The Oxford Handbook of PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
Edited by HAROLD KINCAID and
JEROEN VAN BOUWEL
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kincaid, Harold, 1952– editor. | Bouwel, Jeroen van, editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of philosophy of political science / [edited by Harold Kincaid and Jeroen Van Bouwel].
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029518 (print) | LCCN 2022029519 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197519806 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197519820 (epub) | ISBN 9780197519837
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Philosophy. Classification: LCC JA71 .O947 2022 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01—dc23/eng/20220816
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029518
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029519
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197519806.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Marquis, Canada
Harold:
To Don Ross, for many years of intellectual inspiration and friendship
Jeroen:
To my parents, Marie-Thérèse Greefs and Jo Van Bouwel, for supporting me unconditionally.
2.
Harold Kincaid and Jeroen Van Bouwel
PART 1. ANALYZING BASIC FRAMEWORKS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
Jonathan Michael Kaplan
3.
4.
5.
Don Ross, Wynn C. Stirling, and Luca Tummolini
6.
N. Emrah Aydinonat and Petri Ylikoski
7.
Jesús Zamora-Bonilla
8.
Andrew Bennett and Benjamin Mishkin
PART 2. METHODS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE,
9. Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy
Sharon Crasnow
10. Qualitative Research in Political Science
Julie Zahle
11. Interpretivism versus Positivism in an Age of Causal Inference 221 Janet Lawler and David Waldner
12. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA): A Pluralistic Approach to Causal Inference
Federica Russo and Benoît Rihoux
13. Mixed-Methods Research and Variety of Evidence in Political Science
Jaakko Kuorikoski and Caterina Marchionni
14. Generalization, Case Studies, and Within-Case Causal Inference: Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA)
Gary Goertz and Stephan Haggard
15. Process Tracing: Defining the Undefinable?
Christopher Clarke
16. Process Tracing: Causation and Levels of Analysis
Keith Dowding
17. Randomized Interventions in Political Science: Are the Critics Right?
Peter John
18. Lab Experiments in Political Science through the Lens of Experimental Economics
Andre Hofmeyr and Harold Kincaid
PART 3. PURPOSES AND USES OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
19. Philosophy of Science Issues in Clientelism Research
Harold Kincaid, Miquel Pellicer, and Eva Wegner
María Jiménez-Buedo
PART 4. POLITICAL SCIENCE IN SOCIETY: VALUES, EXPERTISE, AND PROGRESS
Season Hoard, Laci Hubbard-Mattix, Amy G. Mazur, and Samantha Noll
List of Contributors
N. Emrah Aydinonat (PhD, Docent) is a researcher working at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Economic Methodology. His research interests include the practices of modeling and explanation in the social sciences and the theories of institutions. Aydinonat is the author of The Invisible Hand in Economics (Routledge, 2008).
Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University and author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). He is also coeditor, with Jeffrey Checkel, of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge, 2014) and President of the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods, which organizes the annual Institute on Qualitative and Multimethod Research (IQMR) at Syracuse University.
Fred Chernoff is Harvey Picker Professor of International Relations, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. His most recent book is Explanation and Progress in Security Studies (Stanford, 2014). His publications have appeared in such journals as International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, and Mind. He holds doctoral degrees in political science (Yale) and philosophy (Johns Hopkins). He has held faculty posts at Yale, Brown, and Wesleyan Universities, and research positions at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London), Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (Oslo), and the Rand Corporation.
Christopher Clarke is a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge (CRASSH) and an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam (School of Philosophy). He works on the nature of causal explanation and causal inference, especially in political science and economics.
Sharon Crasnow is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Norco College in Southern California. Her research is on methodological issues in the social sciences with a focus on political science. She has published work in this area in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Synthese. She also works on feminist philosophy of science and epistemology and is a coeditor (with Kristen Intemann) of The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science.
Keith Dowding is Distinguished Professor Political Science and Political Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has published over a hundred articles in leading political science and political philosophy journals and over a dozen books including The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science, Rational Choice and Political Power, and It’s the Government, Stupid
Gary Goertz is Professor of Political Science at the Kroc Center for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than fifty articles and chapters on topics of international institutions, methodology, and conflict studies. His methodological research focuses on concepts and measurement along with set theoretic approaches, including “Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals,” (2007), “Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology” (2008), “A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences” (2012), and “Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms, and Case Studies: The Research Triad” (2017). The completely revised and rewritten edition of his (2005) concept book “Social science concepts and measurement” was published by Princeton in 2020.
Stephan Haggard is Krause Distinguished Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego. His publications on international political economy include Pathways from the Periphery: The Newly Industrializing Countries in the International System (Cornell University Press, 1990); The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (Institute for International Economics, 2000); and Developmental States (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His work with Robert Kaufman on democratization, inequality, and social policy includes The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton University Press, 1995); Democracy, Development and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2008); Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (Princeton, 2016) and Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge, 2020). His work on North Korea with Marcus Noland includes Famine in North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2007); Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011); and Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (Stanford University Press, 2017).
David Henderson is Robert R. Chambers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His research interests include the philosophy of social science and epistemology—and the present work brings together these interests. His works include Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences (State University of New York Press, 1993) and (with Terry Horgan) The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2011). Recent work has been focused on social norms and epistemic norms—for example, “Are Epistemic Norms Fundamentally Social Norms?” (Episteme, 2020). He coedited and contributed to The Routledge Handbook in Social Epistemology (2019, with Miranda Fricker, David Henderson, Peter Graham, and Nikolaj Pedersen) and (with John Greco) Epistemic Evaluation: Point and Purpose in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Catherine Herfeld is an assistant professor of social theory and philosophy of the social sciences at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research falls into the fields of philosophy and history of the social sciences, in particular economics.
Season Hoard is Associate Professor jointly appointed in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs and the Division of Governmental Studies and Services (DGSS) at Washington State University. She has a PhD in political science from Washington State University, and her areas of expertise include gender and politics, comparative politics, public policy, and applied social science research. Dr. Hoard helps provide applied research
and program evaluation support for governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations in the United States. She has numerous publications focused on applied research methods and public policy, including recent publications in American Political Science Review, Community Development, Politics and Life Sciences, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Biomass and Bioenergy and the International Journal of Aviation Management.
Andre Hofmeyr is Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, and the Director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN). He is an experimental economist who specializes in decision theory, game theory, experimental economic methodology, and structural econometrics. He is an associate editor of Cognitive Processing, and has recently published articles in Experimental Economics, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Methodology, and Southern Economic Journal, along with a commentary forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Laci Hubbard Mattix is Assistant Professor (career track) in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. She specializes in political theory and philosophy. Her work intersects critical theory, feminist theory, and ethics. She has published numerous book chapters on these issues as well as articles in Essays in Philosophy and Transportation in the City.
María Jiménez-Buedo is an associate professor at the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at UNED in Madrid. She works in the philosophy of the social sciences, with an emphasis on methodological issues. Her recent work focuses on experimental methods in the social sciences.
Peter John is Professor of Public Policy at King’s College London. He is interested in how to involve citizens in public policy and in randomized controlled trials. His books include Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017), How Far to Nudge (Edward Elgar, 2018), and his coauthored Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think Experimenting with Ways to Change Citizen Behaviour (Manchester University Press, 2019, 2nd ed.).
Jonathan Michael Kaplan is a professor in the philosophy program at Oregon State University, where he has taught since 2003. His primary research areas are political philosophy and the philosophy of biology. Recently, he has worked on the relationship between contemporary genomic technologies and arguments surrounding claims about the biological nature of human “races,” as well as on issues emerging from recent research on the social determinants of health.
Harold Kincaid is Emeritus Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. His research concerns issues in the philosophy of science and philosophy of social and behavioral science as well as experimental work in economics on, among other things, risk and time attitudes, trust and addiction. He is the author or editor of thirteen books (starting with The Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research, Cambridge, 1996) and many journal articles and book chapters. Recent or forthcoming work includes the Elgar Companion to Philosophy of Economics with Don Ross (Elgar, 2021) and articles or book chapters on objectivity in the social sciences, improving causal inference in economics, the role of mechanisms in the social sciences, agent-based models, classifying mental disorders, the risk-trust confound, and prospect theory.
Jaakko Kuorikoski is an associate professor of practical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His main areas of specialization are philosophy of economics and philosophy of social sciences, and he has published widely on scientific explanation, modeling, simulation, and causal reasoning.
Janet Lawler is a doctoral student in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, working on theories and implications of how new technologies alter public space and discourse.
Caterina Marchionni is University Researcher in the unit of practical philosophy and a member of TINT at the University of Helsinki. She specializes in the methodology and epistemology of science, in particular of economics and the social sciences. Caterina has published widely on scientific explanation, modelling, and interdisciplinarity. .
Johannes Marx is a professor of political theory at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research falls into the fields of political philosophy, philosophy of social sciences, agentbased modeling, and political economy.
Amy G. Mazur is Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor in Political Science at Washington State University and an Associate Researcher at LIEPP at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative feminist policy issues with a particular emphasis on France and comparative methodology. Her recent books include The Politics of State Feminism: Innovation in Comparative Research (with Dorothy McBride, Temple University Press, 2010) and Gender Equality and Policy Implementation in the Corporate World: Making Democracy Work in Business (edited with Isabelle Engeli, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She has published in French Politics, European Journal of Politics and Gender, Comparative European Politics, Revue Française de Science Politique, Politics and Gender, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, PS: Political Science, and Politics, Groups and Identities. She is currently co-convening, with Isabelle Engeli (Exeter University), the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Network (GEPP) as well as GEPP-Equal Employment and GEPP-France. She is Lead Editor of French Politics and a fellow-in-residence for the Global Contestations of Gender and Women’s Rights at Bielefeld University.
Benjamin Mishkin is a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgetown University where he studies American foreign policy, civil-military relations, and bureaucratic politics. He also maintains interests in the study of political violence and qualitative methods.
Samantha Noll is an assistant professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs (PPPA) at Washington State University. She is also the bioethicist affiliated with the Functional Genomics Initiative, which applies genome editing in agriculture research. Her research agenda focuses on teasing out ethical, social, and environmental implications of agriculture biotechnology, food systems, and other technological innovations. Noll publishes widely on values and agriculture, local food movements, and the application of genomics technology.
Robert Northcott is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. He has published extensively on the philosophy of economics and other sciences, and on causation and causal explanation. He is currently working on a book that will develop a systematic position on
the methodology of nonlaboratory sciences. He was founding coeditor of the Elements series in Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press), and is Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
Miquel Pellicer is Professor for Inequality and Poverty at the University of Marburg. He works on inequality, political behavior, and development. His articles have appeared, among others, in Perspectives on Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and the Journal of Development Economics
Julian Reiss is Professor and Head of the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method at Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is the author of Error in Economics (2008), Philosophy of Economics (2013), Causation, Evidence, and Inference (2015), and seventy journal articles and book chapters on topics in general philosophy of science and philosophy of the biomedical and social sciences. He is a past president of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM).
Benoît Rihoux is a full professor in comparative politics at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium), where he chairs the Centre for Political Science and Comparative Politics (CESPOL). His substantive research interests comprise among others political parties, political behavior, organizational change, social movements, gender and politics, and professional ethics. He plays a leading role in the development of configurational comparative methods and QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) and coordinates the interdisciplinary COMPASSS global network (http://www.compasss.org) in that field. He has published multiple pieces around QCA: review pieces, empirical applications in diverse fields, and a reference textbook (Sage, 2009; with Charles Ragin). He is also strongly involved in research methods training as joint Academic Coordinator of MethodsNET, the Methods Excellence Network (https://www.methodsnet.org/home).
Don Ross is Professor and Head of the School of Society, Politics, and Ethics, University College Cork (Ireland); Professor in the School of Economics, University of Cape Town (South Africa); and Program Director for Methodology at the Center for Economic Analysis of Risk, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University (United States). His current areas of research are the experimental economics of risk and time preferences; the economics of addiction and gambling; economic behavior in nonhuman animals; scientific metaphysics; and economic optimization of road networks in Africa. He is the author of many articles and chapters, and author or editor of fourteen books, including Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation (MIT Press, 2005); Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised (with James Ladyman, Oxford University Press, 2007); and Philosophy of Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is currently writing a book on the evolution of human risk management (with Glenn Harrison) and another on generalization of conditional game theory for application to economic choice experiments (with Wynn Stirling).
Federica Russo is a philosopher of science and technology based at the University of Amsterdam. She has a long-standing interest in social science methodology, and she wrote extensively about causal modelling, explanation, and evidence in the social, biomedical, and policy sciences. Among her contributions, Causality and Causal Modelling in the Social Sciences. Measuring Variations (Springer, 2009), Causality: Philosophical Theory
Meets Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Phyllis Illari), and Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine: Principles and Procedures (Springer, 2018, a coauthored monograph of the EBM + group). Together with Phyllis Illari, she is editor-in-chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Attilia Ruzzene is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergamo. She obtained her first PhD in economics at the University of Torino and a PhD in philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She has been teaching courses on the philosophy of science, economics, and social sciences at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Witten/ Herdecke University, and University of Bologna.Her research currently focuses on a variety of qualitative perspectives for the study of organizational phenomena which include causalmechanistic reasoning, the practice approach, and visual analysis. She has long lasting interest in issues related to causal inference in case-study research and the use of case-study evidence for policy making.
Stephen Schneider is a fellow at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works in the area of political psychology and has published articles examining how lay attributions for traits and behaviors influence tolerance, how threat influences conspiracy theory endorsement, and what role the behavioral immune system plays in support for refugee resettlement programs among others.
Wynn C. Stirling is an emeritus professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University. His current research interests are game theory, stochastic processes, and control theory. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah in 1969 and 1971, respectively, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1983. Dr. Stirling is the author or many articles and chapters, is a co-author of Mathematical Methods and Algorithms for Signal Processing (Prentice Hall, 2000), and is the author of Satisficing Games and Decision Making (Cambridge, 2003), Theory of Conditional Games (Cambridge, 2012), and Theory of Social Choice on Networks (Cambridge, 2016). He is working with Don Ross on a book on applications of conditional game theory to economics.
Luca Tummolini is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian Research Council in Rome and Associated Researcher at the Institute for Future Studies in Sweden. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Siena in 2010. His research interests are in social interaction and the cognitive mechanisms that enable humans to flexibly coordinate and collaborate with one another: from shared deliberation in small groups to conformity with population-wide regularities like conventions and social norms. He is also interested in using game theory to develop a common framework between the cognitive and the social sciences. He has published in philosophy, psychology, economics, and computer science journals. He is the author of more than fifty articles and coeditor of three books.
Jeroen Van Bouwel is a senior researcher at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science and a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science at Ghent University. His research areas include philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology, and the relations between science and democracy. He has published work in these areas in, inter alia, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Economics & Philosophy, Social Epistemology,
Perspectives on Science, History and Theory, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, and numerous collected volumes, handbooks, and encyclopedias. His books include The Social Sciences and Democracy (Palgrave, 2009, editor) and Scientific Explanation (Springer, 2013, coauthored with Erik Weber and Leen De Vreese).
David Waldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His empirical work focuses on the intersection of political and economic development; his methods writings focus on qualitative causal inference.
Eva Wegner is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Marburg. Her research focuses on political behavior and accountability in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, the International Political Science Review, and Party Politics, among others.
Petri Ylikoski is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of Helsinki. His research interests include theories of explanation and evidence, science studies, and social theory. His current research focuses on the foundations of mechanism-based social science, institutional epistemology, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence.
Julie Zahle is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of Bergen. Previously, she taught at Durham University and University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 2009. Her research areas include the philosophy of qualitative methods, values and objectivity in social science, the individualism-holism debate, and social theories of practices.
Jesús Zamora-Bonilla is a philosopher and economist, and a professor of philosophy of science at UNED (Madrid). He is the coeditor of The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Social Sciences, and author of numerous papers on rationality, normativity, scientific realism, verisimilitude, economics of scientific knowledge, and other topics, published in journals like Synthese, Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Journal of Economic Methodology, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Economics & Philosophy, Theoria, Episteme, and Perspectives on Science.
