point to the various fractures that divide the discipline, recent surveys
of political science also admit that the exact nature of these fractures
remains difficult to “pin down.”^63
Many political scientists insist on the gap between those who
privilege the “hard,” quantitative methods associated with the natural
sciences and those who prefer the “soft,” qualitative approaches
inspired by the humanities. This conflict can also be cast as an
opposition between those who aim for universal, law-like general-
izations, and those who favor rich, context-specific explanations. The
former would advocate a “method-driven” political science, and the
latter a “problem-driven” discipline. The overall division, however, is
not only a question of methodology or epistemology. Political scien-
tists hold different views about power and democracy, and they
defend a number of more or less opposed theories, to explain just
about every phenomenon. Some, for instance, understand power in
terms of individual behavior and preferences, others in terms of
social structures and dominating worldviews. Hence, in the Weberian
tradition, power can be seen as “the ability of one actor to get another
to do something the latter would not otherwise do,” that is to say as
the capability one has to influence another actor’s individual choices.
In a more Marxist vein, power can alternatively be understood as a
more profound effect of inequality and privilege, whereby the public
agenda, the different actors’ preferences, and language itself are defined
and circumscribed by a society’s unequal structures of representation.^64
Accordingly, some theories of comparative politics stress individual
rationality, others insist more on institutional structures and cultural
factors.^65 In international relations, similar divergences differentiate
realist, liberal, neoMarxist, and constructivist approaches.
(^63) Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, “Introduction: Problems
and Methods in the Study of Politics,” in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek
E. Masoud (eds.),Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics,Cambridge
University Press, 2004, p.1; Katznelson and Milner, “American Political Science,”
p. 2; Farr and Seidelman, “General Introduction,” p. 7; J. Tobin Grant, “What
Divides Us? The Image and Organization of Political Science,”PS: Political
64 Science and Politics, vol. 38, no. 3, July 2005, 379–86, p. 379.
65 Katznelson and Milner, “American Political Science,” p. 15.
Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, “Research Traditions and
Theory in Comparative Politics: An Introduction,” in Mark Irving Lichbach
and Alan S. Zuckerman (eds.),Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and
Structure, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 5.
216 Left and Right in Global Politics