POLI 338 SLIDES

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POLI 338 SLIDES
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Historical Development of Political Analysis

• Normative (Political Philosophy)
• Institutional/Legal
• Behavioral
• Post-Behavioral Eclecticism

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Assumptions behind Standard Social Science

• Principle of determinism
• Principle of empiricism
• Principle of the common paradigm
• Analytical distinction between questions of fact
  and questions of value

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Elements of standard science approach

• Search patterns and relations
• Necessary and sufficient conditions
• Based on testing and falsification of hypotheses
• Using empirical evidence
• Requiring precision in the use of concepts
• Focusing on measurable phenomena (variables)
• nominal
• ordinal
• interval

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Laws, Hypothesis and Theory

• A Covering law A Confirmed relationship between
  variables
• A Hypothesis A guess that those relationships
  will or will not exist in a given context
• A Theory An explanation of why those
  relationships exist, linking different studies
  one to another, giving substantive significance,
  and providing an interpretation of the larger
  meaning of the findings.
• (Hoover and Donovan, Elements of Social
  Scientific Thinking, p. 35)

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Empirical Research Methods

• EXPERIMENTAL
• NON-EXPERIMENTAL
• Statistical
• Comparative
• Case Study

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Comparative Methodology

• Large N comparisons
• Small N comparisons
• Method of difference
• Method of agreement
• Method of concomitant variation

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Behavioralism

• Application of principles of scientific reasoning
  to political behavior
• Links to sociology and social psychology
• Focus on individual actors rather than
  institutions and collectives

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Rational Choice

• Deductive rather than inductive approach
• A construction of logical propositions about
  behaviour
• Methodological individualism (reductionist)
• Unifying model to simplify representations of
  reality
• A standard against which non-rational behavior
  can be measured

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Applications

• The Beach Problem
• Anthony Downs, Economic Theory of Democracy
• The Prisoners Dilemma
• The free rider syndrome
• Exit, Voice, Loyalty

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The Beach Problem

• A beach
• Evenly distributed consumers
• Two vendors selling exactly the same product
• ??? Where do they stand

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Downsian Model of Democracy

• Voters equated to consumers wishing to maximize
  their utility
• Parties wish to maximize votes
• Under different conditions, where do they
  position themselves on the ideological spectrum?

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The Prisoners dilemma YOU
ME
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Traditional Institutionalism

• Formal rules, rather than informal conventions
  government rather than governance
• Normative concerned with good government
• Structuralist structures determine political
  behavior
• Historicist central influence of history
• Holistic whole systems of government

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The New Institutionalism

• A focus on rules, rather than organizations
• A focus on the informal rather than the formal
• From a static to a dynamic conception or
  process -- institutionalization
• From submerged values to a value-critical stance
• From the holistic to the disaggregated
• From independence to embeddedness

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The development of feminist political science

• Critique of malestream political theory and
  political science
• Investigation of womens under-representation in
  domestic and international politics
• More fundamental epistemological and
  methodological critique

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Feminist Ontologies

• The personal as political
• Tendencies toward anti-foundationalism
• Close relationship between feminist analysis and
  practice

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Feminist approaches

• Liberal feminism
• Marxist feminism
• Standpoint feminism
• Radical feminism

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Classical Marxist Social Science

• Foundationalist ontology
• Realist epistemology
• Economic determinism
• Scientific principle of dialectics
• Emancipatory

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Critiques of Classical Marxism

• Theoretical critiques
• Gramscian theory of hegemony role of ideas
• Poulantzas the relative autonomy of the state
• Weberian ideas about class
• Feminist influences
• Interpretivist critiques
• Empirical critiques
• Of economic development and political development
• Of globalization
• Of the changing nature of class
• Of the collapse of communism

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Interpetivism

• Anti-Foundationalist
• Constitutive rather than designative language
• Claims to knowledge are always provisional and
  contested
• Understanding of human activity inherently
  different from that of the physical world
• Search for meaning rather than explanation
• People act on their beliefs and preferences
• Beliefs and preferences cannot be inferred from
  objective facts about that person
• Politics is a contest between different
  narratives

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Approaches to Interpretation

• Hermeneutics
• Ethnology/Ethnography
• Post-Structuralism/Post-Modernism