We all use concepts in our research, but as with learning to walk, our acquisition of these skills is largely incidental and subconscious – that is, tacit knowledge. In this chapter, I build on the topics covered in this volume to develop a basic structure for teaching the formation and analysis of concepts more explicitly.Footnote 1
This structure can be incorporated both into courses on research methods, and also into substantively oriented courses. A common constraint on teaching concepts is that the subject is rarely allocated more than a session or two in a course. The recommendations of this chapter are intended to lay the foundation for conceptual thinking in students’ future work and should be applicable to either a single session or an entire course.
Two pedagogical tools, example and practice (exercises), are core to much teaching, but I argue that they are especially important in teaching things that we think we know but in fact may not know very well. Concepts are complicated beasts in that they are identified by “folk” terms with which we are often very familiar, such as democracy or corruption,Footnote 2 and yet for which a broadly agreed upon definition can be elusive. Thus, graduate students may assume that the meaning of a concept is widely shared, when in fact even their peers in the seminar room may have quite a different understanding of it, let alone those in the broader discipline (or outside it). Sartori’s (Sartori, Riggs, and Teune Reference Sartori, Riggs and Teune1975) concern about a “tower of Babel” problem in political science – the counterproductive proliferation of terms and meanings – is certainly salient today. Hence, training students to work effectively with concepts can maximize clarity and understanding and, not incidentally, contribute to students’ future effectiveness as researchers and teachers.
Motivating the Focus on Concepts and Concept Analysis
Concepts are ideas that we use for ordering and organizing discussions about the world. To do this successfully, we must define and measure concepts clearly. The resulting clarity allows us to talk about ideas in a coherent manner and cumulate knowledge about specific topics. I suggest that careful work with concepts in the context of a research project includes four basic steps:
(1) Formulation and definition of the concept.
(2) Discussion of its place in the broader conceptual field – that is, the connection with related concepts.
(3) Operationalization – to define the descriptive indicators that can be used to determine whether a concept is present empirically. This iterative, multistep process involves researchers’ evaluating potential indicators and assessing their matchup with the concept being considered. This potentially can involve teasing out multidimensionality, and even modifications in the concept itself.
(4) Measurement – the application of specific empirical indicators to evaluate the components of a concept and generate data.
If indicators appropriate to a given study have previously been established, step 3 will probably be skipped. Yet for teaching, all four steps should be emphasized.
Each of these tasks can be introduced briefly to begin a discussion of concepts. This will help students see the close relationship between developing the idea and characteristics of a concept while also tackling the practical aspects of identifying indicators and techniques for measurement. Rather than a straight path from concept to measurement, these tasks often involve an iterative process wherein a researcher discovers assumptions they have made or gaps in their definitions that emerge during efforts to operationalize the concept. This process then leads to a reevaluation of the concept itself, as well as possible techniques for measuring it. Introducing concepts in this holistic, interactive manner should lead to both richer conceptual discussions and increased validity in measurement.
Once these basic tasks of concept analysis are laid out, examples of concepts serve as the first pedagogical tool to explore. Here, it can be useful to begin with students’ own interests, rather than jumping to examples of established concepts in the discipline. This allows students to grapple with the intricacies of concept analysis on their own, before engaging in a discussion of topics in other work. Their own experiences then provide a foundation for better examining and understanding the issues faced in conceptual analysis more generally. The very act of prodding students to articulate the concepts that run through their topics of research is enlightening for them and provokes conceptual thinking. And, of course, to name examples pushes one to understand what concepts are and how they vary.
A useful assignment for this type of practice is a short, written conceptual analysis on something relevant to a student’s research interests. This should include attention to all four of the basic steps in concept analysis and can be motivated with these and related questions:
What is the “folk” use of the concept in daily (nonacademic) life?
How, if at all, has it been used in social science research to date?
Are the folk and scientific uses similar? If not, how do they differ?
What limitations, if any, exist in past work and why? These could be related to definition, operationalization, and/or measurement.
How do you plan to use the concept?
With this usage, how does the concept relate to other associated concepts in the field?
How does the concept stand up to Gerring’s (Reference Rose-Ackerman1999) criteria for “what makes a concept good”?
What are the different attributes that make up the concept?
What are some possible indicators – existing or proposed – that you could use to measure these attributes?
Building Blocks: Concept Formation and Typologies
Contending with the complexities of their own research helps to open students’ minds to the issues raised in conceptual work more generally, but it may introduce only certain types of concerns, depending on the particular concept. This is where examples can play a powerful role in broadening their understanding. This section shows how concept formation can be advanced through the construction of informal typologies, which can help with understanding the multidimensionality of many concepts.
Examples of concepts already in use can be highly instructive for illustrating the four basic steps in concept analysis, as well as for evaluating the quality of a concept as a whole. Here, I highlight these steps with two important concepts in political science: democracy and corruption. Intriguingly, the meaning of democracy is often contested, whereas that of corruption is not – and it can be productive to press students to figure out why.Footnote 3
In considering specific examples, students should be encouraged to evaluate both the definition of the concept and its relationship to other concepts. That is, mapping the “semantic field” (Sartori Reference Sartori1984). The three fundamental elements of a conceptual definition are: (1) the events or phenomena to be defined, (2) the properties or attributes used to define, and (3) the label for the concept (Sartori Reference Sartori1984; Gerring Reference Gerring1999). Once defined, the concept can be compared with other relevant concepts in the field, which is typically achieved through use of conceptual hierarchies. Two types of hierarchies are frequently used in political science: kind hierarchies, as described by Sartori (Reference Sartori1984), and part–whole hierarchies, as discussed by Collier and Levitsky.Footnote 4 With kind hierarchies, concepts at a lower level of the hierarchy retain all the characteristics of the root concept but are differentiated by the addition of more specific characteristics. For example, presidential and parliamentary democracies both fit all of the “procedural minimum” characteristics of the root concept “democracy” (as discussed later) while exhibiting additional features that differentiate their executive/legislative institutions. In part–whole hierarchies, by contrast, lower-level concepts possess some but not all the characteristics of the root concept, resulting in “diminished” subtypes.Footnote 5 A diminished subtype of democracy might be missing competitive elections, while another lacks universal suffrage. This attention to vertical hierarchies and horizontal types will help students establish where their concept of interest fits in the broader conceptual field.
Democracy
These techniques can then be applied to prominent examples in the field. For example, what is “democracy”? It may be sufficient in some contexts to define democracy as “rule by the people,” but for empirical social science, a further elaboration is necessary for what “rule” means and who “the people” are. Within political science, many analysts have settled on conceptualizations that are procedural and in general “minimalist,” as in “procedural minimum definition,” emphasizing the multidimensional character of this concept and the minimal number of procedures that must exist for a case to be considered a democracy.Footnote 6 Significant procedures that may be included are universal suffrage, free and fair elections, electoral competition, and protection of civil liberties. Students can debate whether specific definitions of a concept seem complete and how the definition establishes the relationship to other, parallel concepts.
Yet even with a minimal definition, analysts may argue that (1) additional features are necessary for fully representing the concept of democracy, or that (2) different mixes of the “minimum” procedures can be appropriate. This suggests that typologies may also be relevant to understanding the concept of democracy, in that they can be used to map out the relationship between different dimensions and different types. An important example in conceptualizations of democracy is the two-by-two typology produced by Dahl’s (Reference Dahl1971) focus on contestation and participation.
Corruption
Another concept useful for instruction is “corruption.” As with democracy, it is often defined in minimalist terms as “the abuse of public office for private gain.” But in contrast to democracy, this definition is hardly debated at all, to the detriment of our understanding of corruption (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015). I have argued that the frequent failure to interrogate the characteristics falling within this definition “makes it largely, if not entirely, impossible to determine whether the corruption considered in one analysis ‘should’ be the same or different from that evaluated elsewhere” (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015: 24).
Typologies can again play a useful role here, given their contribution to mapping dimensions and types. They allow the researcher to build detail into the definition of the concept in a way that is appropriate to the specific research question. Past work has differentiated corruption on multiple dimensions, for example, petty versus grand corruption (Heywood Reference Heywood1997; Rose-Ackerman Reference Rose-Ackerman1999; Basu Reference Basu2011), retail versus wholesale, harassment versus nonharassment, and local versus national. Heywood (Reference Heywood1997) identifies still other dimensions upon which typologies can be developed, but I posit that lack of attention to when a particular typology should be used has impeded the accumulation of knowledge on corruption in general (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015: 23–24).
The solution I propose is to develop typologies of corruption tailored to specific research projects. Where possible, they should build on existing work, yet also draw on the specific characteristics of corruption relevant to the analytical question at hand. For example, in work concerned with identifying constraints on anti-corruption reforms, I focus on control over resources as the key dimension of corruption to consider and differentiate between types of corruption based on who has control (direct or indirect) over what type of government resource (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015: 37–41). This allows for a more specific consideration of which actors within government might resist reforms to corruption related to the distribution of which resources. While this distinction may not be useful for all analyses of corruption, establishing whether it is useful becomes more straightforward with a clear delineation of the assumptions and logic behind the types. Table 23.1 summarizes a set of examples for how “corruption” has been typologized, depending on the goals of the researcher. Instructors can use these examples to encourage students to explore the conditions under which different variants of a concept would be useful for addressing a specific research question.
| Dimensions of Corruption | Dimensional Categories | (Typical) Distinguishing Features | Examples of relevant studies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale |
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| Phase of transaction |
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| Eligibility |
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| Jurisdiction |
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| Controller |
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This presentation of existing corruption typologies also shows that much work in this area has focused on only a single dimension or characteristic, which might result in an underrepresentation of the larger concept. While this kind of simplification can be useful for analysis, it may also force important substantive differences between types of behaviors into a single type, thereby limiting what we can infer from the results of an analysis. Thus, attempting to distinguish between multiple features within a definition could help to clarify our thinking on what differences within a concept may be theoretically relevant while also improving the match of measurement techniques to overall concept.
To illustrate with one hypothetical example, I explore in Table 23.2 how we might combine existing distinctions between petty and grand corruption with the differentiation between whether the bribe-giver is eligible for the service/good or not (otherwise known as harassment versus nonharassment bribe). The latter distinction, eligibility, might help us to evaluate, for example, the implications of bribes paid by multiple viable contractors to get a government contract, versus bribes paid by contractors who are actually unable to fulfill the contractual demands in a satisfactory way. The interaction of these dimensions of scale and eligibility yield interesting categories that lead to a richer description of the phenomenon. Thus, considering dimensions jointly, as typologies, can be powerful.
| Eligibility of Bribe Giver | Petty versus Grand Corruption | |
|---|---|---|
| Petty | Grand | |
| Eligible | Speed Money – Bribes paid to access basic services to which an actor is entitled, but in a timelier manner | Selection Corruption – Bribes paid to win a competitive contract for which a company is eligible |
| Noneligible | Petty Access Corruption – Bribes paid to access basic services to which an actor is not eligible, such as welfare benefits | Grand Access Corruption – Bribes paid to acquire a contract for which a company is ineligible |
Having reviewed these different models of definition and typologies, one may also return to Gerring’s (Reference Gerring1999) criteria for establishing “what makes a concept good,” by applying his framework to different variations on the concepts of democracy and corruption.
Untangling Concepts
Understanding when an instance or a case no longer fits the concept under consideration is also a key issue.Footnote 7 Examples again provide an important tool for teaching by elucidating strategies we can use to untangle concepts. Two related issues often raised in discussions of corruption are relevant here. First, how do we think about something that is considered “corruption” in one place, but is legalized in another context? And second, can legal behavior that “corrupts” a system be considered corruption?
In the first case, consider a typical act of corruption: A bureaucrat accepts a bribe from an individual to provide a service more quickly than they otherwise would. This instance of “speed money” is common in many parts of the Global South, but largely unheard of in the Global North. Yet legalized speed money, in the form of extra payments to receive government services, such as a passport, more quickly is common in the Global North. The difference is these funds go into the official receipts of the government, rather than the pocket of the individual bureaucrat. When this act is legal, there is no longer abuse of office by a single actor, but there remains variation in who can access services quickly.
This question leads us to the second case, in which legal acts or influences are seen to corrupt the functioning of an institution. This “institutional corruption” is seen to exist where there is a “systemic and strategic influence which is legal, or even currently ethical, that nonetheless undermines the institution’s effectiveness,” its ability to achieve its purpose, and its trustworthiness (Lessig Reference Lessig2013b). Where, for example, politicians are dependent on donations for their political success, this can conflict with their institutional role as representatives in a democracy (Lessig Reference Lessig2013a).
In both cases, the acts that we have traditionally considered “corruption” are those that are explicitly illegal forms of private gain, even though the question of legality is not made explicit in the standard definition of corruption. Perhaps defining corruption as “the abuse of public office to engage in illegal activity for private gain” would add clarity to our analyses. In this sense, to untangle different, but similar, forms of behavior, it is necessary to add specificity to our definition. This also allows us to distinguish between those acts that, in the case of corruption, are likely to have different political and institutional ramifications.
Students can be asked to consider which practices or behaviors an existing conceptual definition would “allow for.” Do these other cases fit with what we generally assume to be instances of the concept? Does including or excluding a case change what we see as the fundamental characteristics that must be present in the definition?
Operationalization and Measurement Validity
Once defined, how do we operationalize and measure a concept? Operationalization is a process of identifying the indicators that one will use to evaluate the degree to which the concept is relevant in a given context. For the procedural minimum definition of democracy discussed here, this would mean identifying which indicators of those procedures are sufficient for establishing the presence or absence of democracy. This could include suffrage laws and their implementation; election rules and regulations; the presence of multiple viable candidates and/or political parties; and legal protections and their enforcement for freedom of association, speech, and assembly.
In a classroom setting, students can be asked to consider what is necessary and sufficient in mapping the definition of a concept to specific indicators. For example, is it necessary to include indicators of each attribute of a multifaceted concept? Are certain attributes more fundamental than others to the definition?
It is then important to develop a strategy for measuring the relevant attributes. Measurement involves several considerations fundamental in research design, including practical concerns related to accessing useful data. A measurement plan must include a description of the proposed measure(s) and sources, such as administrative data, a survey, or news reports. For each indicator, there should also be consideration of whether a single measure or a composite index will be used.
This raises the important topic of measurement validity, or the degree to which our operationalization and measurement of a concept adequately reflect the content of the concept in question.Footnote 8 Consider an extreme minimum definition of democracy as universal adult suffrage. In this case, the operationalization includes only one indicator: inclusive suffrage. However, as Paxton (Reference Paxton2000) points out, most empirical studies of democracy prior to 2000 used a measure of adult male suffrage. As a result, many countries were counted as democracies long before they achieved the key characteristic identified in even a narrow operationalization, thereby bringing into question any analysis that drew conclusions based on this invalid measure. Instructors should encourage students to revisit research in their area of interest to evaluate the match between concepts, specific defining attributes, and measures.
Similar issues arise in the measurement of corruption. While a minimum definition seems useful for comparing across studies, in practice it has resulted in defining corruption in similar ways, while implementing dramatically different operationalization and measurement strategies. Consider these very different corruption measures, extracted from recent work:
External “expert” perceptions of corruption as measured by Transparency International (Glaeser and Saks Reference Glaeser and Saks2006)
The accumulation of unpaid parking tickets by diplomats in Manhattan (Golden and Picci Reference Golden and Picci2005)
Estimated changes in elected politicians’ wealth (Fisman and Miguel Reference Fisman and Miguel2007)
The difference between built infrastructure and funds allocated to building (Bose et al. Reference Bose, Capasso and Panini Murshid2008)
The number of officials convicted for corrupt practices (Bhavnani Reference Bhavnani2009)
Each of these measures is intended to evaluate whether public actors are abusing their offices for private gain. Yet they are so diverse as to be largely incomparable – and one might in fact find low correlations among indicators (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015). While each measure may indeed be an indicator of corruption, the sharp contrasts among them highlight both issues in the translation from concept to measurement and difficulties in comparing findings across research ostensibly studying the same concept.
Pulling It Together
A final exercise for motivating students is to return to their original conceptual analyses and revisit the initial conclusions in light of subsequent discussions. Are students satisfied with their initial analysis? Are there nuances that they missed in the first pass, but which would be important for their work? How might they apply each topic covered here to the evaluation and measurement of their concept?
Engaging in teaching concept analysis also allows us to demystify the idea of concepts, while grounding it in specific guidance for rigorous analytic work. Thus, in addition to the tools discussed earlier, we can encourage a conceptual mindset that values the quality of an analysis. This enables researchers to recognize that:
It is not necessary to generate a “new” concept to do meaningful work. Rather, it is necessary to define the concept in the clearest and most parsimonious way possible, and to consider how each student’s usage relates to previous uses in the literature.
If students are using a typology, ensure that it clearly reflects the conceptual foundation they have developed and is substantively appropriate to the research question (typological completeness) (Bussell Reference Bussell, Rose Ackerman and Lagunes2015).
The indicators for a concept must incorporate the full range of characteristics identified as important for the specific research question (concept representation).
“Good” data sources do not equal good measurement. Measures are only good (i.e., useful for analyzing a question) if they reflect the underlying assumptions and characteristics formulated in the broader process of operationalization (measurement validity).
Concept analysis can be fun, frustrating, inspiring, and difficult all at once, much like the rest of our research endeavors. But it is the core of what we do and of our ability to cumulate knowledge about the world around us. Empowering our students with these tools is one of our most fundamental tasks as advisors, and it will pay dividends for many years in the exciting research it enables.
Social scientists employ concepts almost intuitively. But being more deliberate and self-conscious about the use and analysis of concepts can accelerate and improve the practice. It follows that we should teach conceptualization and concept analysis at various levels of education.Footnote 1 I sketch a set of classroom exercises and thought experiments that hook students on concepts, improve their research, and enliven the classroom.
Exercises in Conceptual Training
Reconceptualization of Your Favorite Concept
A standard practice in concept analysis is something that Giovanni Sartori (Reference Sartori, Collier and Gerring2009) sometimes called reconceptualization. The reconceptualization exercise involves immersing oneself in the various meanings of a term employed by scholars and distilling a set of both defining and elective (accidental) attributes. An important complement to this definitional step is a back and forth between the abstract and the observable world, in which one sharpens the connotation (intension) of the concept at the same time one explores its denotation (extension). Importantly, denotation requires examples which bring refreshing clarity. Finally, a good reconceptualization should pay attention to the semantic field, the network of related concepts that represent narrower or broader variants of the target concept or that share some attribute, whether elective or definitional. This disambiguation of related terms is helpful since we do not know what something is until we know what it is not. The flood of terms in this paragraph is no accident. The approach to concepts in the style of Sartori and David Collier involves learning new concepts about concepts, an approach that appropriately reinforces and exemplifies the mission.
Some version of the reconceptualization exercise is evident in many journal articles, books, and dissertations. I would suggest that every PhD dissertation should have at least a few pages of reconceptualization. Good examples are not hard to find. The back half of Sartori’s Reference Sartori1984 book includes a set of such analyses that he commissioned from his band of concept enthusiasts. Such reconceptualizations help readers retain ideas. But they can also have lasting and formative influences on scholarship for years, unlike some more ephemeral work. One example is Kurt Weyland’s (Reference Weyland2001) reconceptualization of populism, which has served to shape debates during at least two eras of populist emergence.
“What Is That a Case of?”
David Collier popularized this line, and it has the surprising power to push researchers beyond their cases to the categories that contain them. Many of us come to our studies enraptured by some concrete political phenomenon. Perhaps it is some historic event, some scandalous leader, or some meaty policy arena. For me, like so many who lived through the third wave of democracy, it was the cascade of democratic transitions in southern Europe, Latin America, and then Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. All of these events seemed to be interdependent, the process of some kind of bandwagoning. Fascinated by these connections, I combed through the debates of constitutional assemblies of the era, and their references to other countries and constitutions. What were these references “a case of”? Why, a case of ostensive rhetoric, I ultimately determined, coining that term for the argument-by-pointing of the delegates. It seemed presumptuous of me to invent the term, but then again, none existed, and an idea requires a word if we are to expect others to file it away cognitively. I note that Sartori warns against excessive neologisms, being something of a conservationist of language, but selective term invention is one of the joys of working with concepts, as I describe in more detail later.
So, to this day, a self-conscious mantra of “what is that a case of?” serves to launch many scholars past concrete cases and into the conceptual realm. It might well be a professor’s first step towards kick-starting conceptual thinking among students.
Taxonomy Construction
Categorizing cases can soon lead to taxonomy construction. If one is categorizing some event, one might as well peel back the onion and categorize other like events, and connect concepts that are related. After all, every object of study – whether it is animals, mental disorders, films, or pizza – needs a catalog of its kinds. One needs to represent knowledge to accumulate knowledge. And, just like performing CPR, it is better to do something badly than nothing at all. Linnaeus et al. (Reference Linnaeus1758) may have created an excellent, resonant taxonomy of natural organisms – he described it himself as “masterful.” Yet ordinary mortals should also take up the taxonomy task. With my coauthors on the Comparative Constitutions Project, I have taken such a process to its logical, and time-consuming, end. Our objective has been to record the content of historical constitutions. But, of course, if one is to say what is in constitutions, one needs a large set of relevant concepts of what “what” is. Our “survey instrument” allows a reader to code some 650 aspects of constitutions. It is a taxonomy, of sorts, of constitutional provisions. We have condensed this list to a more general set of 330 topics, which form the “taxonomy” that is on Constitute, our indexed repository of constitutions (online at constituteproject.org). We have tagged excerpts from these constitutions so that users (most frequently, constitution drafters) can retrieve model text on any given topic. One does not need to go to these ends, though one might imagine a dissertation project doing so. A simpler version of this process can and should happen every day.
One way to facilitate taxonomy construction is to take common phenomena and build a quick, workable taxonomy. Topics could be music, film, wine, or political science subjects. If the class meets prior to lunch, developing a taxonomy of restaurants is especially motivating. In five to ten minutes, hungry students usually have a decent working taxonomy. What is interesting, of course, is that students will choose different methods of categorization. Some take a hierarchical (branch, stem, and leaf) approach while others a faceted (leaf only) one, which allows students to think about variation in the structure of their concepts. Their approaches will also inevitably privilege different dimensions (cuisine, cost, vibe, ingredient restrictions), much in the same way Linnaeus would have privileged different attributes in Systema Naturae than did other biologists. That variation in taxonomies reminds us that there is not just one way to categorize the world. Surely, not every biologist thinks it was a good idea to group blue whales and cows in the same category as mammals, simply because both have mammary glands. Furthermore, the inevitable argument about the defining attributes of a category and the placement of particular entities in that category reminds us of the critical back-and-forth nature of the exercise between the abstract and the concrete. In sum, the exercise is enlightening and generalizable to many phenomena.
Taxonomy construction can also be empowering intellectually. Building or studying the categorization of some domain – whether political regimes or films – leads to a sense of command over items in that domain. Formal taxonomies represent knowledge in a field, after all, and if one understands where things go, one can speak more intelligently of them in a way that is readily appreciated by the listener. One of the virtues of graduate school field exams, for example, is that students usually develop a set of categories for kinds of research, an organizational sense that often equates to expertise. Further, like any good conceptual exercise, the taxonomy process stimulates interest in the phenomenon itself. Suffice it to say that the lunch after the restaurant taxonomy exercise may well taste that much better.
The satisfaction that comes with the systematization of ideas will be recognizable to most. Just as our intellectual lives are besieged by a torrent of ideas and theories and facts, our ordinary lives are constantly threatened by material clutter. Whether it is the garage, closet, desk, or photos, the possibilities for organization are endless. In my garage sits a large box with a motley collection of screws just waiting for one of my kids to typologize and organize them, or at least so I threaten. Odds and ends belong to types, which can be put in boxes (or thrown out). The ultimate result is an oddly satisfying orderly world in which things are in their place. So too with conceptualization.
Students need not look far for intellectual clutter. It may be surprising how many domains of inquiry lack even the most rudimentary taxonomy. The political world is filled with such opportunities. Recall the list of topics by which my colleagues and I index constitutional provisions. On Constitute, our indexed repository of constitutions, one could retrieve all of the provisions related to, say, the “environment” or “campaign financing.” Yet that is where the fun begins, at least for my students. Categories beget subcategories: What are the different ways that constitutions treat the environment or campaign finance? Furthermore, even if my coauthors and I have our own categorization scheme, ours is just one approach. Students can pick most areas of constitutional design and refine, revise, and enrich the taxonomy, just as biologists have done with the Linnaean approach over time. Students may well be one of the first to describe some interesting variation in environmental clauses. And, like any good conceptual exercise, this taxonomy and its illustrative elements would make for a useful publication or report.
“There are Two Kinds of People in the World…”
Taxonomy construction can take a bit of time. A two-minute version of the taxonomy exercise is to ask students to compose binaries, by asking them to finish the sentence above. One can toss it out as an ice-breaker. A minute of thought and everyone has an answer, or two, which may well be completely different from the others. Nothing better exposes the irony of the “two kinds of people…” opening than twenty different endings to it. And, inevitably, the answers are entertaining and enlightening about what is important to the student. I still recall a student whose view of people was profoundly shaped by the herb cilantro. According to him, there were two kinds of people: those who like cilantro, and those who have a deep aversion to it. Of course, other answers probably cut more deeply into the human condition and psyche. Undoubtedly, most of us live in a nonbinary world, but it is still illuminating to see alternative answers to the question, whether one writes them on the chalkboard or commissions them in an online chat. And facilitators should be ready for the response that cuts to the heart of the exercise: “those who think there are two kinds of people, and those that do not.”
“So, What Do You Work On?”
You are at a social gathering or maybe in the proverbial elevator, that time-limited space for conversation. Some well-meaning person expresses interest in your work, skips the small talk, and cuts right to the heart of your scholarly experience with some variation of this question: “So, what do you work on?”
That should be easy, right? One thing for students to think about is how they would categorize their research, even how they might better categorize the fields of political science. Surely, we can do better than “comparative politics,” “American politics,” and so on. Departments have, at times, tried to move beyond these categories, though without much success. Even suboptimal categorization can have something of a lock-in effect once scholars build their careers around it; again, scholarly conversation is the point of categorization, and once one has learned a language, learning another is not always easy.
Yet a student’s research project should certainly be categorized somehow. What is their study a case of? If they were to classify their study as a particular genre, what would that be? And how is that related to other genres? They might categorize by topic, by theoretical approach, by method (statistical, case study, ethnography, formal theory), or some other dimension. Locating the work gives listeners some purchase on the project, and may even teach them something about the lay of the land.
Summarizing research for nonspecialists is not easy; too much detail loses the listener and overly abstract notions will be not be grounded enough. Those who stop someone to ask for directions need the big picture, with just enough detail. Answering the question with concepts and examples can be enlightening and clarifying, for speaker and listener.
The larger point of the exercise is that if we are to categorize anything, it may as well be the ideas in our discipline, and also how our own research project fits in that scheme. For young scholars about to stake their territory, conceptualization about their research may be particularly important.
Testing and the Internalization of Concepts
Spelling bees, and the contestants that drill and study for them incessantly, represent an intriguing subculture. In a tense tie-breaking round, a twelve year old won the 2024 Scripps Competition with the correct spelling of “abseil.” I have come to suspect that learning so many arcane words may be more than just an intellectual feat; with each word, these spellers may have unlocked a set of ideas that they would not have otherwise learned. Would some targeted version of this practice be worthwhile at both the undergraduate and graduate levels? If concepts are cognitive tools that help to represent knowledge, why not equip students with such knowledge tools? In any given subject area, ideas emerge that, more often than not, can be represented by concepts.
Spelling, of course, is not the point, though helpful. For each idea (concept), one should be able to provide (1) an adequate definition, and (2) a concrete illustration. That one–two punch is, of course, already a central part of many exams in the social sciences. A typical exam format, in my experience, is one in which the examiner presupplies a list of concepts, which the student learns to define and illustrate. A student develops and internalizes answers to entries on this list and then, on exam day, provides the answers to some subset (or all) of those entries. The format also serves as a nice check on professors, since it pushes them to incorporate concepts explicitly in their teaching, lecture by lecture. Their list of concepts, then, represents the intellectual terrain covered in the course.
Students arguably appreciate this format. After all, the task is clear and defined. And they walk out of the exam with a clear set of ideas associated with a specific vocabulary, which allows them to communicate these ideas to others. At times, I have wondered whether the format erred on the side of the rote, mechanical learning characteristic of the spelling bee, but now I have come to see those elements as features as opposed to bugs. Part of the reason is that students crave and deserve some sort of architectural record of what they have learned. Ideas sometimes wash over us without sticking. Moreover, it is unclear sometimes what exactly the intellectual terrain and boundaries even are of a particular domain of knowledge.
The graduate field exam, as practiced in most US departments of political science, is no exception. Students are expected to learn as much as possible about the central ideas and contributions in the field and then demonstrate that knowledge in response to a set of essay questions. The game, of course, is for the student to deliver a canned answer on, say, transitions to democracy, while framing it around whatever clever hook the professor used to pose the question. Some may shudder at the thought of reading or writing such precooked essays. But as I mentioned earlier, one of the great benefits of the field exam is that students learn and internalize where to put things; that is, they develop and learn a set of categories of research. Even so, it is never clear whether students have read and learned the ideas that they were “supposed” to learn. How very civilized it would be if they were presented with a taxonomy of the field – a list of its important concepts (ideas) – and asked to identify them. Showing a command of this list might be only part of the exam; I am not suggesting that we forego entirely the rite of passage that is the canned essay. But it would be nice to know that students have some comprehensive knowledge of the core ideas in a field. At least I think so, which is why I recently convinced my colleagues in the Public Law field at the University of Texas to implement a version of this vocabulary test. For now, reviews have been positive.
Conclusion
The exercises described here are road-tested, though adaptation to the particular audience is advised. The reviews suggest that students appreciate the basic objective and more than one student has since committed to “conceptualism.” That is, they recognize the intellectual value and cognitive utility of concepts. Conceptual thought feels like core scholarly work, maybe even like one’s prototypical view of science, in that concepts help to generalize knowledge yet stay closely grounded to cases. Concepts as shorthand are instantly communicable to others, and therefore accumulative in ways we hope science would be. And working with concepts is strangely intellectually satisfying, in part because the world and its many observables become more comprehensible. Yet more than anything, concepts render life’s events and experiences easier to remember. How frustrating it is to forget ideas in a course, book, or film just one week later, much less thirty years. In a world in which too much can seem quite ephemeral, an idea that sticks around is priceless.
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