Under Threat? Methodological Pluralism in Public Administration

Abstract

A consensus appears to be emerging on the desirability of methodological pluralism in public administration research. Scholars as diverse as Riccucci and Meier see it as inevitable in a multidisciplinary, practice-oriented field, and both endorse it as key to advancing theory. Yet it is not always clear what is meant by “methodological pluralism” nor how it is related to scientific progress. I argue that Dryzek’s conceptualization of progress as “lateral” is supportive of a robust methodological pluralism. Then, I analyze three threats to methodological pluralism in public administration: prior ethics review, transparency movements, and the metric mania characteristic of corporatized universities. I conclude that some methodologies and methods, primarily those that are positivist and quantitative, are advantaged over others, which are interpretivist and qualitative. To protect methodological pluralism, the tolerance that Dryzek recommends needs to be extended to structural changes, e.g., requiring a qualitative-interpretive methods course in doctoral programs. More broadly, scholarly autonomy to design and conduct research is increasingly being curtailed by these intertwined threats. Collective action is needed to reverse this worrisome trend. Autonomy for individuals and epistemic communities nourishes the pluralism in research approaches which is essential for understanding and responding to an uncertain, possibly turbulent future.

Keywords:

• higher education metrics
• lateral progress
• methodological pluralism
• scholarly autonomy
• transparency

Acknowledgments

A draft of this paper was presented at the conference, “Methodologies Toward a New Era of Public Administration,” sponsored by the School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University, China (October 2018). Thanks to the conference organizers for the invitation and support for travel to China and to the attendees for their vibrant conversation, with special thanks to Professor Mary Guy, Professor Zhilin Liu, and Dean Kaifeng Yang. Thanks, also, to Seth Wright for his able research assistance and to Dvora Yanow for her incisive feedback on an earlier draft.

Notes

1 Riccucci characterizes each “research approach” in terms of ontology, epistemology and other factors. As discussed subsequently, Kuhn’s uses “paradigm” whereas Dryzek prefers “research tradition.” Comparable terms include “research program” and “epistemic community.” Although there are differences, I use all these terms to indicate shared philosophical commitments.

2 As Dryzek (1986, p. 312) expresses this: “Social forces can both frustrate the internal progress of would-be victorious traditions, and bolster the fortunes of putative occupants of the rubbish bin of discarded tradition.” A contemporary example is the Koch foundation’s funding of public university institutes that presume the desirability of a free-market society.

3 What makes a research tradition “distinctive”? Dryzek (1986) assesses distinctiveness using three elements: ontology, methodology, and a set of interrelated theories. Over various publications, Dryzek has identified a number of research traditions that meet his criteria, from behavioralism to cultural analysis. He does not take up explicitly how these traditions relate to positivism, interpretivism, or other philosophies. What make approaches using interpretivism “distinctive” is their constructivist ontology and their interpretivist epistemology (as contrasted with the realist ontology and objectivist epistemology of positivism). Sidestepping philosophical issues, one of the easiest ways to differentiate interpretive empirical research from positivist work (whether quantitative or qualitative) is that the latter involves, as Brady and Collier (2010, p. 315) express it, “think[ing] in terms of variables,” whereas the former is committed to holism (Adcock, 2014, p. 88).

4 Exactly what term to use is subject to debate. Meier and O’Toole (2007, p. 792) use “explanatory social scienc[e],” by which they seem to mean Popper’s postpositivism.

5 Dryzek’s 1986 article has been cited almost 100 times on Google Scholar. My selective reading reinforced my initial understanding that “lateral progress” has not been widely taken up; general ideas from that article are mentioned but not that term.

6 PA programs hire PhDs from public administration, economics, political science, organizational psychology, among others. That practice encourages multidisciplinary research, which is not necessarily “interdisciplinary” as that requires an individual researcher mastering both ways of looking at the world. Thanks to Dvora Yanow for this point.

7 A science/art dichotomy produces a hierarchy in which the “art of practice” is devalued.

8 Where might “mixed methods” fit? As a synthesis in which “the strengths of one method can compensate for the limitations of another” (Poteete, 2010, p. 28)? Or as an approach in which “qualitative” is narrowed in its meaning and treated as a subordinate partner (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012)? Or as a practice that “may ultimately hurt the quality of scholarship, producing thin case studies, shoddy datasets, and unsophisticated models” (Ahmed & Sil, 2009, p. 5)? I do not pursue this important debate here.

9 Thanks to Professor Mary Guy for inspiring this insight.

10 The authors use postpositivism to mean “contemporary versions of logical positivism” (2017, p. 594).

11 “Active citation” refers to embedded hyperlinks, which enable direct access to parts of a cited work that an author annotates to explain its specific role in the study’s knowledge claims.

12 Over objections of the American Political Science Association, the “public officials exemption” was removed in the revised regulations because “it does not seem appropriate to single out this category of subjects for different treatment” (Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, 2015, p. 53951). As of January 2019, researchers whose work is argued to produce harms to the reputations of public officials could be threatened with legal action.

13 In 2014, more than 20 editors signed onto the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement (JETS), pledging to commit their journals to principles of data access and transparency. For an overview of what produced JETS, see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2016).

14 Baele and Bettiza (2017, p. 446) report on these but observe, “It is worth evaluating whether this trend is a positive move or whether it misses its target.” Rather than challenging the very plausibility of their policy use for scientific knowledge, such efforts treat them as inevitable and as a technical problem of inventing better metrics (Welsh, 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, professor of political science, peregrinated from experimental methods and rational choice theory to focus on methodological practices in political science, particularly interpretive methods. With Dvora Yanow she is coeditor of the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods; their coauthored Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (2012) was the first volume in the series. Professor Schwartz-Shea is past president of the Western Political Science Associaton (2012-13) and recipient of a National Science Foundation Grant to co-organize the Workshop on Interpretive Methodologies in Political Science (2009).