Empirical Political Science Research Articles

The History of Ideas and the Study of Politics

LJN RECENT YEARS, a cloud of methodological confusion has been cast over the study of politics. The traditional procedure, studying political institutions and selected texts from the classics of political philosophy, had previously existed in uneasy compromise in most politics departments. The application of sociological techniques to the study of politics has made that compromise even more difficult to maintain, and many observers have argued that politics, far from being a unified discipline, is simply a naive application of different disciplines to a loosely defined and notoriously ambiguous subject-matter. Politics, in short, is seen to possess no more unity than such a subject as European studies. A voice from America, perceiving the difficulties of the old world, has attempted to unify the study of politics by the application of new methods. Closely adhering to the methods of the natural sciences, strongly influenced by the techniques developed in cultural anthropology, the voice has called us to follow along the road to positivism to a haven of rigorously empirical political science. But if we are of a historical frame of mind, we will appreciate that revolutionary apostles have been quite a normal feature in the history of political thought. We need only recall the claims made by Hobbes about his science of politics. And the claim to base the study of politics upon the natural sciences is not itself a new phenomenon. It has been made with monotonous regularity since the

Information access at the data file level

In the mid-sixties, political and social science was theory-rich and data-poor. [1] In the decade following this statement, the ever-increasing holdings of machine-readable datasets in a growing chain of data repositories throughout the world have made the social science community much more wealthy. But, the vast scientific potential buried in data repositories is being transformed only at a slow pace. In the mid-seventies, quantitative data generated by empirical political and social science research are still heavily underexploited.

Invisible Politics: Critique of Empirical UrbanismThe Study of Community Power: A Bibliographical Review. By Willis D. Hawley and James H. Svara Police in Urban Society. By Harlan Hahn People and Politics in Urban Society. By Harlan Hahn The New Urban Politics: Cities and the Federal Government. By Douglas M. Fox Urban Political Analysis: A Systems Approach. By David R. Morgan

Marx wrote about the poverty of philosophy in his time. I feel compelled to write about the poverty of political science in its empirical, behavioral style and to question the relevancy of the entire political and sociological research enterprise. Obviously, I can not attempt to do a full-scale criticism within the compass of an article, but set against the back-drop of six current volumes of political science research I can at least begin to hope for better things. As the French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, we must try to speak as if no one has ever spoken before, yet never losing sight of the bearings which orient our thought and criticism. On the face of it, urban politics is a respectable enough venture in the new empirical political science. At least, the question-begging structural political science of past decades is overthrown under the all-seeing eye of empirical research. The study of power, since the Lynd's study of Middletown (with roots in Marx and Weber, not to mention Machiavelli), has been made realistic at least in the sense in which political institutional-

The Development of Empirical Political Science Research in West Germany

The Development of Empirical Political Science Research in West Germany

The Linkage between Urban Policy Outputs and Voting Behavior: New York and London

One of the complaints most frequently raised against modern empirical political science is that it overemphasizes political inputs (such as voting behavior) and pays insufficient attention to political outputs (such as allocation of resources). In response to this complaint, a number of political scientists in recent years have focused their attention on the question of whether variations in political inputs are much related to variations in outputs. A considerable literature has grown up around this question, particularly focusing on relationships between variations in electoral competitiveness and variations in public spending patterns across a range of different political systems. Because they are different yet comparable, American states have been the setting for much of this research. In addition to the state policy outputs literature, investigations have been undertaken of variations in outputs among differing jurisdictions within a metropolitan area and between variations in outputs and differing types of city organizational structure. The focus of the research reported on here is somewhat different. Rather than looking at variations between political systems, we focus here on variations within political systems. Without dealing with all of the literature alluded to above, and the myriad criticisms that each attempt has spawned, it seems fair to say that the general conclusion of most researchers has been that political characteristics account for little of the variation in output between political systems, and that variation in levels of wealth is usually a far more powerful predictor. Such a conclusion, however, does not relate to the possible impact of politics on allocational decisions within a single jurisdiction. While the City

A Critique of Karl O'Lessker's "Who Voted for Hitler?"

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommentary and DebateA Critique of Karl O'Lessker's "Who Voted for Hitler?"Allan SchnaibergAllan Schnaiberg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 74, Number 6May, 1969 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/224723 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1969 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Abraham H. Miller and James S. Robbins Who Did Vote for Hitler? A Reanalysis of the Lipset/Bendix Controversy, Polity 21, no.44 (Nov 2016): 655–677.https://doi.org/10.2307/3234718D. W. Urwin The other German Question, Political Studies 31, no.22 (Jun 1983): 304–311.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1983.tb01349.xJames D. Wright Political Disaffection, (Jan 1981): 1–79.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3878-9_1David P. Conradt The Development of Empirical Political Science Research in West Germany, Comparative Political Studies 6, no.33 (Oct 1973): 380–391.https://doi.org/10.1177/001041407300600305W. Phillips Shively Party Identification, Party Choice, and Voting Stability: The Weimar Case, American Political Science Review 66, no.44 (Aug 2014): 1203–1225.https://doi.org/10.2307/1957174

The Function of Formal Education in a Political System

The attention that political science has devoted to problems of education has a peculiar if not a puzzling history. Over two thousand years ago education occupied a prominent position in political thought; today, in political science as a whole, attention to problems of education has all but disappeared. It is not easy to account for this condition. From the very beginnings of political speculation, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle, political philosophers were sensitive to the role of education in political life, and they have continued their concern to the present day. But their steadfast awareness of, and interest in, education has not been sufficient to induce them to seek out the way in which education does in fact influence political life. As we shall see in a moment, their preoccupations have been of a different order. But if the very nature of the tasks that philosophers posed for themselves stifled a concern for the practical effects of education on political life, this did not need to be the case for empirical political science. If anywhere, it was here that the philosopher's ideas about education should have been converted into a practical program for research with regard to educational institutions. As the weight of knowledge began to press men into specialized research during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as moral philosophy began to break up into today's many specialized social disciplines, political