Chapter 1 - Political Research
The authors of this book reflect pluralism. One pursues qualitative and exploratory
historical-comparitive work, while the other author does quantitative and comparitive
work. The authors also believe that research should be problem-driven and research
should be relevant to political problems.
In political research, there is a lot of debate on the name itself. The term politics is
not even clear and there are a lot of viewpoints.
There is a tendency to seperate empirical research and normative research. (’what
is’ against ‘what should be’)
Politics and international relations tend to be seperate as well, but there are growing
concerns because of this seperation. They are not analytically distinct. This book
addresses the study of Politics and International Relations as one.
Normative and empirical research are different kinds of research, but they are not
independent of each other. Normative research shapes empirical research and vice
versa.
Epistemology is concerned with understanding and explaining how we know what
we know. This is important because “If we don’t understand the different positions
that exist with regard to what is knowable about the soccial world, we will be
unaware of the implications of choices we and others make when conducting
research.”
There are two main theories is epistemology.
1. Positivism: Scientific knowledge is limited to what we can actually observe and
we can predict things through regularities.
2. Interpretivism: We can interpretate the meanings which give people reason and
understand human behaviour and gain knowledge.
Positivism and interpretivism have different views about the nature of the social
world. We call this research of this nature ontology.
There is also an distinction between quantitative and qualitative research.
Quantitative research tends to be based on the statistical analysis of carefully
coded information for many cases or observations.
Qualitative research tends to be based on the discursive analysis of more
loosely coded information for just a few cases.
Chapter 1 - Political Research 1
The authors of this book reflect pluralism. One pursues qualitative and exploratory
historical-comparitive work, while the other author does quantitative and comparitive
work. The authors also believe that research should be problem-driven and research
should be relevant to political problems.
In political research, there is a lot of debate on the name itself. The term politics is
not even clear and there are a lot of viewpoints.
There is a tendency to seperate empirical research and normative research. (’what
is’ against ‘what should be’)
Politics and international relations tend to be seperate as well, but there are growing
concerns because of this seperation. They are not analytically distinct. This book
addresses the study of Politics and International Relations as one.
Normative and empirical research are different kinds of research, but they are not
independent of each other. Normative research shapes empirical research and vice
versa.
Epistemology is concerned with understanding and explaining how we know what
we know. This is important because “If we don’t understand the different positions
that exist with regard to what is knowable about the soccial world, we will be
unaware of the implications of choices we and others make when conducting
research.”
There are two main theories is epistemology.
1. Positivism: Scientific knowledge is limited to what we can actually observe and
we can predict things through regularities.
2. Interpretivism: We can interpretate the meanings which give people reason and
understand human behaviour and gain knowledge.
Positivism and interpretivism have different views about the nature of the social
world. We call this research of this nature ontology.
There is also an distinction between quantitative and qualitative research.
Quantitative research tends to be based on the statistical analysis of carefully
coded information for many cases or observations.
Qualitative research tends to be based on the discursive analysis of more
loosely coded information for just a few cases.
Chapter 1 - Political Research 1
