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The Agenda for “Social Science History”*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
I want to take as my texts today statements made to me in correspondence and conversation by two senior quantitative historians. Each statement illustrates what I believe to be misjudgments about the proper methodological priorities for quantitative historians in America today. To spare these historians from publicity which their casual statements were not intended to invite, but mostly to protect myself against reprisal, I shall not name them here.
The first statement arose because I assigned a particular book in my American Political History course. Some of my colleagues, students, and I were critical of the methodology employed in the book, and a student suggested we might reanalyze the data, employing different techniques. The data set, however, was rather obscure and was apparently not available at any major archive. When I wrote to the author, rather brashly asking for a copy of his computer tapes, I was informed that he had “lost interest” in the project after the first year or so and discarded most of the tapes and IBM cards.
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- Comment and Debate
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- Copyright © Social Science History Association 1977
Footnotes
*
This paper was first given to a panel on “Priorities in American Behavioral History” at the SSHA meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, April 23-24, 1976. I have retained its rhetorical and slightly hyperbolic character deliberately in order to provoke controversy.
References
Notes
1 This ongoing literature is much too vast to cite here. For a discussion of recent work in the area, see Jacob, Herbert and Vines, Kenneth N., Politics in The American States, third ed. (Boston, 1976).Google Scholar
2 See Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957), and Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter, Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973).Google Scholar
3 “The ‘New Political History’: A Methodological Critique,” Reviews in American History, IV (1976), 1-14.
4 Examples might be drawn from reviews of Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar, or of my own book, The Shaping of Southern Politics (New Haven, Conn., 1974). Again, in order to minimize the number of my enemies, I shall not cite specific examples.
5 Johnston, John, Econometric Methods, second ed. (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Key, V.O. Jr., Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Blalock, Hubert M., Social Statistics, second ed. (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. See also the new moderately mathematical text by Hanushek, Eric and Jackson, John, Statistical Methods for Social Scientists (New York, 1976).Google Scholar