Introduction to Political Science: Concepts, Methods, and Topics

For Instructors

In an age where information is readily available, the textbook’s role is not to provide that content to students but present it in such a way that students can understand it while allowing instructors the freedom to adapt the textbook to their specific needs. This textbook accomplishes this task. It is organized in such a way that instructors have the freedom to select outside source material and present lectures that are relevant to the needs of a specific class while, at the same time, provide a coherent and consistent approach to that topic. Because of its flexibility, the instructor can start with any chapter, or any entries within a chapter, and then proceed as best he or she thinks. The textbook merely provides a theoretical framework for students to understand political science, with the instructor providing the primary content of the course. Thus, the textbook can be used in multiple ways by the instructor.

Although the instructor is free to use the textbook as most fitting for his or her needs, I briefly want to explain the rationale for the textbook’s organization. The textbook is designed to provide the easiest pathway for students to learn political concepts, paradigms, methods, and topics. Generally speaking, concepts are easier to understand than paradigms; paradigms are easier to understand than methods; and methods are easier to understand than topics. Although the textbook is designed to prepare students to write a research paper, it is not organized along the components of a research paper because students, particularly those with no experience in independent research, have difficulty understanding the relevance of each component until they have understood at some level concepts, paradigms, and methods first. For the instructor or an experienced student, the organization of the textbook may appear counter-intuitive; but for a student without any research experience, the movement from mastering concepts to paradigms to methods to topics makes studying political science more approachable.

One possible way to start the course is to begin with Appendix B (Student Skills), so students learn how to read, write, and speak effectively, and then proceed to the first chapter, Political Concepts, because students easily can understand these ideas and determine which ones might interest them for further study. Chapter two, Political Paradigms, provides theoretical way to understand concepts in the context of the scholarship of political science. After a student has selected one or two political concepts, he or she next could determine which paradigm would be best suited to study. The third chapter, Political Methods, provide students different methodologies to study their selected political concepts within a certain paradigm. Finally, chapter four, Political Topics, attempt to synthesize the preceding chapters of concepts, paradigms, and methods under a single subject. Once the student has reached this stage, he or she can start the research paper by referring to Appendix A (The Research Paper).

Of course, the instructor should use the textbook as most appropriate for his or her needs. For some courses, the student may actually write a research paper; for others, the student needs only to learn how to write one. For some instructors, the outside source material may be drawn from comparative politics or international relations; for others, it might be works of political philosophy or public policy. Regardless of how one decides to use the textbook, the student will be exposed to some of the most important concepts, paradigms, methods, and topics in the discipline of political science.

Political Concepts

Concepts are abstractions or generalizations about experience with reality, whether in the physical world or in the world of ideas. This section is an introduction to some key political concepts, which will be elaborated in lectures. The lists of political concept as well as western political thinkers associated with them are not meant to be complete or exhaustive; rather, they are to introduce you to some of the critical ideas and thinkers in political science.

Political scientists believe that the features of a good concept include the following:

• Resonance: does the chosen term make sense?
• Parsimony: is the concept’s defining attributes definable and specific to it (intension)?
• Coherence: how internally consistent is a concept’s intension?
• Differentiation: is the concept’s intension different enough to distinguish it clearly from other concepts?
• Operationalization: can the concept be measured empirically or quantitatively?
• Utility: how useful is the concept with respect to theory and practice?

Political concepts are the building blocks of political paradigms, which, in turn, are tested against the empirical world by adopting certain methods. By learning about political concepts, you are taking the first step of being able to understand political topics in a scientific manner.

EQUALITY can either be understood conceptually as foundational or distributional in nature. Foundational equality describes people as equal beings by nature; distributional equality justifies a distribution of economic goods, social opportunities, and political power among people so as to render them more equal in fact. Theories of equality generally invoke foundational equality to support distributive equality.

Foundational claims of equality – that “all men are created equal” – are difficult to evaluate. For example, utilitarians argue that all humans share a similar capacity for experiencing pleasure and pain, while Kantians contend that people share a common dignity by virtue of being moral agents. To say that people are equal because of common passions or dignity already entails a normative evaluation that a shared human characteristic is more significant than other apparent differences. How one determines which shared characteristic should be valued more than others depends upon one’s conception of HUMAN NATURE.

Aristotle argues that justice is a form of quality where certain human virtues merit certain goods. For example, talented musicians and not well-born people deserve musical instruments. Equality for Aristotle, therefore, is the distribution of certain goods to certain people who are equal in merit. Contemporary thinkers extend the logic of relevant reasons beyond merit to considerations of need. For instance, Williams and Michael Walzer (1935-) maintain that medical care should be distributed by need rather than merit, for it would unjust for equally sick people to receive unequal medical treatment.

A second approach by which to understand equality is equality of opportunity and its relationship to FREEDOM. Equal opportunity is sometimes identified as unequal because it affects who gets social goods rather than how those goods are distributed. But if inequalities are produced by one’s environment rather than by nature, then equality of opportunity implies an equalization of the conditions within which one operates that could include a radical distribution of social goods. Taken to its extreme, this distribution of social goods would prevent people from exercising their freedom (i.e., using their resources, talents, and virtues) if that exercise tends to lead to unequal results.

Two other forms of equality that are of concern are gender and race. Plato introduces the idea of gender equality by suggesting that certain men and certain women are equally endowed with the virtues necessary for ruling, and Mill calls for all women to be treated as the social, economic, and political equals of men. Contemporary feminist are divided on whether gender equality in public life should be their objective or to establish the supremacy of women and their values over men.

The contemporary debate about racial equality is similar to the one on gender. For example, there is a division about thinkers about the benefits of positive discrimination, such as affirmative action. Thinkers about race are in agreement about the need to prohibit discrimination against minorities on the basis of their race, but they disagree about the use of positive discrimination. Defenders of the practice justify the policy that individual minorities are being compensated as members of a disadvantaged group that has suffered past discriminations; opponents point out that such a policy conflicts with treating individuals as equal citizens.

FREEDOM is also known as liberty and can refer to a relationship that is free of oppression and coercion, the absence of conditions of compulsion in society, or the absence of disabling conditions for an individual. Freedom also can be understood negatively as the absence of unreasonable external constraints on action or positively as the exercise of rights and the capacities for action. Berlin makes this distinction of negative and positive liberty as does Benjamin Constant (1767-1830).

Kant provides a positive account of freedom that individuals are free only if they act morally (categorical imperative). This view of freedom as a type of mastery of one’s passions and self-interest in order to be moral comports with the views of Christian thinkers like Augustine and certain modern thinkers like Rousseau. In contrast this positive account of freedom, Hobbes sees freedom in the negative sense: one is able to do what one wants without obstruction from others or the state. Mill, who also subscribes to a negative account of freedom, argues that there are three main types of freedom as conditioned by the “no harm” principle: 1) to think and discuss; 2) to pursue activities, even if they are deemed immoral; and 3) to assemble with others.

Freedom is also connected to one’s understandings of PROPERTY and JUSTICE: Marx claims that people under capitalism are not free but slaves of capital, while Rawls argues everyone should enjoy the widest freedom possible as long as it is for all and is for fair value for everyone.

Political Paradigms

Paradigms are a distinct set of concepts that include theories, methodologies, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field of knowledge. This section is an introduction to some key political paradigms in the subfields of political philosophy, international relations, and comparative politics, with each paradigm elaborated in lectures. The list of political paradigms as well as the references underneath each entry is not meant to be complete or comprehensive but rather to present you to some of the critical ones in political science.

A good paradigm addresses the following questions:

• What is to be observed and scrutinized
• What kind of questions are to be asked
• How are these questions formulated
• What are predictions made by the theories from that paradigm
• How should the investigation of the subject be conducted
• How should the results of the investigation be interpreted

The word “paradigm” is controversial among political scientists, as they disagree about theories, methodologies, and standards within and across subfields. Perhaps a better way to think about paradigms is to substitute the word “worldview” or “social paradigm” to make it distinct from the way it is used in the natural sciences. However, for the purposes of this book, we use the word paradigm to mean a study of politics that includes theories, methodologies, standards as well as a research program, tradition, and a community of professionals who partake in it.

In order to study a political concept, you need to select a paradigm, which consists of several theories. Once you have selected a theory, your next step is to adopt a methodology to test your ideas against the empirical world. By learning about political paradigms and selecting a theory from them, you are starting to study politics in a scientific manner.

REALISM asserts that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that states are its principal actors, which are sovereign and rational in acting out their national interests of security and survival. States pursue those interests by amassing power and those power capabilities determine relations among states. Key terms in realism are national interest, security, realpolitik, raison d’état, and balance of power.

Hans J. Morgenthau (1973) provides the six principles of classical realism: 1) politics are governed by objective laws rooted in a stable human nature and therefore one can derive a rational theory reflecting those objectives; 2) interest, defined as power, is the key to understand international politics; 3) interest is a universal category but does not possess a fixed meaning; 4) prudence, the weighing of consequences of alternative political actions, and not morality, is required for a successful politics; 5) national interest prevents moral excess and political irrationalism (i.e., a nation’s moral aspirations); and 6) the political sphere is autonomous with the most important question being, “How does this policy affect the power of the nation?”

Neorealism, or structural realism, focuses on the structure of international relations and how it affects the interaction among its main units. Instead of examining the state as the fundamental unit of analysis, neorealists look at the international system itself, believing that a system-level analysis can both explain and predict international events. The principles of neorealism are 1) the international system tends to be either anarchic or hierarchal; 2) states have similar functions; and 3) the distribution of capabilities (e.g., population, economic development, and military force) across states can yield a unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar system.

Political Methods

Political methods explore, describe, and explain political phenomena in a scientific manner. This section is an introduction to some key political methods with them elaborated in lectures. Like the other sections, the list is not meant to be comprehensive but rather to present you the most adopted ones used in political science.

There are two main types of political methods: positivist and interpretative. Positivist methods are concerned with political facts, descriptive accounts of political phenomena, while interpretative methods are focused on political values, the meaning of politics. Positivists adopt a realist standpoint that posits that facts objectively exist. By contrast, interpretivists assume a subjective perspective that sees truth as dependent upon historical and sociological context.

In the first section, you were introduced to political concepts to select one for further study; in the second section, you were introduced to political paradigms to find a theory to study political concepts; in this section, you will be introduced to political methods to analyze your political idea. By the end of this section, you will have learned about political paradigms, theories, and methods to study political concepts in a scientific fashion.

EXPERIMENTAL AND QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL METHODS are used to study cause and effect by examining the relationship between two or more variables. Features of an experiment are a hypothesis, independent and dependent variable, pretesting and post-testing, and experimental and control groups. Pretesting is the measurement of the dependent variable among subjects, while post-testing is the re-measurement of the dependent variable among subjects after they have been exposed to an independent variable. The experimental group is the one subjected to experimental stimulus; the control group is the one to which no experimental stimulus is administered and should resemble the experimental group in all other respects. The comparison between the control group and the experimental group at the end of the experiment points to the effect of the experiment stimulus (i.e., the independent variable).

To prevent experiments from going awry, political scientists must be aware of the Hawthorne effect, members of the experiment group who modify their behavior because they know they are in an experiment. Another way an experiment’s integrity can be undermined is the Rosenthal effect, when political scientists unwittingly convey their expectations to the subjects in the experiment. Double-blind experiments, in which neither the political scientists nor the subjects know the pertinent details relating to the experiment, can protect against these effects.

Political scientists also need to be conscious of threats to internal and external validity: the former is the possibility that the conclusions drawn from the experiment may not accurately reflect what went on in the experiment itself; the latter is the possibility that the conclusions drawn from the experiment may not be generalizable to the real world. An example of a threat to internal invalidity is the maturation of the subjects (i.e., people continually grow and change over time, and such changes may affect the results of the experiment); an example of a threat to external invalidity is the Hawthorne or Rosenthal effect.

Finally, political scientists must be aware of ethical issues in research. Subjects in experiments only can volunteer to participate, expect no harm done to them, and be assured of anonymity and confidentiality. If you plan to conduct experiments, you need to know the professional code of ethics in political science as well as obtain approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board.

A quasi-experiment is an experiment “in the real world,” in which laboratory conditions and perfect control groups do not exist. It examines the effects of a variable by comparing different groups, even though the political scientist knows that neither group completely meets the criteria of a control group. The quasi-experiment also usually relies upon indirect quantitative analysis for its results: data that is compiled by others to assess empirically verifiable patterns. For example, a political scientist wants to know whether a local immunization program had helped contain the spread of an infectious disease. A quasi-experiment would compare the infection rates of pre-immunized populations to post-immunized populations to confirm or falsify the hypothesis, with the data gathered from other sources.

When randomization is impractical or experiments are unethical, the quasi-experiment is employed. The quasi-experiment minimizes threats to external validity, as the natural environments do not suffer from the same problems of artificiality in well-controlled laboratory settings. However, a quasi-experiment introduces new threats to internal validity because randomization is absent, thereby introducing confounding variables. Because confounding variables correlate with both the independent and dependent variables, causation can never be fully established in a quasi-experiment.

Political Topics

Political topics are the main subjects of study in political science. This section is to an introduction to the main paradigms, methods, and questions for each topic, with elaboration in lectures. Each entry also has cross-reference to other relevant and related political topics. The list of political topics is not comprehensive but to present you some of the most frequent ones chosen by political scientists.

Your selection of a political concept, paradigm, and method now is placed in the context of political topics. After reading this section, you will be ready to start your political science research paper. The components of a research paper are listed below:

• Cover Page: name and paper’s title
• Abstract: a one-paragraph account of your paper
• Introduction: a justification about the topic selected
• Literature Review: a review of the scholarship about your topic
• Research Design: how you plan to study your topic
• Analysis: the analysis of the data and drawing conclusions
• Conclusion: a summary of your study
• Citations and Sources

By learning about political concepts, paradigms, methods, and topics, you now possess the knowledge to start your research in a scientific manner.

CITIZENSHIP has several definitions, which is a topic of research for political scientists. Some important political concepts to understand citizenship are citizenship, interest, rights, social contract, and the state. One approach to understand citizenship is to focus on its elements (legal, political, identity) and models (republican and liberal). A second way is to differentiate citizenship from other political statuses, like legal aliens, illegal immigrants, or dual citizens. A third is to examine and compare the different trajectories of how states determine citizenship in their own countries.

Political philosophers usually adopt the analytical, Cambridge, and post-structural paradigms to study citizenship and are open to all the methods available in political philosophy. Likewise, positivist political scientists use all the available positivist methodologies to study citizenship. They typically adopt the paradigm of political agents from comparative politics.

A common topic of research about citizenship is the study of rights associated with it: their definition, evolution, history, and variation among states. For example, some political scientists examine what rights have been expanded, contested, or created for citizens and how they are related to international (human) rights. Other political scientists focus on a specific right (e.g., freedom of association) in different countries. Finally, there are political scientists who explore the relationship between individual rights and communal ones.

These excerpts are from Political Science: Concepts, Methods, and Topics (Kendall Hunt, 2016).

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