Political Science Research: From Theory to Practice By Sanford F. Schram Forthcoming as a “Core Essay” in the International Encyclopedia of Political Science Sanford Schram teaches social theory and social policy in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Sociological Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Service Review, Theory & Society, and other journals. He is author of four books and co-editor for four additional volumes, including most recently Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method (New York University Press, 2006).1 Political Science research has remained a contested terrain from its first beginnings with the formation of the discipline in the late 19th Century, the subsequent development as Political Science as a distinct profession, and right down to this very day. As a result, the quest for a unitary paradigm for structuring research about politics has remained unfulfilled.1 But the battle lines are being redrawn as we speak. In recent decades, Political Science research has been shadowed by a debate between positivists who champion emulating the natural sciences and interpretivists who side with approaching the study of politics along the lines of more humanistic forms of inquiry. Competing positivist and interpretivist epistemologies have spawned distinctive methodologies with separate logics of inquiry, varying preferences for different methods of data collection, and debates about a number of other issues including, most commonly, the value of quantitative versus qualitative data. Most recently, debates between positivists and interpretivists have been complicated by interventions by others who do not situate their investigations in either camp. This group has included a growing number of scholars who refuse to accept that they must limit their research to either a positivist or interpretivist methodology. Mixed-methods researchers have been joined by others who stress the importance of problem-driven over theory-driven research. These researchers want to focus on problems in the real world of politics and then use whatever many different methods of study and forms of data collection necessary to study those topics as best they can. The debates about Political Science research ultimately raise issues about 1 On the idea of a unitary paradigm for Political Science, see David D. Laitin, “Disciplining Political Science,” American Political Science Review 89, 2 (June 1995): 454-456.2 the relationship of Political Science to politics. This essay reviews the major points of contention about political science research today with an eye toward addressing the issue of the discipline's relationship to politics. Researching the Discipline/Disciplining Research Beginning with its origins in the late 19th Century, the American incarnation of Political Science as an academic discipline has always been a work in progress, dedicated to the idea of progress. That chiasmus points to the hope the discipline‟s early leaders had that Political Science could develop as the scientific study of politics that would redound to the improvement of American democracy and vise versa.2 The push for professionalization that came with the initiation of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in the first years of the 20th Century represented an attempt to transform the discipline to more explicitly and successfully address the relationship of science to democracy. John Gunnell has written: Between the institution of the APSA and the appearance of the first issue of the American Political Science Review, Max Weber published his 1904 essay on “The „Objectivity‟ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy” in the newly created Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which he shared in editing. There is little to suggest any direct relationship between Weber‟s essay and the ideas of American political scientists, but in both theme and context there were a distinct 2 See John G. Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association: Discipline, Profession, Political Theory, and Politics,” American Political Science Review 100, 4 (November 2006): 479-486.3 family resemblance and mediated intellectual connections. Weber‟s argument was in part a response to the failure of the Verein [für Sozialpolitik] and the ideological and methodological disputes that had characterized its history. Although he presented his essay as an intervention in controversies about the nature of social scientific explanation, he also explicitly addressed it to a wider public audience with the aim of vouchsafing the cognitive authority of academic social science. He stressed the commitment of the journal was to the scientific pursuit of the “the facts of social life,” but it was also concerned with “social policy” and “the training of judgment in respect of practical problems arising from these social circumstances.”…Weber…emphasized various ways in which social scientific knowledge could, in principle, constrain and direct policy decisions as well as the extent to which scientific investigation necessarily proceeded from the perspective of value-laden premises. The authority of social science nevertheless depended, he argued, on acceptance of the autonomy of empirical claims and on the professional status and independence of those who made such claims. The dilemma and solution the Weber articulated bore remarkable similarities to the situation attending the founding of the APSA.3 Frank Goodnow, W. W. Willoughby, Woodrow Wilson, and others formed the APSA based on concerns consistent with Weber's thinking about the connections between science and politics. Goodnow was an especially poignant participant due to his 3 Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association,” pp. 480-481.4 prior involvement in both politics and academic administration, much like Wilson, but also because he helped educate leaders of the next generation who sought to develop a science of politics for the betterment of democracy, including most prominently Charles Merriam. With time, a number of exemplars of the attempt to fuse science and democracy to their mutual benefit appear in the histories of the profession. Prominent among them was Merriam‟s colleague at Chicago Harold