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Toward A Science of Politics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Bernard Grofman
Bernard Grofman*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
*
E-mail: BGrofman@uci.edu
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Abstract

In the first half of the essay we summarise the main contributions in the essays in this issue by Coleman, Colomer, and Taagepera, and identify key commonalities in their suggestions for making political science more ‘scientific’. We argue that most of their concerns are well taken, but that the remedies they propose may not be applicable in all domains within political science. In particular, it is largely in the area of voting and elections, where clearly demarcated input and output variables can be identified, that their suggestions seem the most applicable. In the second half of the essay we trace the rise and fall, over the past 100 years, of movements in the US to make political science more scientific. We conclude by identifying similarities between these essays and the recent EITM movement in US political science.

Keywords

philosophy of social sciencesmethodologylogic of inquiryscientific study of politics

Information

Type
Symposium
Information
European Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 143 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 European Consortium for Political Research

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