The politics of identities and the tasks of political science

Abstract

Those of us in political science who subscribe to the view that our research should be “problem driven,” with methods chosen according to what is needed to explore those problems, bear the burden of defining and defending the substantive political problems that we think we should address, and explaining why certain methods are suitable for doing so. This chapter contends that contemporary political science should give high (though certainly not exclusive) priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which senses of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do so, we will need to rely more than the discipline collectively has done on approaches that provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values, and on identification of historical and contextual differences in identities and values. We cannot rely solely or even predominantly on approaches that seek to improve our formal grasp of instrumental rationality, or even on efforts to seek to identify timeless, enduring regularities in political behavior that are relatively independent of specific historical contexts. Though valuable for other purposes, in regard to processes of political identity formation and transformation, those methods generally contribute most when they are but components of projects that rest extensively on contextually informed interpretive accounts. Yet even if, in regard to such problems, we must often move away from striving to develop a single thin, universal theory of all politics, we should still be able to formulate somewhat less abstract theoretical frameworks that can help us identify both near-universal patterns of political conduct, and some necessarily suprahistorical theories about the means and mechanisms of historical transformations.