raises problems for academics outside of political science. Among
evaluators I interviewed, this was particularly the case for anthropol-
ogists. One offers this summary of a widely shared perspective: “An-
thropologists think that [rational choice] is a totally misbegotten
theory of human behavior, you know, actions are not produced by
any kind of simple rational calculation. And even if they were, the
variables involved, namely defining what the goals are in the model,
[are] entirely beyond the model itself. So for all these reasons, I tend
to take a very dim view of it.”
Clearly, the ascent of the rational choice paradigm is important in
its own right, but it is also tied to much broader questions within the
discipline concerning the meaning of science. In their influential
bookDesigning Social Inquiry,published in 1994, Gary King, Robert
Keohane, and Sidney Verba invited qualitative researchers to pro-
duce the same kind of descriptive or causal inferences (or predic-
tions about the nonobservable) as can be produced by quantitative
research.^55 The book generated a strong response among qualitative
researchers concerned with demonstrating their commitment to sci-
ence through their methodological rigor.^56 Designing Social Inquiry
has played an emblematic role for political science comparable to
that which Clifford and Marcus’sWriting Cultureplayed for anthro-
pology. As one political economist puts it: “People get kind of ob-
sessed with writing in registers or genres that look more like science,
even though these guys are really interpretivists. There’s a lot of con-
cern with things like case selection...todemonstratethat, in fact,
qualitative research methods are really as rigorous as quantitative
ones.”^57 This panelist believes that the main debate in his field con-
cerns whether a “person [is] contributing to a generalizable theory
of politics, or nomothetic laws of politics, or universal theory, to
the extent that someone is arguing this person has to be supported
because he or she is making a theoretical contribution.” Yet others
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