Academic Articles & Research Papers

Political Science

The idea that politics is, or can be, the subject of science is an ancient one that reaches back to Aristotle. Early modern expressions of the idea can be found in Machiavelli and Hobbes, as well as in Enlightenment thinkers from Hume to th...

Interpretive Political Science

This collection of essays is Volume II in a retrospective of previous publications. It looks forward and explores the ‘interpretive turn’ and its implications for the craft of political science, especially public administration. It draws to...

Basic interests: the importance of groups in politics and in political science

A generation ago, scholars saw interest groups as the single most important element in the American political system. Today, political scientists are more likely to see groups as a marginal influence compared to institutions such as Congres...

Political Science and "The Public Interest"

Political Theory, Political Science, and Politics

The History of Political Science

Political science is once again rediscovering its past and retelling its history. In last few years several works have brought an end to an era when our discipline's historical reflections were limited to rather brief presidential addresses...

Tocqueville’s New Political Science

“A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”’ ( DAI Intro., 7) Here is a striking statement, given a paragraph to itself, from the Introduction to Tocqueville's Democracy in America . Although it could hardly be more prom...

The Progress of Political Science

Scientific progress is normally portrayed as a series of stable, rational choices between competing theories, research programs, or research traditions within a discipline. Progress of that sort cannot occur in political science because any...

The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science

This original account of the role of philosophy and methodology in political sciences gets back to the basics of studying politics. Cutting through long-standing controversies across different theoretical camps within the discipline, Dowdin...

PROSPECT THEORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

▪ Abstract Prospect theory is the most influential behavioral theory of choice in the social sciences. Its creators won a Nobel Prize in economics, and it is largely responsible for the booming field of behavioral economics. Although intern...

Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science

Interpretive political science focuses on the meanings that shape actions and institutions, and the ways in which they do so. This Handbook explores the implications of interpretive theory for the study of politics. It provides the first de...

The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science

Scholasticism in Political Science

Criticism of trends in political science centers on specific methodologies—quantitative methods or rational choice. However, the more worrisome development is scholasticism—a tendency for research to become overspecialized and ingrown. I de...

Political Science and Public Policy

Political scientists who are policy scholars often trace their lineage back to the pioneering work of Lerner and Lasswell (1951). But public policy did not emerge as a significant subfield within the discipline of political science until th...

The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy

What's Queer about Political Science?

Research Highlights and Abstract The study of gender, sexuality—and, in particular, queer theory—is central to the social sciences and humanities. Our analysis of citation practices shows that queer theorist Judith Butler is one of the most...

Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality

Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Re...

The Promise and Pitfalls of Big Data and Computational Studies of Politics

For Symposium abstract is not required...

The Political Science of Federalism

This article highlights political science's interest in the distribution of authority between federal and state governments. The authority boundaries are studied (a) as mechanism design problems, where authority is allocated optimally to ac...

Network Analysis and Political Science

Political science is fascinated with networks. This fascination builds on networks' descriptive appeal, and descriptions of networks play a prominent role in recent forays into network analysis. For some time, quantitative research has incl...