CONTENDING CONCEPTIONS OF SCIENCE AND POLITICS 2727CHAPTER 2
CONTENDING CONCEPTIONS
OF SCIENCE AND POLITICS
Methodology and the Constitution of the Political
MARY HAWKESWORTH
My introduction to political science was atypical in many ways. My earliest course work at the
University of Massachusetts and at the University of Sussex was more oriented toward political
philosophy and the “New” Political Science advocated by its eponymous Caucus than by
behavioralism. Although Georgetown University required all Ph.D. students to complete a two-
semester sequence in “Scope and Methods” and “Quantitative Analysis,” the faculty was domi-
nated by “traditionalists” who maintained a healthy skepticism of the “behavioral revolution.”
As a consequence, my “Scope and Methods” course devoted a great deal of time and attention
to issues in the philosophy of science. I ingested Hume’s analysis of the problem of induction,
Popper’s critique of positivism, and Feyerabend’s critique of critical rationalism before I took
my first statistics course.
Halfway through my Ph.D. course work, I spent a summer at the Interuniversity Consortium
for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan learning advanced
quantitative techniques. There I was struck by the gulf between textbook accounts of research
design, hypothesis formation and testing, and cautious and tentative conclusions drawn from
correlations, and the unfettered confidence in quantitative techniques, the apparent lack of
concern about the adequacy of the data to “measure” the political phenomena under investi-
gation, and the insistent focus on strategies to maximize the R^2.
One of the last courses I took in graduate school, “Normative Policy Analysis,” sought to
explore tacit and explicit biases that structure policy making, policy implementation, and
policy interpretation and raised important questions about the role of policy analysts in rela-
tion to the tacit presuppositions of “scientific” approaches to policy studies. Max Weber’s
convictions concerning the “fact/value dichotomy” seemed a particularly inadequate guide
for policy analysts concerned with attacks on affirmative action, reproductive freedom, wel-
fare provision, environmental protection, and democratic norms of participation, transpar-
ency, and accountability.
My first book, Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis, attempted to demonstrate a range of
philosophical and empirical flaws in positivist approaches to political science and policy stud-
ies and to indicate some of the benefits that might accrue from a postpositivist approach to
policy studies. In two editions of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Government and Politics (1992,
2003), I have tried to make visible the impact of particular methodologies upon our under-
standings of the political world. This chapter continues that project.