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ItIs customary to describe the development of political science since the Second World War as a step toward the creation of an empirical science of politics. Not its empiricism, however, but rather its concern for theory is understood to be the defining characteristic of the new way. The prescientific period was also empirically oriented, but it was naive, unthinking empiricism which treated the acquisition of political knowledge as a matter of collecting political facts as one might collect butterflies. Empiricism became scientific, it is said, only when it became theoretical, when its practitioners realized that before they could collect butterflies they had first to fashion a proper net and devise a scheme for ordering the specimens to be caught. At the heart, then, of what we mean today by the science of politics stands political theory, understood as the self-conscious construction of conceptual systems for ordering reality and of hypotheses to explain the interconnections of the parts of these systems. Beside the scientist as survey researcher and statistician stands the scientist as theorist, as author of approaches, frameworks, and models.

The philosophical literature on global distributive justice has become both more substantive and more rigorous in recent years. This article surveys some recent positions within that literature and notes that the differences between them often involve different views about the empirical facts underlying global wealth and poverty. This suggests that some headway might be gained in arguments about global justice by a greater engagement between political philosophy and empirical political science. Adapted from the source document.

Several areas of political research deal with sequences, that is, successions of standard categorical states or events: political sociology, evolution of regimes, analysis of speeches, geopolitics, comparative studies, or elections. At least three kinds of longitudinal methods, popular in political science, may attempt at treating political longitudinal objects: regression models, event history analysis and time series analysis. Yet, none can unfold the three dimensions of categorical time series, that is, the nature of the states/events composing the sequences, their order and length. Sequence analysis, with the optimal matching algorithm as a core tool, was specifically designed to this task. It is now commonly used in sociology and demography, and more and more in geography and history. This pragmatic, state-by-state comparison of sequences does not make any assumption about an underlying process that would generate sequences. The paper first defines sequences and their empirical applications. Then it details the principles of sequence analysis and its canonical steps. It shows how sequence analysis connects to and/or competes with other multivariate methods, before giving an overview of advanced issues and available software. To illustrate how fruitful this approach can be for political science, I apply it to a retrospective survey conducted among members of the main French activist organization mobilizing against AIDS.