questions, eschewing narrow methodological diatribes to explore what political science is and how political scientists should aspire to do their work.

Genres: Politics

432 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 9, 2004

About the author

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. In democratic theory, he has argued that democracy's value comes primarily from its potential to limit domination rather than, as is conventionally assumed, from its operation as a system of participation, representation, or preference aggregation. In debates about social scientific methods, he is chiefly known for rejecting prevalent theory-driven and method-driven approaches in favor of starting with a problem and then devising suitable methods to study it.

Reviews

[Jas · Rating 1 out of 5]

The last piece in the book by Mearsheimer points out that barely any of the contributors addressed the question raised by the contributors and it led me to wonder what the point of assigning the entire book for a course was. Moreover, the book spends tonnes of time talking about rational choice theory, which to me seemed useless.