will always be faulted for sacrificing relevance and empirical validity
to theoretical elegance; sociologists for being disorderly and messy in
their approaches.^74
Now, consider methodological debates in political science. The
most ardent defenders of the economic – or “rational choice” –
approach to politics have no qualms about describing rival, more
sociological approaches as pre-scientific. In the last fifty years, write,
for instance, Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, political science has
evolved “from storytelling and anecdote swapping, first to thick
description and history writing, then to systematic measurement, and
more recently to explanation and analysis,” and this transformation
“constitutes significant movement along a scientific trajectory.”^75
Those relying on more inductive approaches are simply behind on the
road toward science. In return, critics of the rational choice approach
always point to the shaky empirical foundations of models that often
bear little correspondence to reality, and to the approach’s general
disregard for social and political relevance.^76 This is where the
cleavage between a “method-driven” and a “problem-driven” polit-
ical science comes from. In the abstract, the cleavage is just another
appellation for the confrontation between economic and sociological
perspectives in political science, itself an expression of the more fun-
damental left–right divide.
The ramifications of this divide are numerous and extended. In
comparative politics, for instance, a specific debate opposes scholars
who identify themselves as “area specialists” and take pride in
knowing not only the politics, but also the language, the history, and
the culture of a region of the world, to those who claim to be “social
scientists” first, entirely devoted to the search for “lawful regularities”
that can contribute to the development of political science. Robert
Bates, who uses rational choice models to account for African pol-
itics and is a strong advocate of the“scientific” approach, leaves no
doubt about the ideological underpinnings of this methodological
(^74) Ibid.; Robert Aaron Gordon, “Rigor and Relevance in a Changing Institutional
75 Setting,”American Economic Review, vol. 66, no. 1, March 1976, 1–14, p. 1.
Kenneth A. Shepsle and Mark S. Bonchek,Analyzing Politics: Rationality,
Behavior, and Institutions, New York, W. W. Norton, 1997, 166–69, p. 7.
(^76) Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro,Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory:
A Critique of Applications in Political Science, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1994, pp. 5–6.
The core currency of political exchange 219