Identities, Interests, and the Future of Political Science

Abstract

tioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline’s more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. 2 Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments. Despite what some may fear, an increased focus on how political identities are formed and on their behavioral and normative significance need not mean abandoning aspirations to do rigorous social science in favor of purely thick descriptive or subjective accounts. Political scientists who study problems of political identity should still be able to develop less abstract theoretical frameworks that can help us to discern and explain both the origins and transformations of particular political identities and near-universal patterns of political conduct. We may also be able to develop some supra-historical theories about the means and mechanisms of consequential historical transformations in political affiliations and behavior. Even in our interpretive and contextual characterizations, moreover, we still have to conform as rigorously as we can, as King, Keohane, and Verba have rightly urged, to a unified “logic of scientific inference,” although we should not equate that logic with the particular statistical techniques, all necessarily limited, that are commonly used to approximate it at any given time. 3 If we are to judge, for example, to what conceptions of their identities and interests particular political actors are giving priority, we need to form some hypotheses based on what we think we know about those actors. Then, we define the different implications of alternative hypotheses. Finally, we look for observable data about their lives that we can use to falsify some of the hypotheses. That logic is constant, though the techniques of falsification will vary with the types of problems particular data present and with the tools currently at our disposal. Yet though the challenge of drawing reliable inferences is universal in social science, the most crucial work in analyzing political identities must often be done by immersing ourselves in information about the actors in question, and using both