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How can we best understand the major debates and recent movements in contemporary empirical political theory? In this volume, the contributors, including four past presidents of the APSA and one past president of the IPSA, present their views of the central core, methodologies and development of empirical political science. Their disparate views of the unifying themes of the discipline reflect different theoretical orientations, from behavioralism to rational choice, cultural theory to postmodernism, and feminism to Marxism. Is there a human nature on which we can construct scientific theories of political life? What is the role of culture in shaping any such nature? How objective and value-free can political theories be? These are only a few of the issues the volume addresses. By assessing where we have traveled intellectually as a discipline and asking what remains of lasting significance in the various theoretical approaches that have engulfed the profession, Contemporary Empirical Political Theory provides an important evaluation of the current state of empirical political theory and a valuable guide to future developments in political science. CONTRIBUTORS: Gabriel Almond, David Easton, Murray Edelman, J. Peter Euben, Bernard Grofman, John Gunnell, Russell Hardin, Edward Harpham, Nancy Hartsock, Jean Laponce, Theodore Lowi, Kristen Monroe, William Riker, Ian Shapiro, Alexander Wendt, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
A revolutionary textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social science, and proceeds to issues of methodology and research design essential for producing a good research proposal. It also introduces researchers to the main issues of debate and contention in the methodology of social sciences, identifying commonalities, historic continuities and genuine differences.
Provides a framework to demonstrate how to unify formal, theoretical and empirical analysis through various interdisciplinary examples.
What should we expect from democracy, and how likely is it that democracies will live up to those expectations? In The State of Democratic Theory, Ian Shapiro offers a critical assessment of contemporary answers to these questions, lays out his distinctive alternative, and explores its implications for policy and political action. Some accounts of democracy's purposes focus on aggregating preferences; others deal with collective deliberation in search of the common good. Shapiro reveals the shortcomings of both, arguing instead that democracy should be geared toward minimizing domination throughout society. He contends that Joseph Schumpeter's classic defense of competitive democracy is a useful starting point for achieving this purpose, but that it stands in need of radical supplementation--both with respect to its operation in national political institutions and in its extension to other forms of collective association. Shapiro's unusually wide-ranging discussion also deals with the conditions that make democracy's survival more and less likely, with the challenges presented by ethnic differences and claims for group rights, and with the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth. Ranging over politics, philosophy, constitutional law, economics, sociology, and psychology, this book is written in Shapiro's characteristic lucid style--a style that engages practitioners within the field while also opening up the debate to newcomers.
How can we best understand the major debates and recent movements in contemporary empirical political theory? Is there a human nature on which we can construct scientific theories of political life? What is the role of culture in shaping any such nature? How objective and value-free can political theories be? These are only a few of the issues addressed by this collection of essays from a disparate group of contributors.
Political theorists focus on the nature of justice, liberty, and equality while ignoring the institutions through which these ideals are achieved. Political scientists keep institutions in view but deploy a meager set of value-conceptions in analyzing them. A more political political theory is needed to address this gap, Jeremy Waldron argues.
Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field.
Looking at the roots of contemporary political theory, this three-volume set examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, and provides concise, to-the-point definitions of key concepts, ideas, schools and figures.
A novel, sophisticated and realistic account of freedom as power through political representation.