Political science as a social science Essay

policy-making Science is in seg workforcetation a complaisant light, and in part a humanity. Both ar important. In this topic, we get step to the fore look at the basics of hearty erudition inquiry, and then proceed to show how this differs from, on the superstar hand, inquiry in the indispensable sciences and, on the early(a), inquiry in the humanities. br otherwisely Science Social science inquiry seeks to develop selective information-based guess. ?Empirical? refers to things that can be experienced through the five senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or (in the case of political corruption) smelling.Theory? basically means explanation. An empirical theory of political relation, then, is an attempt to beg off why the great unwashed behave the itinerary they do politically. If a sociable scientist (or anyone else) observes citizenry engaging in political behavior, he or she will shoot to focus on certain characteristics of the people being observed. Th e observer may wonder why some people differ from others in their political characteristics. Why, for example, argon some people Liberals eon others atomic number 18 Conservatives and still others are New Democrats.Characteristics that differ from one psyche to another are called one variables. Those that do not are called constants. Constants are generally slight interesting than variables. There is not such(prenominal) acme in trying to explain vote behavior in a country in which only one party appears on the ballot. Of course, we king then ask why some countries have only one party whereas others have multi-party systems, provided now we are treating ? number of parties? as a variables. Everyday language is full of what are, in effect, hypotheses nigh political behavior.For example, talk about a ? sexual activity gap? in voting hypothesizes that vote (the dependent variable) is in part a function of gender (the independent variable), with women more likely to vote for the Liberals or New Democrats and men more likely to vote Conservative. Social science research differs from prevalent discussion of politics in two slipway. The first is where hypotheses dumb implant from. Anyone who follows politics will likely carry around in his or her interrogative a lot of ideas about what explains political behavior.Such ideas may come from personal experience, from conversations with others, or from following politics through the mass media. This is original as well for the ways social scientists think about politics. In addition, however, social scientists develop hypotheses more systematically by pick outing the learned literature for the results of previous research. This is important for at least a fit of reasons. For one thing, it is usually the case that the more you learn what is already cognise about a subject, the more new questions you are likely to have.A review of the literature helps generate new hypotheses. unconstipated more importa nt, social science seeks not that to describe raw facts, plainly to explain why people behave the way that they do. To accomplish this, we need to beat our ideas into a broader theoretical context that offers such an explanation. It is a fact that in the United States, from 1936 through 2000, the incumbent party has always won the government whenever the Washington Redskins won their last home game before the election, and bewildered whenever the Redskins lost.However, since there is no reasonable explanation for why this should be the case, it is me swan an interesting bit of trivia, and no serious observer of politics would hope on it in analyzing the next presidential contest. A second deflexion is that, for many people, ideas about patterns of political behavior remain merely assumptions. Social science insists that the rigorousness of assumptions must be tested against data. Conceptual definition. We need to know, and be able to communicate to others, what our independe nt and dependent variables mean.What, in other words, is the idea in our mind when we determination a term? Definitions found in dictionaries are examples of abstract definitions. Sometimes, the idea that is in our mind when we drill a term will be obvious, but often it will not. Many concepts used in political science are anything but clear. If we are to study political ideology, for example, we need to spell out with as much precision as possible what that concept means in the context of our research. Operational definition. For hypotheses to be tested, we will need to come up with circularments of our variables.An operational definition is one stated in a way that can be directly measured by data. We strive for a one-to-one correspondence between our conceptual definitions and our measurements (operational definitions) of them. If we succeed, then our measurements have validity and reliability. Data needed to provide operational definitions of our variables come from a large -minded variety of sources. We may earn the data ourselves. Analysis of data that we gather in order to test hypotheses that we have formulated is called primary analysis.Often, however, this get along would be totally beyond our resources of time, money, and expertise. A nationwide survey of unexclusive opinion, for example, would take months to intention and carry out, would cost many thousands of dollars, and would require the function of a large survey research organization. Often, secondary analysis of data (that is, analysis of data originally gathered for other purposes) will caseful our needs far better. thence, very important databases are used closely exclusively in secondary analysis. The Census Canada data is a dear example.Other surveys such as the Canadian National Election determine and the General Social Survey were created, in part, for the express purpose of providing musical note survey data for secondary analysis by students of Canadian politics. Indee d much of the work using the Canadian National is based on secondary analysis. To facilitate secondary analysis, the University of Toronto Data Library, and other university-based data archive have been established throughout the world. The largest of these is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social query (ICPSR) established in 1962.Today, over 500 colleges and universities from all over the world, including the University of Toronto are member institutions. Students and faculty at these institutions obtain datasets that provide the basis for many scholarly books, articles, and conference papers, graduate theses and dissertations, and undergraduate term papers. The Social Sciences and the lifelike Sciences What we have described as the social science method ? the lather to explain empirical phenomena by developing and testing hypotheses ? could as comfortably be called simply ? the scientific method,? without the ? social? qualifier. There are, however, di fferences between social sciences, including political science, and the natural sciences. Though these are differences in degree, they are important. genius difference is that the natural sciences rely much more heavily on experimental design, in which subjects are assigned randomly to groups and in which the detective is able to manipulate the independent variable in order to measure its impact on the dependent variable. Often, when people think about the scientific method, what they have in mind are these sorts of controlled laboratory experiments.In political science, we for the most part are not able to carry out experimental designs. If, for example, we wish to study the impact of party affiliation on decisions by judges, we cannot very well assign judges to different parties, but rather have to take the data as they come to us from observing judges in their natural setting. Experimental design, however, does not bound the natural sciences, nor does its absence define the so cial sciences. Astronomy, for example, must of necessity rely on observation of things that cannot be manipulated. ?Epidemiological? medical research withal relies on non-experimental data. Conversely, the social science discipline of social psychology has been create in large part from experiments in small group laboratories. In political science, a great deal of laboratory research on the impact of campaign commercials has been carried out in recent years. Field experiments are also common, as when survey researchers will test the impact of selection question wordings by splitting their sample and administering different questionnaire forms to different subsets of respondents.Nevertheless, it is honest to say that experimental designs are much less common in the social sciences, including political science, than in the natural sciences. Most of our research design is, in effect, an effort to approximate the logic of experimental design as closely as possible. Other differe nces, also differences in degree, have to do with lower levels of consensus in the social sciences. There is less consensus about conceptual definition. Even if we agree that power is a key concept for the study of politics, we may not agree on what power means.Chemists, on the other hand, not only agree that molecules are important, they also mean slightly much the same thing when they use the term. There is less consensus about operational definition. Chemists also agree on how to measure the atomic saddle of a molecule. Social scientists are far from unanimous in the ways they go about measuring power. It bears repeating that these differences are ones of degree. In the natural sciences there are also disputes at the frontiers of the various disciplines about what concepts are important, what they mean, and how they should be measured.In the social sciences, consensus is likely to break down from the start. Even if we can agree that a particular concept is important, on what it means, and on how it should be measured, we will encounter far larger problems of measurement shift than those in the natural sciences, where measurement is not without error, but is typically much more precise. Finally, remember that we are involved in trying to explain human behavior. People do not seem to behave as predictably as molecules.Philosophers are not in agreement on this point, but it may be that human behavior is inherently less predictabl The fact that we deal with tendencies rather than with laws means that, for the most part (and patronage impressive work by ? rational choice? theorists to develop clump mathematical models of political behavior), political science makes relatively little use of elegant systems of deduction, but considerable use of statistics, which provides us with valuable tools for transaction with probabilities.Despite its unavoidable limitations, political science as a social science has produced an explosion in our knowledge about politics. This has had important operable consequences. For example, no serious aspirant for a major elected means in an economically developed democracy would consider embarking on a campaign without consulting experts in survey research, a signature social science technique. In addition to being, in part, a social science, political science is also in part a humanity. Political science as a humanity means at least a pair of different things.