Research Methods in Politics and International Relations

Christopher Lamont, Mieczyslaw P. Boduszynski

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529721805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the perfect guide to conducting a research project in politics and international relations. From formulating a research question and conducting a literature review to writing up and disseminating your work, this book guides you through the research process from start to finish.

The book:

-Is focused specifically on research methods in politics and IR

-Introduces the central methodological debates in a clear, accessible style

-Considers the key questions of ethics and research design

-Covers both qualitative and quantitative approaches

-Shows you how to choose and implement the right methods in your own project

The book features two example research projects – one from politics, one from IR – that appear periodically throughout the book to show you how real research looks at each stage of the process. Packed full of engaging examples, it provides you with all you need to know to coordinate your own research project in politics and international relations.

1 Getting Started

• Methodology, Methods, and Making Sense of Politics 3
• Politics, Political Science, and International Relations 4
• Methodology and Methods: Research Choices 6
• Methodology and Methods: How they Matter 7
• Methodology and Methods: A Practical Guide 8
• A Brief Chapter Overview: The Research and Writing Process from Start to Finish 9
  • Framing the Debate 9
  • Research Ethics 10
  • From Research Interests to Research Questions 10
  • Doing a Literature Review 11
  • What is Your Research Design? 11
  • Qualitative Data Collection 12
  • Qualitative Data Analysis 12
  • Quantitative Data Collection 12
  • Quantitative Data Analysis 13
  • Writing Up Your Research 13
  • Moving Forward 13
• Chapter Summary 13

Learning Objectives

• To distinguish between methodology and methods;
• To understand how methodological debates shape research in PIR;
• To grasp why methodology and research methods can be seen as a framework for making research choices;
• To describe the choices you will make as part of the research process.

If you have picked up this book, you are likely on the cusp of beginning your very own research project. Whether it is a paper or an essay for a class, bachelor’s thesis, or a postgraduate thesis, a core element of academic writing in Politics and International Relations (PIR) remains constant, and that is methodology and methods. While you may see learning methodology and mastering methods as a chore, it may help to consider that methodology and methods are simply expressions of what you want to know and how you aim to go about knowing it.

Because PIR research is a systematic activity in which we analyze or interpret the social world around us, we need to think critically about how we are going to go about trying to make sense of complex practices and processes that make up politics or international affairs. Our aim as researchers is to help resolve conflicts over different interpretations, understandings, and explanations of the reality which we inhabit. In order to do this, we must consider the ways in which we produce knowledge (how we do research) and the ways in which we evaluate knowledge claims (how we evaluate and make judgments about research). But what distinguishes research from other kinds of written work? What tools of the trade must one learn before engaging in the craft of research? Is all research of equal value? How can we tell good research from bad research?

For some, the answer to this last question is the scientific method (Van Evera 1997). According to Moses and Knutsen, the scientific method is ‘a process that involves systematic observation, scrupulous note taking of things and patterns observed, and thoughtful efforts to make sense of it all’ (2012, 19). The scientific method was first applied to making sense of the natural world, in the natural sciences. Biologists and chemists tested theories, or law-like propositions, through empirical observation or experimentation. Later, it was applied to the social world, or the social sciences. For some scholars of PIR, such as Stephen Van Evera, there is no reason that the standards of research should differ between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Van Evera argues, ‘I remain unpersuaded by the view that the prime rules of scientific method should differ between “hard sciences” and the social sciences. Science is science’ (1997, 3). Yet, other scholars argue that the standards and practices we use to learn about natural phenomena like the weather are ill-suited to furthering our understanding of complex social practices. In Chapter 2, we will delve deeper into this debate.

Methodology has been defined in a number of ways in social science literature. According to Gerring, methodology refers to the ‘tasks, strategies, and criteria governing scientific inquiry, including all facets of the research enterprise’ (2012, 6). Linda Tuhiwai Smith tells us that methodology is a ‘theory of method’ or, in other words, the reasoning that informs which methods we use in our research (2012, 1). Others, like Moses and Knutsen, argue more generally that methodology is a way of knowing or a way of making sense of the social world (2012, 4). What does this all mean in terms of doing our own research? Methodologies are the underlying assumptions about what is knowable and how we know about the social world around us. This social world we inhabit includes all facets of life, from major international crises and interstate wars to the mundane and everyday choices we make. Indeed, before we can go on to evaluate which particular approach you might find most useful for your own research, you will need to stake out a methodological position to justify your choice of those strategies.

While the aforementioned debates over the ways in which we know will inform our overall research strategies, what about the means by which we know? For example, what if you are interested in explaining voter behavior in the 2016 US presidential elections? If so, have you thought about what kinds of data might be most useful to respond to this question? How will you go about collecting this data? How will you analyze it? Methods are what we use in our research to collect and analyze data. They are, in a sense, the researcher’s tools.¹

¹ Moses and Knutsen use the analogy of research methodologies constituting a researcher’s ‘toolbox’ and research methods being the researcher’s ‘tools’ (2012, 2). We will discuss what this means in greater detail in Chapter 2.

This textbook is not just about research methods but also about research methodology. Teaching methods without methodology would be like trying to build a house with all the necessary tools and materials, but with no architectural plans. You could put together the individual components of the house, but you would not be able to organize these components into some form of coherent structure. But, as there are many schools of architectural design, there are also distinct methodological traditions in PIR. In order to make sense of this methodological plurality within our fields, we will provide you with a basic overview of methodological debates that have shaped research in PIR and also a guide to some common strategies for data collection and analysis.

Table 1.1

Methodology, Methods, and Making Sense of Politics

In PIR research we seek facts. But what are facts? This question might seem simple at first, but there is much debate today about what is factual, and what is not, in politics at home and abroad. Old ways of knowing in politics, which were formerly dominated by well-established news agencies and political parties, have given way to what Persily (2017) describes as an unmediated media environment. Purveyors of fake news pump out more, and increasingly outrageous, stories as a means to expand their bottom line or advance their ideological agendas. This has made the task of conducting ‘good’ social research that improves our understanding and helps structure policy responses to the complex challenges that we are faced with today more challenging.

Politics, from the time of Aristotle and Plato, has been about setting the rules by which we live our lives. There is conflict because there is significant disagreement about what these rules should look like and how best to achieve a community’s goals, and even what these goals might be. Politics has therefore always been characterized by polarized debates, and it is not surprising that sometimes we might feel that looking for facts is an elusory endeavor.

In part, it is the debate over how we know, and how we evaluate knowledge claims, that makes finding consensus even more challenging. If we have different perspectives on what is important and what is not when it comes to evaluating claims in politics and international affairs, then we lack a shared framework for evaluating each other’s positions on any given issue. We need to ask some fundamental questions about how we arrived at what we believe we know. Are all facts knowable? Can the same material fact have different meanings to different audiences that are both equally valid? How you answer these questions says something about how you make sense of politics. We will dive deeper into this question in our discussion of methodology in Chapter 2.

A second, but related, question is, how do we evaluate between two opposing and seemingly contradictory claims in scholarship or policy? Let’s take a principal assumption in the study of electoral politics in democracies, that the state of the economy acts as a primary determinant of voter behavior (Lewis-Beck 1986, 315–346; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000, 183–219). As Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier argued:

The powerful relationship between the economy and the electorate in democracies the world over comes from the economic responsiveness of the electors, the individual voters. Among the issues on the typical voter’s agenda, none is more consistently present, nor generally has a strong impact, than the economy. (2000, 211)

Or, as the then US presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it more succinctly in his 1992 campaign for the presidency against a candidate who highlighted his foreign policy credentials, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ But if voter choice is determined by economic performance and not by other issues such as race or identity, how then do we account for the more recent rise of populist parties that play off these very anxieties? Indeed, when Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck looked at voter behavior in the 2016 US presidential election that resulted in the election of Donald J. Trump, they found that Trump’s electoral victory was a result of voter behavior turning on ‘largely issues related to racial, ethnic, and social identities’ (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2017, 41). With two opposing explanations of voter behavior, how can we evaluate which one of these arguments is more convincing? Here, your knowledge of methodology and methods will help you to be able to critically engage with such debates.

Politics, Political Science, and International Relations

Why do we address methodologies and methods for politics and international relations in this textbook? Whether you are a student of Politics, Political Science, International Relations, or International Studies, you will find the methodological debates and methods tools presented to you in this textbook helpful not just in evaluating ‘truth claims’ advanced by scholars, politicians, lobbyists, or the media, but they will also help you to answer questions you may have about how to go about researching your own topic. There is quite a bit of common ground covered in the aforementioned programs and fields of study. After all, as students of PIR, we all seek to explore questions of how power is exercised at the local, national, or international level of governance.

Recent decades have witnessed the globalization of world politics. This has made disentangling domestic and international politics research increasingly difficult to sustain. We see this in the classroom, as student research topics span a wide range of topics that challenge traditional barriers between the study of domestic and international politics. With politics and access to information becoming increasingly globalized, even traditional questions of domestic politics, such as political party competition, cannot be divorced from a transnational context. The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US presidency and the vote of a majority of UK citizens to leave the European Union (Brexit) that same year are but two examples of political mobilization that cannot be understood without reference to transnational anxieties and debates that take place within an increasingly global public sphere. Taken together, these developments highlight why unpacking the ways in which we make sense of the world around us in a manner that allows for scholarly and policy debate is not only a prerequisite for good research, but also for making informed decisions about issues that will impact the world around us.

The breaking down of barriers between the study of the domestic and the international has been reflected in PIR curricula across the globe as more and more programs either add an international relations component to the study of politics or establish departments and taught programs under the label of PIR. What we see as politics ‘at home’ and politics ‘abroad’ are increasingly intertwined. Over the last three decades, the number of combined undergraduate programs in PIR has experienced a steady growth.² In sum, how we practice politics has changed, and so has how we study politics.

² Evidence for this includes the tendency for academic departments to group Politics and International Relations together within a single organizational unit, and external rankings, such as Times Higher Education, treating Politics and International Relations as a single subject area. See www.timeshighereducation.com/student/what-to-study/politics-international-studies-incl-development-studies

Nevertheless, despite these developments, boundaries ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Table List
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Getting Started
• 2 Methodology and Methods in Politics and International Relations
• 3 Research Ethics
• 4 Your Research Question
• 5 Compiling and Writing a Literature Review
• 6 Research Design
• 7 Collecting Data for Qualitative Methods
• 8 Tools and Strategies for Qualitative Analysis
• 9 Collecting and Preparing Data for Quantitative Methods
• 10 Tools and Strategies for Quantitative Analysis
• 11 Writing Up Your Paper
• 12 Final Hurdles and Looking Forward
• Glossary
• References
• Index