4. On Political Knowledge
Attempts to specify why something happens and to provide the
reason or process by which the phenomenon occurs.
Value judgment that indicates what should occur and should be
done.
Answers to questions of what ought to be, not merely
description or explanation of what is.
2. Explanations of how and why politics occurs as it does
3. Prescriptions of what should happen in the political world
On Political Knowledge
Normative political knowledge – your value judgments (of what
should occur or be done?) – combine three types of
understanding:
Descriptive knowledge of certain facts
Your explanatory knowledge about why certain outcomes occur
Your priorities among competing values
Sources of Political Knowledge
Three important sources of political knowledge:
1. Authority
9. existing evidence.
2. operationalize key concepts (What it means, how might be
measured).
3. gather appropriate data.
4. analyze the evidence
5. Offer a conclusion.
How to apply scientific method to politics? (Ex. Gender and
voting in the U.S)
1. Examine existing evidence that is relevant to the issue you
are analyzing.
State the issue you are examining in a precise manner.
(Hypothesis= proposition about political fact: In a democracy,
men are more likely to vote than women)
2. “Operationalize” key concepts. (What exactly each concept,
like democracy, means and how it might be measured)
(Democracy= periodic elections, adult allowed to vote, genuine
alternatives candidates) (Operational= the probability of voting,
the percentage of those eligible to vote and who actually do
vote)
3. Gather appropriate data, that is valid (measure what supposed
to measure) and reliable (accurate). Gather data from books or
reports or from going to the field to measure it yourself. >
How to apply scientific method to politics? (Ex. Gender and
voting in the U.S)
10. 4. Analyze the evidence (in year such and such that much
percentage of men and women voted…) Decide what, if any,
inference can be made about the issue on the basis of your
evidence. (is the evidence sufficient, can you generalize,
generalization must be done with care and with attention to
longitudinal patterns(overtime), have you overlooked some
other important variables that might affect the relationship
between gender and voting, such as age, ethnicity, education,
party identification, attitude to key issues, and so on)
5. Ideally, offer a tentative conclusion regarding the issue.
(Sometimes the issue is so complicated that no generalization is
possible and more data and more thoughtful analysis is
required)
Political Science and Political Knowledge
Some argue that political science is not a real “science”
Thomas Kuhn, elements of a “real” science:
Values*
1. Concepts
2. Theory (set of systematically linked generalizations)
3. Rules of interpretation (methods)
4.A list of issues worth solving
Criticism of political science as a science
Its subject matter is too complex and unpredictable.
It lacks the scientific elements present in the hard sciences.
It cannot address crucial normative questions about politics.
Scientists cannot be objective.
11. Normative political knowledge includes :
descriptive knowledge.
your priorities among competing values.
explanatory knowledge.
Supporters of women’s rights in the United States continue to
advocate passage of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment).
The method of rationality
The notion that key political knowledge is self-evident is most
associated with
the method of rationality.
In Aristotle’s view, a central goal of political analysis is to
discover the “highest good attainable by action”.
Major obstacles to the application of the scientific method to
politics are:
Not enough data are available to serve as a basis for
generalizations.
12. The evidence is so ambiguous that no clear conclusions can be
reached.
The analyst cannot be objective because of the influence of his
or her social reality.
Political reality is very complex.
The role of United Nations
An essay on the role of United Nations peacekeeping forces
could emphasize the following types of political knowledge:
Descriptive
Explanatory
Prescriptive
A study that analyzes the historical ethnic animosity between
Persian Iranians and Arab Iraqis primarily provides explanatory
knowledge.
Political Science as a Means of Understanding the Political
World
Desirable to use systematic and analytic thinking
Importance of shared knowledge
We need methods to reach some interpersonal agreement about
political facts
Enables us to develop:
Better concepts
Improved methods
Sound generalizations
