Political Science Research in Practice

Akan Malici, Elizabeth Smith, Akan Malici, Elizabeth S. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351401890
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nothing rings truer to those teaching political science research methods: students hate taking this course. Tackle the challenge and turn the standard research methods teaching model on its head with Political Science Research in Practice. Akan Malici and Elizabeth S. Smith engage students first with pressing political questions and then demonstrate how a researcher has gone about answering them, walking them through real political science research that contributors have conducted. Through the exemplary use of a comparative case study, field research, interviews, textual and interpretive research, statistical research, survey research, public policy and program evaluation, content analysis, and field experiments, each chapter introduces students to a method of empirical inquiry through a specific topic that will spark their interest and curiosity. Each chapter shows the process of developing a research question, how and why a particular method was used, and the rewards and challenges discovered along the way. Students can better appreciate why we need a science of politics—why methods matter—with these first-hand, issue-based discussions.

The second edition now includes:

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• Two completely new chapters on field experiments and a chapter on the textual/interpretative method.

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• New topics, ranging from the Arab Spring to political torture to politically sensitive research in China to social networking and voter turnout.

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• Revised and updated "Exercises and Discussion Questions" sections.

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• Revised and updated "Interested to Know More" and "Recommended Resources" sections.

CHAPTER 1
Why Do We Need a Science of Politics?

Elizabeth S. Smith and Akan Malici

CONTENTS

• Science: A Way to Know
• The Scientific Study of Politics: The Birth of the Discipline of Political Science
• The Importance of Science: Debunking False Truth in American Politics
• The Importance of Science: Debunking False Truth in Comparative Politics
• The Importance of Science: Debunking False Truth in International Relations
• The Naïve Scientist and Beyond

In the late afternoon of election day, Tuesday, November 8, 2016, Nate Cohn, a political forecaster at The New York Times, had Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidential election at 85 percent. The Trump campaign, signaling what many thought was their sense that he was going to lose, had denied media requests to film him and his team watching the returns. Early exit polls from that day had Clinton winning the electoral college with well above the requisite 270 votes. Conservative talk show host, Hugh Hewitt, a Trump voter himself, says about his prediction that Clinton would win, “I’ve never been this wrong.” Clearly, he was not the only one.¹

Hillary Clinton was an experienced candidate who had served eight years in the Senate. She was twice elected by the people of the state of New York and sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She was then appointed Secretary of State, a position she held for four years. She lost the 2016 presidential election to a businessman who, unlike all past winning presidential candidates, had never held either political office or served in the military. A candidate who refused to release his tax returns and who during the course of his campaign was revealed on a tape from a few years earlier to have been bragging about sexually assaulting women using the crudest of terms. During the election, Donald Trump questioned the heroism of a former Vietnam POW in his own party² and inspired a group of prominent Republican foreign policy experts to issue a letter calling him “fundamentally dishonest” and “utterly unfitted to the office.”³

Given the stark differences in experience between the two candidates and the unprecedented features of Donald Trump’s candidacy, most had assumed that though Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate she would win the election. The questions on many minds in the days and months following the election was: How did Donald Trump win? And, why did the pollsters and pundits get it so wrong?

The high-school geometry teacher of one of us (Elizabeth Smith) once printed the word ASSUME on the board, and to our teenage amusement pointed out that when you ASSUME you are making an “ass” of “u” and “me.” Quite cleverly, she illustrated why in fact we need science. Our assumptions, our hunches, our general gut level feelings about the “truths” of the world are often proven wrong once we engage in careful, systematic and scientific analysis.

Science: A Way to Know

To know, according to Webster’s, is “to have a clear perception or understanding of; to be sure or well informed about.” There are various types of knowledge. Among them are religious knowledge, instinctual knowledge, common sense, scientific knowledge and so on. Although our book is about scientific knowledge we do want to point out that scientific knowledge is not necessarily better than the other types of knowledge. A mother’s intuition about what to do with her unsettled child may trump the conclusions of scientific studies many times, for example. We value scientific knowledge, but we believe it is important to retain an appreciation also for other types of knowledge.

Science is a distinct type of knowledge and it stands apart from any other type of knowledge. The noun “science” originates from the Latin verb “scire,” and translates into “knowing objectively,” more specifically it is a way of knowing that is systematic, replicable, cumulative and falsifiable. In other words, scientific knowledge is based on careful and comprehensive observation of the data (systematic), collected and analyzed in such a way that others can reproduce the analysis (replicable). Scientific knowledge often evolves over time as multiple methodologies are being used and new data is examined (cumulative). Finally, scientific knowledge must be open to questioning and the possibility of being disproven by new data (falsifiable). The election of Donald Trump is one we can begin to understand more completely by looking at careful scientific analysis.

While there are many features of the 2016 presidential election scholars are still studying, a body of scholarship prior to the election provides important insight into Donald Trump’s win. Headlines explaining Trump’s victory immediately after the election suggest that Trump won because of the economy – displaced workers in the new economy found Trump’s message of protectionism and bringing back jobs appealing, so the argument went. Journalists wrote stories like the one by Tami Luhby on CNN Money suggesting that Trump won because he was seen by voters as more likely to improve the economy. Luhby reports that 49 percent of voters said Trump “would better handle the economy,” while only 46 percent said Clinton would.⁴

However, scholarly research suggests that Trump’s election can be better explained by examining the cultural stressors pushing voters toward populist appeals. Inglehart and Norris, for example, use multiple methodologies, and they provide compelling evidence that in both the US and Europe economic concerns of voters are trumped (pun intended) by fears raised by the perceived erosion of stature and identity, especially among traditional white voters, by increasing immigration, perceived loosening of traditional moral values and policies promoting gender and marriage equality.⁵ Similarly, political scientist Philip Klinkner, who uses the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), a representative study conducted since 1948 by political scientists trained in survey research methods who are interested in understanding voting behavior, provides further insight into Trump’s win. In particular, examining closely the ANES pilot survey of voters before the election, he shows that racial resentment, the feeling that blacks and other minorities were given unfair advantages, better predicts support for Trump than do economic concerns.⁶

A careful reading of the journalistic report cited by Luhby of CNN Money would raise red flags in a student such as yourself who is (soon to be) well trained in research methodology. Political scientists and other statisticians KNOW that the 49 percent to 46 percent difference in reported voter support for Trump’s versus Clinton’s ability to handle the economy is well within the range of a typical margin of error, the difference between the sample and the population value when only a sample of people are surveyed. A margin of error is applied to the spread of the percentages reported, meaning that a +/−3 percent margin of error applied to these percentages could mean that the actual poll results could be a virtual tie (49% to 49%) or as large a difference as 52 percent (49% + 3%) to 43 percent (46% − 3%), or could be flipped (46% for Trump and 49% for Clinton). All of these statistics are very different in terms of potential electoral consequences, but all within the margin of error. In this particular case, the report presented on CNN Money is even more difficult to interpret accurately as, unlike in a scholarly, scientific study, no information is provided to the reader on how the data was collected (it was simply reported that it was a CNN exit poll), what the sample size and margin of error was, and whether it included a true random sample of the population, where no member of the population has any more chance than another of being included. Thus, this study is non-scientific in nature in large part because it is neither systematic, verifiable nor replicable, at least in regard to the form in which we the readers see it online.

But, we are still left with the question: Have political scientists, who point to the cultural influences on Trump voters, discovered the absolute “truth” about why Donald Trump won the 2016 election? Scientists would caution that scientific findings do not indicate absolute certainty if that is what we mean by “truths.” Instead, scientists tell us that any scientific knowledge is in fact tentative. Scientists have ensured themselves job security in the fact that it is an enterprise based on continual investigation of new data in new ways. As the evidence accumulates we certainly feel more confident about our conclusions, but any good scientist knows that their conclusions could one day be disproven by the accumulation of contrary scientific evidence. That is why most of us find science such fun! We are constantly exploring our surroundings, making careful observations and testing and re-testing our hunches in a search for knowledge and understanding of the complex and interesting world in which we live.

The Scientific Study of Politics: The Birth of the Discipline of Political Science

It is easy to think of false truths in the natural world that have been disproven by systematic, cumulative, scientific evidence: the false truth that the world was flat; the false truth that maggots were spontaneously generated in decaying meat; the false truth that the sun revolved around the earth; the false truth that a heavy object travels faster through space than a lighter one (Elizabeth still finds that one hard to let go of). As with the misunderstandings of the early explanations of support for Trump, the world of politics has been plagued by false truths.

False truths exist everywhere, including the political world, and for this reason it was suggested that a science of politics be created. In fact, in 1903, the American Political Science Association was formally created in an attempt to create an objective, systematic scientific study of claims made about the political world. The address to the association’s members by the first president of the American Political Science Association, Frank J. Goodnow, emphasized that “scientific knowledge provided a check on the tendencies of political theory ‘to soar in the empyrean realms of speculation’.”⁷

Prior to the creation of this association, the study of politics was often normative, meaning it was concerned more often with theorizing about how things ought to be rather than on understanding how things actually are. Students of politics began to understand that one important way to credibly make claims about how things ought to be would be to have a better understanding of how they actually are (a positivist approach). The discipline gradually evolved over time. At first, there was what could be labeled traditional political science. It was concerned mainly with documenting the institutions of government and the laws, rules and norms of the politics. It was idiographic and descriptive rather than nomothetic and analytical: it was largely limited to a description of individual cases or events rather than the discovery of general laws pertaining to many cases or events. Yet, the ambition to discover generalities and cause–effect relationships grew over time, and along with it grew more advanced and precise scientific methods and tools (like survey research, statistical analysis aided by computers, etc.). Beginning around the 1950s, these advances came to be known as the behavioral revolution in political science. Two of the main traits of this revolution were the quantification and the formalization of the study of politics toward a more precise, empirical and explanatory science.

The behavioral revolution helped our discipline become more scientific, yet it also led to postbehavioral criticism. This criticism asserted that political and social conduct cannot be quantified and analyzed through mathematical models. There was also the criticism that political scientists became more concerned with sophisticated methodologies than the substantive issues that they should care about. Today most political science studies are marked by the behavioral revolution, some more so and some a little less.

Political science, as a field, is divided into four major subfields: American politics, comparative poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 WHY DO WE NEED A SCIENCE OF POLITICS?
• 2 HOW DO WE GET A SCIENCE OF POLITICS?
• 3 THE COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY METHOD: “UNCIVIL SOCIETY” IN THE ARAB UPRISINGS
• 4 FIELD RESEARCH: NAVIGATING POLITICALLY SENSITIVE RESEARCH IN CHINA
• 5 INTERVIEWING IN POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: WHO RESISTS INJUSTICE?
• 6 CRITICAL AND INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH: UNDERSTANDING TORTURE’S POPULARITY IN THE UNITED STATES
• 7 STATISTICAL RESEARCH: LACK OF CITIZENSHIP, THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF LATINO POLITICAL POWER
• 8 SURVEY RESEARCH: RELIGION AND ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR IN THE UNITED STATES, 1936–2016
• 9 PUBLIC POLICY AND PROGRAM EVALUATION: DOES HIGH SCHOOL TYPE AFFECT COLLEGE SUCCESS?
• 10 CONTENT ANALYSIS: CONGRESSIONAL COMMUNICATION THROUGH BROADCAST AND NEW MEDIA
• 11 FIELD EXPERIMENTS: WIRED TO MOBILIZE: THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL NETWORKING MESSAGES ON VOTER TURNOUT
• 12 NORMATIVE AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
• Glossary
• Index