Mapping Methods in Contemporary Political Science Research

• In Event: Qualitative Research: Rethinking Boundaries and Expanding Frontiers

Abstract

A fundamental feature of scholarly production in the discipline of political science is its methodological heterogeneity: political scientists use a broad range of data-gathering techniques and analytic strategies to generate knowledge. Scholars’ different predilections for collecting and analyzing data spring from deeper epistemological commitments that reflect significant disagreement about ways of knowing. Understanding how political scientists produce knowledge is crucial because research conducted by scholars in the discipline examines critical problems facing the contemporary world and informs both academic debate and politics and policy-making worldwide.

This paper takes on that question by “mapping” the use of methods in contemporary political science research. Specifically, we analyze the data collection and generation techniques and methods of analysis employed in a specialized slice of political science scholarship – nearly 2,000 articles published in ten top disciplinary journals between 1998 and 2018 – to address a series of key questions. What data collection and generation techniques do contemporary political scientists employ – independently and in tandem – and how do they do so? What methods of analysis do they use, and in what combinations? How do authors combine different ways of collecting, generating, and analyzing data in their work, how does their use differ across subfields, and how has it changed over time?

While we are not the first to analyze how political scientists conduct research, previous studies have focused most heavily on the analytic methods employed in work in the discipline (Bennett et al. 2003; Levy 2007; Blanchard et al. 2017). We believe that understanding if and how scholars generate data – the raw inputs to their analysis – is at least as important as knowing how they analyze them. Political science inquiry can only produce accurate, actionable results if the data on which it is based were collected systematically, and in a way appropriate for the methods of analysis employed. Analyzing what techniques scholars use to generate the evidentiary basis for their inquiries in tandem with what methods they use to analyze those data offers a more complete portrait of the production of knowledge in the discipline.

Our initial findings – regarding authorship, in the distribution of work in different subfields across journals, in the frequency with which authors generate their own data vs. using pre-existing information as evidence, and in the methods they use to analyze those data – suggest key insights about the practice of political science. Ultimately, the paper will allow us to evaluate to what degree some of the presumptions about scholarly trends in the discipline—for example, the dominance of quantitative inquiry, the diffusion of multi-method research, and the rise of experimental methods and causal identification—bear out in an important subset of political science research published over the last two decades.

The paper first briefly considers some of the main methodological milestones in the discipline over the last 20 years, which we expect to see reflected, with some lag, in the work we analyze in our study; we also touch on some of the other scholarship that has sought to investigate methodological tendencies in political science research. Next, we describe how we selected articles for study and how we analyzed them. We then offer and discuss our findings about data generation and analysis in an important subset of disciplinary work. In the paper’s conclusion we recap our main results, identify avenues of future inquiry, and consider their implications for how we conduct research, teach research practices, and think of ourselves as a discipline.

Authors

• Tranae Hardy, Georgetown University

• Diana Kapiszewski, Georgetown University

• Daniel Solomon, Georgetown University