School of Social and Political Science

Description

You can join us in the Violet Laidlaw Room, or if you can't make it in person, we will be sending out a Teams joining link before the session.

Examining the U.S. political science discipline more than twenty years after its Perestroika movement, it would appear that methodological pluralism is a widely accepted value. Indeed, in her 2022 American Political Science Association Presidential address, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier argued that scholars should push further toward “engaged” pluralism, even chastising some scholars:
 

We are all familiar with the concern that the dominant approach is closing out possibilities for other methodologies and methods—this concern has been constant over the years even as the nature of the dominant approach itself has changed. However, dogmatism, even within a nondominant tradition, creates barriers and stifles teaching and research (2022, 13, emphasis added).

But one scholar’s dogmatism might be another’s clarity. And her critique begs two questions, What is meant by methodological pluralism? How should we understand its purpose? After a brief overview of how things have changed in U.S. political science since the 1980s, I engage these two questions from the perspective of an interpretivist methodologist who was initially trained in experimental methods and rational choice theory.

By Peregrine Schwartz-Shea from the University of Utah

You can find more information on our speaker here.