1. See Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); idem, “Pathologies Revisited: Reflections on Our Critics,” in The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered, ed. Jeffrey Friedman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 235-76.

2. John Nash, “The Bargaining Problem,”Econometrica 18 (1950): 155-62. For explication, see John Harsanyi, “Advances in Understanding Rational Behavior,” in Rational Choice, ed. Jon Elster (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 92-94.

3. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

4. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 151-56.

5. Charles Murray, “Does Welfare Bring More Babies?”The Public Interest, spring 1994, 25.

6. John Roemer, “Does Democracy Engender Justice?” in Democracy's Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56-68.

7. It should be noted, however, that the median voter theorem is eminently debatable empirically. For discussion, see Green and Shapiro, Pathologies, 146-78.

8. Kathleen Bawn, “Constructing `Us': “Ideology, Coalition Politics and False Consciousness,”American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 2 (1999): 303-34.

9. Russell Hardin, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35, 86-88, 106, 114, 144, 285.

10. I leave aside, for present purposes, how convincing the debatable conjectures are. Consider the great difficulties Republican candidates face in forging winning coalitions in American politics that keep both social and libertarian conservatives on board. If one were to set out to define a blueprint to put together a winning coalition, trying to fashion it out of these conflicting elements scarcely seems like a logical place to start. Likewise with constitutions viewed as coordinating devices, the many veto points in the American constitutional system could just as arguably be said to be obstacles to coordination. See George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). This might not seem problematic if one takes the view, as Hardin does, that the central purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to facilitate commerce. On such a view, institutional sclerosis might arguably be an advantage, limiting government's capacity to interfere with the economy. The difficulty with going that route is that we then have a theory for all seasons: constitutions lacking multiple veto points facilitate political coordination, while those containing them facilitate coordination in realms that might otherwise be interfered with by politicians. Certainly nothing in Hardin's argument accounts for why some constitutions facilitate more coordination of a particular kind than do others.

11. Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Economics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1953).

12. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 88-108.

13. See Courtney Jung and Ian Shapiro, “South Africa's Negotiated Transition: Democracy, Opposition, and the New Constitutional Order,”Politics and Society 23 (1995): 269-308.

14. What is necessary in the context of one problem may, of course, be contingent in another. When we postulate that it was necessary that Arafat be strong enough to marginalize the radicals on his flank if he were to make an agreement with Barak, we do not mean to deny that his relative strength in this regard was dependent on many contingent factors. For further discussion, see Courtney Jung, Ellen Lust-Okar, and Ian Shapiro, “Problems and Prospects for Democratic Transitions: South Africa as a Model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?” (mimeo, Yale University, 2002). In some ultimate—if uninteresting—sense, everything social scientists study is contingent on factors such as that the possibility of life on Earth not be destroyed due to a collision with a giant meteor. To be intelligible, the search for lawlike generalizations must be couched in “if... then” statements that make reference, however implicitly, to the problem under study.

15. Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106-17.

16. For Przeworski et al.'s discussion of other explanatory variables, see ibid., 122-37.

17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Perennial, 1966).

18. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,”American Political Science Review 53 (1959): 69-105.

19. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 413-32; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Oxford, UK: Polity, 1992).

20. See Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix-xii, 1-9, 51-99; Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development, 78-106; Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 3-18; Ian Shapiro, Democracy's Place (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 79-108.

21. Perhaps one could develop such a theory but only of an exceedingly general kind such as “holes are created when something takes material content out of something else.” This would not be of much help in understanding or predicting anything worth knowing about holes.

22. See the various postmortem papers in the March 2001 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 9-58.

23. For discussion of the difficulties with prediction in open systems, see Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Sussex, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1975), 63-142; idem, The Possibility of Naturalism (Sussex, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1979), 158-69.

24. Alan Gerber and Donald Green, “Do Phone Calls Increase Voter Turnout? A Field Experiment,”Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (2001): 75-85; idem, “Reclaiming the Experimental Tradition in Political Science” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, 3d ed., ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner (forthcoming).

25. For discussion of an analogous phenomenon that plagues normative debates in political theory, see Ian Shapiro, “Gross Concepts in Political Argument,”Political Theory 17, no. 1 (1989): 51-76.

26. Charles Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” in Philosophical Papers II: Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ed. Charles Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 90.

27. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Changing Conceptions of Citizenship in US Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

28. Indeed, Smith's argument turns out to be the tip of an iceberg in debunking misleading orthodoxy about American exceptionalism. Eric Foner has shown that its assumptions about Europe are no less questionable than its assumptions about the United States. See Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?”History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): 57-80.

29. Philippe Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?”Review of Politics 36, no. 1 (1974): 85-121; Leo Panitch, “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies,”Comparative Political Studies, April 1977, 61-90.

30. It turns out that joint legislation writing is a small part of the story. What often matters more is ongoing tripartite consultation about public policy and mutual adjustment of legislation/macroeconomic policy and “private” but quasi-public policy (e.g., wage increases, or multiemployer pension and health plans). There is also the formalized inclusion of private interest representatives in the administration and implementation process where de facto legislation and common law—like adjudication takes place. The extent of their influence in the political process varies from country to country and even industry to industry, but the overall picture is a far cry from the standard pluralist account.

31. For a discussion of the dangers of convergent thinking, see Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 118-32.

32. For a discussion of differences between these models, see Ian Shapiro, “The State of Democratic Theory,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, 3d ed., ed. Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner (forthcoming).

Problems,Methods,and Theories in the Study of Politics,or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do About it

Abstract

Get full access to this article