2.1: Brief History of Empirical Study of Politics

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Remember a brief history of the empirical study of politics
Understand how each iteration of the study of politics influenced the following iteration

What is empirical study? Empirical study is research that seeks patterns and explanations for general phenomena and specific cases (Powner 2014). For political science this means attempts to explain various political phenomena, which could include understanding the behavior of voters, or the foreign policy of a country. In the discipline of political science, we often say that the empirical study of politics traces its roots to what is called the behavioral revolution of the post-World War II era (more on that in Section 2.3).

It is not that empirical analysis did not occur at all before WWII, but that most of this inquiry often centered on the study of institutions, often accompanied with praise, or with criticism for these institutions. The institutions that were studied were of great importance: parliamentary democracy (Mill 1910), military formation and strategy (von Clausewitz 1956), or of the political-economic systems within countries (Smith 1937; Marx and Engels 1967). Their writings and thoughts on how these institutions structure political, economic, and social interaction, are still with us today and influence our understandings in both normative and positivist political science (North 1991).

However, the major shift to studying the behavior of individuals themselves, and a commensurate increase in the methods, has indelibly changed the field. Foremost, scholars could become more “objective”, or less normative, in their study of human behavior. The goal was no longer to provide evidence with moral arguments. Instead, this new political science would, as Shively (2017) stated, be “concerned with ascertaining the facts needed to solve political problems.” Through the introduction of formal theory, political scientists use facts as their empirical foundation, or assumptions, and develop social theories that are generalizable to other areas of study.

This new approach inevitably led to the importation of research methods from other disciplines, such as economics and psychology. This set off an explosion of research into methodology and their application to political questions, such as voting behavior and party formation. Discussions on tradeoffs, alliances, and rationality were brought over from economics. In contrast, discourse on media cues, opinion formation, the effect of societal prejudices, such as racial attitudes, were brought in from sociology and psychology. Institutions were no longer the focus.