Suchergebnisse

The defence of political science rests on a starting proposition that practitioners of political science need to embrace relevance rather than fear. Defending the role of politics in resolving societal dilemmas is in part a responsibility of those who study it and the challenge is significant given evidence of disenchantment with the political process in many established and mew democracies. Political science needs to offer not only an understanding of politics that is theoretical, sophisticated and empirically rigorous but also an approach that is not just problem‐focused but solution‐seeking. Defending political science means defending politics and taking on the challenge of improving its practice.

'Political science' is a 'vanguard' field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider 'political scholarship' utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of 'digital-era' developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of 'instrumentation', informed by post-rational choice theoretical perspectives.

Intro -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- Donatella Campus, Gianfranco Pasquino and Martin Bull -- Chapter 1 - Gabriel A. Almond: Comparative Politics and Political Development -- Gianfranco Pasquino -- Chapter 2 - Raymond Aron or the Three Dimensions of Political Science: Critical Philosophy of History, Political Sociology and Theory of International Relations -- Stephen Launay -- Chapter 3 - Philip Converse: Normalising the Vote and Voting Studies -- Jocelyn Evans -- Chapter 4 - Maurice Duverger: A Law, a Hypothesis and a Paradox -- Robert Elgie -- Chapter 5 - Stanley Hoffmann: Managing the Unmanageable: A Concern for World Order -- Martin A. Schain -- Chapter 6 - Paul Lazarsfeld: The Founder of Empirical Electoral Research -- Donatella Campus -- Chapter 7 - Arend Lijphart: Power Sharing and the Pursuit of a Kinder and Gentler Democratic Society -- Hans Keman -- Chapter 8 - Elinor Ostrom: Politics as Problem-Solving in Polycentric Settings -- Michael D. McGinnis -- Chapter 9 - William H. Riker: and the Building of a Science of Politics (Positive Political Theory) -- Daniela Giannetti -- Chapter 10 - Stein Rokkan: The Macro-Sociological Fresco of State, Nation and Democracy in Europe -- Daniele Caramani -- Chapter 11 - Susan Strange: The Authority of Questioning -- Eugenia Baroncelli.

Written for students and researchers in political science comparative politics and sociology, this text offers a comprehensive introduction to methods and statistics in research in political science.