politics as a science also known as Politology
Preface and Acknowledgments
These are the reflections of a professor who has had a lengthy career researching and teaching “the politics of others” – known in the profession as “comparative politics.” Always being on the outside looking in has its
advantages – and disadvantages. It should make one less susceptible to presuming that the rules and practices of one’s own polity are normal and should provide the standard for observing and evaluating the politics of others. It also, however, means that the necessarily short exposure to other people’s politics – and it gets shorter and shorter as one gets older –
deprives the researcher of the depth of observation needed to capture the subtleties and secrets of their behavior. Of course, one can always take refuge in statistical manipulations of data that can be gathered at home without having to go to some exotic locale. My experience has suggested that there is no substitute for living among and talking with the subjects of one’s analysis – and preferably in their own language.
This lengthy essay makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no
disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of data, no search for
patterns of association and certainly no conclusive inferences about
causality. It is self-consciously “pre-scientific.” Before one can do any
science, but especially any social science, one must identify and label
what it is that one is trying to understand or explain. Without the ‘right’
words (and the right theory surrounding them), the researcher could not
even begin his or her task, much less gather the relevant data. In the case of political (or any social) research, “Que Dire?” comes before “Que Faire?” This indispensable first stage is called “conceptualization” in academic jargon. It is a sort of mapping process in which the researchertries to specify the goal of his or her trip, some of the landmarks that he or she is likely to encounter en route, and the boundaries that circumscribe the effort. Continue reading here