Methodological Transformations in Contemporary Political Science

Abstract

This article seeks to identify, map, and understand a set of institutions – understood as values, beliefs, and parameters – that structure the scientific knowledge in political science over the past 20 years. Its basic purpose is to map the “fundamental” values that had produced a new paradigm for academic production in the contemporary political science. The central argument of the paper is that Political Science is moving throughout a methodological transformation in which causal inference is pursued by means of several research design types, condition I named as inferential pluralism.