The Politics Missed by Political Science
-
John R. Petrocik
This essay offers some experience-based observations about electoral phenomena that academic political science misses because of a focus on conceptual and theoretical debates that often take pride of place over the empirical phenomena that gave rise to the ideas and concepts that we highly value. We suggest that academic political science is increasingly committed to models and methods that serve a theory or an idea more than they account for observable empirical regularities. Practitioner methods and innovations for persuading voters and winning elections under varying electoral conditions are largely unknown to scholars, with consequences for our collective factual knowledge and ability to test current hypotheses and theories about elections in an appropriate wide range of circumstances.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- The Politics Missed by Political Science
- Fiction, Facts, and Truth: The Personal Lives of Political Figures
- Armed with Practice: Learning to Engage with the Military
- Whether and Whither an Applied Career Track for Doctoral Political Scientists
- Political Science and Practical Politics: A Journalist's Journey
- Is Political Science Relevant? Ask an Expert Witness
- Academics Outside the Academy
- Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics
- Political Science and Practical Politics
- Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs
- Political Science at the State University in the State Capital
- Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don't
- Obama's "Big Bang" Presidency
- Forecasting Control of State Governments and Redistricting Authority After the 2010 Elections
- Review
- Review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike - An Essay in Numbers
- Review of The American Public Mind: The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
- Review of A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- The Politics Missed by Political Science
- Fiction, Facts, and Truth: The Personal Lives of Political Figures
- Armed with Practice: Learning to Engage with the Military
- Whether and Whither an Applied Career Track for Doctoral Political Scientists
- Political Science and Practical Politics: A Journalist's Journey
- Is Political Science Relevant? Ask an Expert Witness
- Academics Outside the Academy
- Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics
- Political Science and Practical Politics
- Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs
- Political Science at the State University in the State Capital
- Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don't
- Obama's "Big Bang" Presidency
- Forecasting Control of State Governments and Redistricting Authority After the 2010 Elections
- Review
- Review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike - An Essay in Numbers
- Review of The American Public Mind: The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
- Review of A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
