Is It Possible To Study Politics Scientifically?

1. This question encourages you to think about the key subject matter of Politics and how far it is possible (and even desirable if you want to attend to the normative implications) to study it in a scientific fashion. & The question operates at the “Science-Politics” nexus.

The key, then, is to think about the two key terms in the question: “Politics [as discipline of inquiry]” and “Science”. A bad answer would avoid thinking through the meaning of the terms and dive straight into an analysis of the different “facts” we can bring to bear in our analysis, say, of political decisions, voting behaviour, party systems, constitutions or different policy agendas. Whilst good science is indeed rooted in fact, the implications of “doing” Politics using human-generated data about non-tangible objects (the very stuff of Politics) spread far and wide. The bad answer would, therefore, avoid dealing with an underlying issue the question is trying to get you to reflect on: the philosophy of [social] science. It would show limited analytical skill. lt;/p>

To give your answer conceptual clarity and critical edge here are some suggestions about the kinds of issues you might raise and reflect on. Remember they want to hear the logic of your position in your verbal “working out”, so don’t be afraid to talk the interviewers through the difficulties of arriving at an easy answer. Remember you are looking at Politics-as-Science. lt;/p>

2. It is reasonable to begin by unpacking the term Science:

o There is a huge literature on the Philosophy of Science and Social Science: Thomas Kuhn’s work is particularly good here. lt;/p>

o You do not need to be an expert on this material but everyone has studied some form of science (think Physics, Chemistry, Biology). So you should be able to think about the differences between the natural and social sciences.

o The gist is that in the natural sciences the objects of study are, more often than not, tangible “things” we can see and study. lt;/p>

o In laboratory conditions we can do experiments on these objects to ascertain causality (why outcome X flows from input Y). EG, we can test the boiling point of water by heating it up and measuring the temperature at which it bubbles.

o We can report our findings in “neutral” language that clearly states what we did and what we found. lt;/p>

o Others in the global scientific community can replicate our experiments and test our findings. For example, water can be heated up anywhere to test its properties at different temperatures. lt;/p>

o Over time, different “truths” about the workings of the physical world emerge from this continued community approach to undertaking simple experiments like this, and more complex ones. lt;/p>

o Bad scientists get exposed and bad science gets refuted in the court of scientific opinion. Science in this approach is all about slowly gaining a better understanding of external reality. & lt;/p>

3. So what about Politics?:

o Does any of the above map straight forwardly onto what goes on in the study of the Social Sciences, including Politics?

o Unfortunately we cannot put politicians’ beliefs under the microscope to discover the “truth” of what caused them.

o Political decisions, constitutions, voting behaviour, party systems are loose collections of practices wrapped up in different kinds of ideational structures, institutional structures, and human agency (the stories we tell about how we think the world works and how we and others act in it). They are strongly influenced by historical activity (and our perceptions of that too). lt;/p>

o Books such as Mark Bevir’s Governance Stories (part of the “interpretivist” turn in Politics/IR) shows how explanations in Politics are arrived at differently than in the harder sciences.

4. And yet people have been trying to create a “science” of Politics for centuries. Minogue’s work on the Greek and Roman approach to Politics shows how they viewed it as the search for patterns in the rise and fall of Empires resting on an account of human nature and divine intervention.

o Much more recently, post-WW2, the heavily US-dominated discipline of Political Science (note the name) attempted to build the discipline on a heavily quantitative approach. Death by numbers can look scientific – but is it? lt;/p>

o Even a quantitative approach to Politics cannot escape a simple “fact”: that the study of collections of organised human behaviour manifest in different ideologies, party positions, voter outlooks and governing institutions is not amenable to study in the same way that the hard sciences are. lt;/p>

o Ideas and beliefs and the associated practices in different cultures and societies are elusive and our access to them is never first hand. lt;/p>

5. Ultimately, this is not to say that facts do not matter in Politics or that there is no scientific basis for it. We need not need to slip into extreme relativism or “post-truth” to reflect on the challenges of “doing” good science. lt;/p>

o Rather, it is a reminder that we need to be critically reflexive in Politics about our own role in selecting, gathering and reporting the data, and to make our “experiments” as replicable as possible so our findings can undergo the same test in the court of Political Science opinion.