Political scientists have access to a number of competing methodologies that marshal different forms of evidence for their arguments about political phenomena. Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in political science research and, more frequently, economics: spatially explicit and time-varying neurological activity of human subjects engaged in political or economic decision-making. As with any of the more standard methodologies, this approach carries with it a set of orienting theories linking hypotheses with the types of data induced to support or falsify these theories. While this new form of evidence is exciting, especially for the empirically minded social scientist, it deserves the utmost scrutiny. I provide a review of how neurological imaging is being used in the social sciences and consider several problems and prospects of using neuroimaging data in political science.
French
Les sciences politiques ont recours à des méthodes de recherche et à des évidences empiriques diverses pour étudier les phénomènes politiques. Récemment, les chercheurs en sciences politiques et plus souvent encore en économie se sont tout particulièrement intéressés à l'activité cérébrale, objectivable dans l'espace et variant dans le temps, de sujets humains en situation de prise de décision politique ou économique. Comme toute autre méthode de recherche, cette approche s'appuie sur des orientations théoriques, qui font le lien entre les hypothèses de recherche et les données destinées à étayer ou invalider ces théories. Si cette approche nouvelle semble prometteuse, tout particulièrement pour les chercheurs à l'esprit empirique, elle mérite d'être examinée en profondeur. L'article fait le point sur l'utilisation des résultats de l'imagerie cérébrale fonctionnelle en sciences sociales et considère les différents problèmes qu'elle pose ainsi que les perspectives nouvelles qu'elle peut offrir en sciences politiques.
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