Old ladies and political science

Spilled ink and political science

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT POLITICS?

• What have long been the main sources of knowledge in US politics? Tradition and culture, authority, commonsense guessing & personal observation.

• What’s wrong with knowing politics this way?– What is overgeneralization or concept stretching?

Why are our brains hardwired to do it?– Why do people selectively review and incorporate

evidence when they know they shouldn’t?– Why is disinformation is so prevalent?

• Why does it matter if we’re sometimes wrong about the big things?Some data to come… How informed are we about politics and then a couple of examples about what happens when we don’t know much about politics…

• Pew - 2011

• Pew - 2013

• How much in debt is the US? What are the main source of America’s debt?

• Which party, when in control, makes rich Americans richer and poor Americans poorer? Why?

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•Source: http://www.cbpp.org/research/economic-downturn-and-legacy-of-bush-policies-continue-to-drive-large-deficits?fa=view&id=3849

HOW DO WE STUDY POLITICS SCIENTIFICALLY?

• What are the main types of scientific inquiry? (aka behavioralism, rational choice, and institutionalism)

– Describe, categorize, explain (causes)

– What about using science to prescriptive and normative? American PSC vs. everyone else

• What makes modern PSC claim to be scientific?

– It claims to be objective, empirical, testable & falsifiable, generalizable (i.e., we search for regularities), replicable, and hopefully cumulative

• Why use the scientific method?

– The method of testing theories and hypotheses by applying certain rules of analysis to the observation and interpretation of reality under strictly delineated circumstances. Do this, and you can sometimes replicate and build knowledge

• Why is it a lot easier than it used to be to study politics scientifically? The spread of democracy, globalization, and technology

CAN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE REALLY BE SCIENTIFIC?

• Why do “post-modernists” laugh at the whole idea of “scientific” inquiry?

• What do political scientists miss out when try to be scientific? Just ask the cultural anthropologists

• Karl Popper’s objections to positivism as an approach…. Are we doing things backwards when we should be falsifying

• Can social scientists be completely objective? Should they be?

• Is human behavior too complicated to study?

• Over time, what have social scientists actually learned by being scientific? A lot actually… including big ideas that have impacted global war and financial crises