Transcript The Methodological Foundation.

The Methodological
Foundation.
Is there such a thing as
progress in political
science?
Do we know more than
the Ancients?
Methodological Progress
• Personal computers (1981)
• Sophisticated software for both
quantitative (SPSS) and qualitative
(NUD.IST, QUALRUS) analysis.
• The Internet
• Explosion in the availability of data,
databases, and posibilities of analysis.
But...
Perennial Questions:
Students of politics face
similar problems than the
Classics
Three Precursors of
comparative politics:
• Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
• Machiavelli (1469-1527)
• De Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Aristotle:
• Historical comparative work.
• Empirical study of Constitutions of 158
Greek cities, of which the only recovered
is his work on the Constitution of
Athens.
• Written in different pieces Aristotle and
members of his School used for both
research and teaching (=we do today).
• Aristotle kept adding different pieces
Aristotle: classification of
Constitutions
Agent
One
Few
Many
Monarchy
(kingship)
Tyranny
Aristocracy Polity
Oligarchy
Democracy
(monarch)
(the wealthy)
(the needy)
Form
of rule
Good
Corrupt
Aristotle is also the first who sees
the importance of the middle
class
According to him, we need some equality of
conditions to achieve freedom and friendship
between the people:
“a city ought to be composed, as far as possible,
of equals and similars; and these are generally
the middle classes. Wherefore the city which is
composed of middle-class citizens is
necessarily best constituted in respect of the
elements of which we say the fabric of the state
naturally consists.” (308)
Together with his philosophical
work, this makes Aristotle the
founder of Western political science:
• Aristotle (normative+empirical
investigations) Vs. Plato (normative only)
• In Book II of his Politics, Aristotle depicts
both the ideal (Ch. 1-8) and “the best
existent states” (Ch. 9-12), in which he
considers Sparta, Creta, and the
Carthaginian.
Book IV
• “it is obvious that government... Is the
subject of a single science, which has
to consider what government is best
and of what sort it must be, to be most
in accordance with our aspirations, if
there were no external impediment, and
also what kind of government is
adapted to particular states.” (Aristotle)
“The new science …should deal with
actual as well as ideal forms of
government and it should teach the art of
governing and organizing states of any
sort in any desired manner. This new
general science of politics, therefore, was
not only empirical and descriptive, but
even in some respects independent of any
ethical purpose, since a statesman might
need to be expert in governing even a bad
state.”
George Sabine, p. 91
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, Ch. 1:
“All states and all dominions that have had
and continue to have power over men
were and still are either hereditary, in
which instance the family of the prince
has ruled for generations, or they are
new. And the new ones are either
completely new, as was Milan for
Francesco Sforza, or they are like…
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, Ch. 1:
…members added to the hereditary state
of the prince who acquires them, as is
the Kingdom of Naples for the King of
Spain. Dominions taken in this way are
either used to living under a prince or
are accustomed to being free; and they
are gained either by the arms of others
or by one’s own, either through Fortune
or through cleverness.”
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, Ch. 1:
• “I shall set aside any discussion of
republics, because I treated them
elsewhere at length. I shall consider
solely the principality... And I shall
discuss how these principalities can be
governed and maintained.” (79)
Machiavelli, Discourses
• “When we consider, then, how much honor is
attributed to antiquity... I cannot but be at the
same time both amazed and sorry. And I am even
more amazed when I see that in civil disputes
which arise among citizens, or in sicknesses that
break out, men always have recourse to those
judgments or remedies which were pronounced or
prescribed by the ancients. (...) Nevertheless, in
instituting republics, maintaining states,
governing kingdoms, organizing the army and
administering a war, dispensing justice to
subjects, and increasing an empire one cannot
find a prince or a republic that has recourse to the
examples of the ancients.” (170)
• Causes: Christianism, ignorance of history.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America (1835):
“Amongst the novel objects that
attracted my attention during my stay
in the United States, nothing struck me
more forcibly than the general equality
of conditions.”
Alexis de Tocqueville:
“The more I advanced in the study of
American society, the more I perceived
that the equality of conditions is the
fundamental fact from which all others
seem to be derived...”
Alexis de Tocqueville:
“I then turned my thoughts to our own
hemisphere, where I imagined that I discerned
something analogous to the spectacle which
the New World presented to me. I observed
that the equality of conditions is daily
progressing towards those extreme limits,
which it seems to have reached in the United
States... It is evident to all alike that a great
democratic revolution is going on among us”
(Introduction, p.3)
The modern social sciences...
• Developed since the beginning of the 19th century,
with the spread of a program of applying the
scientific method to the systematic study of social
phenomena.
• Influence of Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825),
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and his “Social
physics,” and John Stuart Mill.
– Positivism (search for LAWS).
• In his System of Logic (1843) Mill devotes a
special section to the method in the social
sciences.
Mill, The System of Logic
• “The Social Science... is a deductive science;
not, indeed, after the model of geometry, but
after that of the more complex physical
sciences. It infers the law of each effect from
the laws of causation on which that effect
depends; not, however, from the law merely of
one cause, as in the geometrical method; but
by considering all the causes which conjunctly
influence the effect, and compounding their
laws with one another.”
On the Complexity of the Social
World:
“If all the resources of science are not
sufficient to enable us to calculate à priori,
with complete precision, the mutual action
of three bodies gravitating towards one
another; it may be judged with what
prospect of success we should endeavour
to calculate the result of the conflicting
tendencies which are acting in a thousand
different directions and promoting a
thousand different changes at a given
instant in a given society:...
“...although we might and ought to be
able, from the laws of human nature, to
distinguish correctly enough the
tendencies themselves, so far as they
depend on causes accessible to our
observation; and to determine the
direction which each of them, if acting
alone, would impress upon society, as
well as, in a general way at least, to
pronounce that some of these tendencies
are more powerful than others.”
Mill, Indirect Verification:
“The conclusion drawn as to the individual case
can only be directly verified in that case; but it is
verified indirectly by the verification of other
conclusions, drawn in other individual cases from
the same laws. (...) The test of the degree in which
the science affords safe ground for predicting (and
consequently for practically dealing with) what has
not yet happened, is the degree in which it would
have enabled us to
predict what has actually occurred.”
SCIENCE AND UTILITARIANISM
“The aim of practical politics is to surround
any given society with the greatest possible
number of circumstances of which the
tendencies are beneficial, and to remove or
counteract, as far as practicable, those of
which the tendencies are injurious. A
knowledge of the tendencies ...gives us to a
considerable extent this power.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that,
even with respect to tendencies, we could
arrive in this manner at any great number of
propositions which will be true in all societies
without exception.”
Basic Methodological Jargon
• Unit of analysis
• Variable
– Dimension
• Valor
– Indicator
Units of analysis
• Objects on which we collect data. Ex:
countries, households, individuals,
protests, etc.
Levels of analysis (units)
• Macro: countries, governments, social
classes, revolutions.
• (holism)
• Micro: individuals
• (methodological individualism)
We can always aggregate data collected on a lower
level of analysis, but we cannot disaggregate data
collected on a higher level
Variables
• Concepts whose values change over a
given set of units (ex: sex, wealth, economic
growth, party identification, etc.)
– Dimension: there are complex variables whose
value results from sub-variables (ex: indicators
of Human Development) whose values contribute
to define the value of the variable, and they are
thus the dimensions of the variable.
Variables: Levels of
Measurement.
• Nominal Variables: Qualitative properties that
characterize the unit of analysis (ex: gender,
nationality).
• Ordinal Variables: qualitative properties that
we can rank (ex: poor, middle-class, rich;
grades A,B,C,D,E,F)
• Interval Variables: the distance between the
attributes is meaningful (it can be measured).
(ex scores: 92, 87,85, 65,56).
Valor
• It is the state the variable assumes
for each unit, and may be expressed
in a number, a word, or an image (ex:
“female,” “poor,” “$34,000 per year,”)
• Indicator is the procedure used for
generating a value for the variable
(ex: a question in a survey)
TABLE
Variable
Income
Household
#1
Unit of
Value
$34,500
analysis
Indicator (i.e. Question: “How much money do people in your
household make every year?”)
Dependent and Independent
Variables
• Dependent variables are those whose
variations we are trying to explain.
• Independent variables are those we use
to explain portions of variation in the
dependent variable.
Method
• Inductive: makes generalizations
from observing individual cases.
• Deductive: makes individual
inferences (using known facts to
learn sth. About the unknown) from
general rules.
Combination
Quantitative /Qualitative
Methods
• Quantitative methods show
differences between units of
analysis expressed in numbers.
• Qualitative methods show those
differences expressed in kind.