Political Political Science: A Phronetic Approach

Abstract

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of political science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect political science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public sociology and public anthropology as well as dissonant movements in economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic social science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge, 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences, while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing. Today, phronetic social science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This article provides a genealogy of efforts to connect political science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed-methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The article concludes with implications for realizing a more political political science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

Notes

¹ On the idea of a unitary paradigm for political science, see David D. Laitin, “Disciplining Political Science,” American Political Science Review 89:2 (1995), pp. 454–456.

² See Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Also see Sanford F. Schram and Brian Caterino (eds), Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research and Method (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 1–12.

³ Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram (eds), Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

⁵ Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association,” pp. 480–481.

⁴ See John G. Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association: Discipline, Profession, Political Theory, and Politics,” American Political Science Review 100:4 (2006), pp. 479–486.

⁶ See James Farr, Jacob S. Hacker, and Nicole Kazee, “The Policy Scientist of Democracy: The Discipline of Harold D. Lasswell,” American Political Science Review 100:4 (2006), pp. 579–588.

⁷ See Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959); see also David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); and John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

⁸ John G. Gunnell, Philosophy, Science, and Political Inquiry (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1975), pp. 11–28.

⁹ Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966).

¹⁰ For instance, one of the authors of this article was recently told that Comparative Political Studies still to this day has a policy of not accepting case studies.

¹¹ Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson S. Polsby (eds), Handbook of Political Science, Volume 7, Strategies of Inquiry (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1975), pp. 79–137; and Bent Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 12:2 (2006), pp. 219–245.

¹² The second coming for positivism in political science was marked by the publication of Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba's Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), which argues for how qualitative research can be made consistent with the positivist paradigm that tends more often to lead to large-n quantitative studies.

¹³ Charles A. McCoy and John Playford, Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967).

¹⁴ Clyde W. Barrow, “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 30:2 (2008), pp. 215–244.

¹⁵ See Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

¹⁶ Rogers M. Smith, “Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More about Politics?,” PS: Political Science and Politics 35 (2002), pp. 199–201; and Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

¹⁷ For sociology see Michael Burawoy, “2004 Presidential Address: For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005), pp. 4–28; and for Economics, see the post-autistic economics journal Real-World Economics Review, < http://www.paecon.net/>.

¹⁸ See Sanford F. Schram, “Return to Politics: Perestroika and Postparadigmatic Political Science,” Political Theory 31 (2003), pp. 831–851.

¹⁹ One oft-cited example of the “anything goes” approach to the philosophy of science is found in Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London, UK: Verso Press, 1993).

²⁰ John S. Dryzek, “A Pox on Perestroika, A Hex on Hegemony: Toward a Critical Political Science,” in Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 509–525.

²¹ Keith Topper, The Disorder of Political Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

²² See Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006).

²³ G.H. Von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London, UK: Routledge, 1971).

²⁴ Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (London, UK: Hutchinson, 1976), p. 9.

²⁵ See Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (eds), Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

²⁶ Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 7.

²⁷ Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

²⁸ Edward Schatz, “Methods are not Tools: Ethnography and the Limits of Multiple-Methods Research,” Working Paper, Committee on Concepts and Methods, International Studies Association, January 2007, < http://www.conceptsmethods.org/working_papers/20070123_26_PM%2012%20Schatz.pdf>.

²⁹ See Gabriel A. Almond, “Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science,” PS: Political Science and Politics 21:4 (1988), pp. 828–842.

³⁰ For books on mixed-methods research, see Abbas Tashakkori and Charles B. Teddlie, Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998).

³¹ For one example of problem-driven research that employs both interpretive and positivistic approaches, see Joe Soss and Sanford F. Schram, “A Public Transformed: Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback,” American Political Science Review 101:1 (2006), pp. 111–127.

³² For essays in a symposium that debate the value of pursuing mixed-methods, problem-driven research on comparative and international politics, see Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions,” Perspectives on Politics 8:2 (2010), pp. 411–431; see also Thomas C. Walker, “The Perils of Paradigm Mentalities: Revisiting Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper,” Perspectives on Politics 8:2 (2010), pp. 433–451; and Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 8:2 (2010), pp. 465–486.

³³ For articles in a symposium that debates the value of mixed-methods, problem-driven research as it relates to the study of social policy, see Paul Spicker, “Generalisation and Phronesis: Rethinking the Methodology of Social Policy,” Journal of Social Policy 40:1 (2011), pp. 1–19; see also Stephen McKay, “Response 1: Scientific Method in Social Policy Research is Not a Lost Cause,” Journal of Social Policy 40:1 (2011), pp. 21–29; and Tony Fitzpatrick, “Response 2: Social Science as Phronesis? The Potential Contradictions of a Phronetic Social Policy,” Journal of Social Policy 40:1 (2011), pp. 31–39.

³⁴ For example, see Joe Soss, “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action,” The American Political Science Review 93:2 (1999), pp. 363–380.

³⁵ The sociologist Howard Becker's contributions to the interpretive turn rivaled Geertz's in importance for the social sciences. And like Geertz, he resisted the separate logics of inquiry insistence that followed his path-breaking work. See Howard S. Becker, “The Epistemology of Qualitative Research,” in Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard Schweder (eds), Essays on Ethnography and Human Development (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 53–71.

³⁶ Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences.

³⁷ Topper, The Disorder of Political Inquiry.

³⁸ Flora Cornish, “Social Science as Practical Wisdom: Here Come the Examples,” LSE Review of Books, < http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/09/06/real-social-science-applied-phronesis-bent-flyvbjerg/>.

³⁹ See Robert Gallucci, “We Have to Talk: The Urgency of Dialogue Between International Relations Scholarship and Policy,” Presentation at Bryn Mawr College, September 20, 2012.

⁴⁰ For general arguments in favor of greater engagement by theorists, see Jason Frank and John Tambornino (eds), Vocations of Political Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

⁴¹ Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, pp. 166–168.

⁴³ Cornish, “Social Science as Practical Wisdom.”

⁴² Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson, revised with notes and appendices by Hugh Tredennick, introduction and bibliography by Jonathan Barnes (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976).

⁴⁴ Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 59.

⁴⁵ Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1141b8–b27.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 1142a12–29.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 1141b27–1142a12.

⁴⁸ Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, pp. 110–112.

⁴⁹ See Flyvbjerg, Landman, and Schram, Real Social Science.

⁵⁰ Flyvbjerg, Landman, and Schram, Real Social Science, p. 288, emphasis added.

⁵¹ Ibid., 290.