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1 Political ResearchThis book has been written for undergraduate and graduate students of politics, with two
main purposes in mind. These are to provide you, first, with the analytic skills and resources
you need to evaluate research findings in political research; and, second, with the practical
skills you need to carry out your own independent research. These twin goals are important
for getting the most out of your study of politics.
The study of politics can often be complicated and confusing. In studying politics, we
are frequently confronted with opposing ideas and arguments about a wide variety of dif-
ferent political phenomena. Is multiculturalism doomed to failure? Has globalization un-
dermined national sovereignty? Is there a crisis of democracy and participation? Is conflict
an inevitable consequence of religious, ethnic, and social difference? The answers to these
questions, whether provided by academics, politicians, or journalists, can be inconsistent
and contradictory. How do we know what to believe or who to trust?
A solid training in research skills can help us make sense of conflicting arguments and
interpretations—to distinguish between those that are relatively sound and robust, and
those that are unsubstantiated or rely on misleading or faulty inference. These skills are
therefore crucial for helping us to make sense of the world. They help us to evaluate the
merits of different arguments and the research of others, and to make our own arguments
strong and convincing. Learning research skills is an active process that engages you in
developing the ability to investigate the world around you and discover things for yourself.
Pursuing research that enables you to find your own answers to questions, rather than just
relying on what is said or has been written by others, can be exciting and challenging. It can
lead you into new and surprising terrain.
These skills are at the core of political research. And understanding them and being able
to use them transforms you from being a passive recipient of knowledge into an active pro-
tagonist. As students of politics, you are not only acquiring knowledge about the world of
politics, you are also joined to a research community. Through engagement with research
and writing in our field, and the independent thought and research you pursue in your own
research projects, dissertations, or theses, you contribute to knowledge about the political
world. But these skills also have wider relevance. They enable you to find creative solutions
to problems and hone your analytical skills. They are genuinely transferable skills in that
they can be used to sharpen and expand your thinking in whatever you do. We hope that
through reading this book, and by engaging seriously with the principles and practices of
political research, you will not only be more informed or knowledgeable about political af-
fairs, but also become engaged, yourself, in a search for solutions to important problems of
a public, political, or collective nature.
,2 POLITICAL RESEARCH
This book focuses on how to ask and answer questions about the political world. The ways
in which we go about this, the methods that enable us to conduct systematic inquiry, allow
us to connect our ideas about the way the political world works to evidence of what actually
happens. Students sometimes view the study of methods as a kind of imposition—a set of
rules and constraints designed to mould research into conformity with the conventions of
a given field of study. This is misleading! Methods are not constraining: they are enabling.
Research methods are essentially about how to make arguments. All of us already know
how to do this. We make them every day. We come up with well-reasoned arguments why
others should believe what we believe, or why our way of doing something is better than
other ways. And to make our arguments convincing we sometimes illustrate them with
examples. Thus, research methods are embedded in the ways that we normally think and
reason about things. What social science research requires you to do is to apply the skills of
reasoning and argumentation you use in everyday life to larger questions of political life,
and to hone these skills by thinking about what sort of evidence or examples you need to
really support your argument. We have all learned to be wary about the use of anecdotal
evidence. We don’t consider the friend of a friend who saw or heard something to be a reli-
able source, and will often discount what people say if it is based on unreliable evidence. Re-
search skills simply build on these intuitive everyday skills that we employ all the time. They
are an organic and creative aspect of thinking and problem-solving. Moreover, they are
intrinsically linked to the substantive concerns of our field. In our view, devising a research
strategy that enables you to investigate or demonstrate an argument, hunch, or hypothesis
is one of the really creative aspects of doing political research. It is the aspect of research
that perhaps provides the greatest scope for independent thinking and creativity. Methods
help you to build upon or synthesize the work of others, to connect up the work of different
writers and thinkers with each other, or link together separate areas of study or studies of a
single issue, in a way that generates fresh insights, that expands, extends, refines our knowl-
edge of a political problem, puzzle, issue, system, process, structure, issue, or event.
Our approach to political research consists of three basic positions. First, we encourage
pluralism in methodological approaches to political research. Politics is a multi-method
field of study. The authors of this text reflect this pluralism. One of us pursues qualitative
and exploratory historical-comparative work; the other quantitative and comparative work.
Second, we believe that research should be problem-driven: that a research method only
makes sense in so far as it is a way of investigating some problem. The value of any method
can only be determined in relation to a research question; and the choice of which to use
should always be driven by the research question that is to be investigated (see, for back-
ground and debate on this issue, Laitin 2005 and Shapiro 2005a, 2005b). Third, we believe re-
search should have relevance to important political questions and policy issues. For research
to be worth pursuing, we have to be interested in the question, and interested in the answer.
Issues in political research
This book, then, is concerned with how to formulate questions that are significant and how
to develop meaningful and persuasive answers to them. A significant question is one that is
‘directly relevant to solving real-world problems and to furthering the goals of a specific
, Political Research 3
scientific literature’ (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994: 18). There is not always agreement
about what constitutes a meaningful and plausible answer to a research question. But we
can all agree that our answers should help to generate valid and reliable knowledge about
the questions that they address. This requires that answers be developed through a process
of inquiry that, at every step, is both self-aware and critical, and that researchers make clear
and transparent how their conclusions were reached.
What research practices and methods enable political researchers to conduct systematic
inquiry and thus make it possible for them to offer credible answers to important ques-
tions? This question has generated considerable debate.
Agreement on this question is difficult to achieve, in part because politics is such a di-
verse discipline. It struggles to even agree on a name. The study of politics is carried on in
Departments of Politics, or Government, or Political Science or, in the UK, Departments
of Politics and International Relations, to name just a few. The array of names reflects a
variety of views about what constitutes the discipline. The growing tendency for sub-fields
of political research, such as International Relations, to become institutionalized as almost
separate fields of inquiry further fragments the field of study. Other divisions exist within
the discipline, as well. There is a tendency to define empirical issues and the study of the
‘real world’, and normative issues and the study of political ‘ideas and values’, as involving
separate research areas and traditions. And even scholars who study ‘real-world’ problems
are divided about what constitutes empirical knowledge and how it can be achieved. Al-
though these divisions are the focus of lively debate and disagreement within the discipline,
they should not be overstated. Ultimately many of these oppositions are not as profound
as they are often presented as being, and there is still more that unites the discipline than
divides it. In the rest of this section we discuss some of these controversies in more detail.
Politics and International Relations
In recent years there has been a tendency to treat Politics and International Relations as
separate fields of study, each with their own professional associations, journals, degree
schemes, and even, in some universities, different departments. The establishment of these
sub-fields institutionalized a division of the political world into processes and structures
that are internal to states (local, domestic, or national politics), and those that are e xternal
to them (interactions and relations among states). However, like many in our field, we have
come to question whether, within the general study of politics, it is productive to treat
domestic and international processes, systems, events, and issues as analytically distinct.
Increasingly, scholars in our field are recognizing that this distinction often obfuscates fun-
damental interdependencies of interstate and domestic systems. Politics and International
Relations are both concerned with states, political systems, development, conflict, ideology,
social movements, geopolitics, nationalism, political participation, and political philosophy.
All aspects of politics are affected by governments, public administration and public policy,
elections and voter behaviour, political parties, political culture, mass publics and elector-
ates, interest groups, and public opinion, as well as by the interactions among states, the
structure of the international system, international political economy, international organi-
zations, and international law.
, 4 POLITICAL RESEARCH
Researchers have increasingly come to appreciate the extent to which political processes
operate across levels, or at multiple scales, of analysis. Societies interact, not just with their
own governments, but with other societies and governments, and with international orga-
nizations; and because states have to answer to groups within their societies, a consideration
of domestic relations is necessary to explaining outcomes in international relations. With
a growing awareness of structural linkages between societies and the multiple channels
that connect societies has come a tendency not to assume the sufficiency of any one scale
of analysis to an understanding of political outcomes. Consequently, this book addresses
the study of Politics and of International Relations as a single area of inquiry; and we ad-
dress ourselves, as well, to students of all sub-fields of political research, including Political
Theory (classical political philosophy and contemporary theoretical perspectives), Public
Policy (the process by which governments make public decisions), Public Administration
(the ways that government policies are implemented), and Public Law (the role of law and
courts in the political process).
Empirical vs normative research
Political research has also tended to define a sharp distinction between ‘empirical’ and ‘nor-
mative’ research. Empirical research addresses events and political phenomena that we ob-
serve in the real world: questions about what is; normative research addresses questions
about what should or ought to be. However, this distinction also appears to have decreasing
relevance for many scholars. Empirical research is always shaped to some extent by norma-
tive thinking; and normative research embodies ‘empirical’ claims about the character of
human and natural realities (Smith 2004: 86).
As John Gerring and Joshua Yesnowitz argue, empirical study of social phenomena ‘is
meaningless if it has no normative import; and it is misleading if its normative content
is . . . [left] ambiguous’, if we don’t know how it matters (Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006: 104).
Indeed, the justification for why a research question is interesting or relevant or meaningful
is essentially a normative one. But at the same time normative arguments that propose or
justify one value system over another will lack relevance if they make no attempt to relate
to the facts of actual practice or public life. As Steve Buckler (2010: 156) points out, norma-
tive theory is concerned both about the world as it is and as we might think it ought to be.
In sum, good social science is both empirically grounded ‘and relevant to human concerns’
(Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006: 133). Normative theorizing ‘must deal in facts’ and empiri-
cal work ‘must deal in values’ (2006: 108). We must be clear about the difference between
normative and empirical questions and statements; but we must recognize that they are not
independent of each other.
Recent discussions about the theory of deliberative democracy illustrate these points.
Early research on the subject by scholars like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls debated
the normative justifications of deliberative democracy, interpretations, and necessary com-
ponents of the theory, but failed to take account of the sheer complexity of contemporary
societies (Elstub 2010: 291). However, recent research has tried to engage more seriously
with the empirical realities of this social complexity (see Baber and Bartlett 2005; O’Flynn
2006; Parkinson 2006). As Chapter 3 will endeavour to show, theory and evidence inform
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