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1st Person Account

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PHILADELPHIA -- Jennifer Woodward recalled that she was an undergraduate aspiring political scientist when the Supreme Court issued the ruling that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election. She stayed up late into the night reading about the decision. The next day, her professors (with one exception) ignored the news everyone was talking about and stuck with their planned lectures for the day. She wanted to hear their expertise and largely did not.

Today, as an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Middle Tennessee State University, Woodward wants to do better by her students. So while she makes sure she covers what her courses promise, she takes some time when big things in the world are happening to talk with students and to relate current events to her courses.

Woodward was a panelist at a discussion here Friday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, discussing the challenges professors face helping their undergraduates make sense of the world. Both panelists and audience members said that political science classes have the potential to be places where students learn about issues that are dividing American society -- and where they can discuss these issues in a civil, informed way. Doing so requires being willing to go off the syllabus (and to still cover all the material on the syllabus). The professors here said that this was worth doing -- but not without challenges.

One of those challenges is that many political science students may be fulfilling general education requirements and may not be following current events with much knowledge. Jennifer Fredette, assistant professor of political science at Ohio University, said she had the idea of organizing the panel after engaging a class about the terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, just after that attack took place, only to have a student ask, "Who's Charlie?"

Patrick F. McKinlay, chair of political science at Morningside College, said that he and his colleagues need to remember that most students lack their background. His college is in northwest Iowa and most students come from homes within 75 miles of the college, don't speak a foreign language and may have limited experience interacting with people different from those they grew up with.

They are not, he said, "the people who are on The New York Times site all the time watching what's going on."

He deals with this by assigning groups of students countries or parts of the world to monitor while they are taking his courses. When the Charlie Hebdo attack took place, he had students assigned to be watching events in France already.

Heather Pool, an assistant professor of political science at Denison University, said she teaches political theory and teaches many classic philosophers. But she includes options in assignments where students can relate what they are reading of Plato or others to current events.

William Muck, chair of political science at North Central College, in Illinois, said that faculty members need to be open to deviating from the syllabus, something many fear doing (especially pretenure). "I think a lot of administrators think of the syllabus as a contract," and that makes faculty members nervous about devoting even part of a class session to discussing something in the news that may be relevant to understanding political science, but not that day's course plans, he said. "But I think our classrooms have to be a place for meaningful discussion -- and that we can't just leave these issues for social media or cable news."
And Then the Student Said ...
Panelists said those who are open to these discussions need to be ready for what students may say -- some of which faculty members and fellow students may find ignorant and/or offensive.

Pool described a student saying that because no one in his family had ever owned slaves, he was not interested in a discussion about race and inequality. McKinlay described a discussion of the Middle East in which someone asked the question (others had heard it, too) "Why don't we just nuke them all?"

Several audience members and panelists said that they had noted a particular problem when international students said things that were factually inaccurate about their home regions, and yet were treated as experts by fellow students. Muck said, for example, that he had two students in a class from Egypt, who, in the middle of a discussion of Islam, shared views of Shia Muslims that were inaccurate, and he had to correct them in ways that didn't insult those students.

Fredette said that these comments from all kinds of students "come up in ways that we don't expect," and that it's important for professors to realize that it's quite likely these views have more support in class than the person who made them. "When a student says 'I'm scared of Muslims,'" making assumptions of all members of a faith, "you can hear a pin drop" as many students see the flaws in the statement, "but you may also see some students nodding."

She said she tries to make points about why a comment may offend, while also looking for ways to avoid excluding any students. For example, in questions related to Donald Trump, she has talked about authoritarian movements, and has made the point of noting that they have risen out of both the right and the left. She said that she wants her responses in these situations to avoid the stereotype of "the typical leftist professor."
Important for the Discipline
Panelists said that having these discussions with students, even if sometimes awkward, was important not only for their students but for the discipline.

Muck said that political science "is supposed to be a balance of empirical and normative questions" but the empirical "crowds out those normative questions, which our students crave."

Fredette said that her departmental duties include talking to new majors, and she also asks them why they are making this choice. The answer is always "I love politics," she said. "I have yet to have a student who says that they are excited by multivariate analysis."

Without reshaping the discipline, she said, welcoming these discussions is a way of recognizing student interests. "We should think about what brings them to the major," she said.

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Political scientists consider challenges of talking to undergraduates about controversial current events

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PHILADELPHIA -- Jennifer Woodward recalled that she was an undergraduate aspiring political scientist when the Supreme Court issued the ruling that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election. She stayed up late into the night reading about the decision. The next day, her professors (with one exception) ignored the news everyone was talking about and stuck with their planned lectures for the day.

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Image Oriented

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Scientific research is often divided into two classes: conceptual research and empirical research. There used to be distinct ways of doing research and a researcher would proudly claim to be one or the other, praising his method and scorning the alternative. Today the distinction is not so clear.

What is Conceptual Research?

Conceptual research focuses on the concept or theory that explains or describes the phenomenon being studied. What causes disease? How can we describe the motions of the planets? What are the building blocks of matter? The conceptual researcher sits at his desk with pen in hand and tries to solve these problems by thinking about them. He does no experiments but may make use of observations by others, since this is the mass of data that he is trying to make sense of. Until fairly recently, conceptual research methodology was considered the most honorable form of research-it required using the brain, not the hands. Researchers such as the alchemists who did experiments were considered little better than blacksmiths-"filthy empiricists."

What is Empirical Research?

For all of their lofty status, conceptual researchers regularly produced theories that were wrong. Aristotle taught that large cannonballs fell to earth faster than small ones, and many generations of professors repeated his teachings until Galileo proved them wrong. Galileo was an empiricist of the best sort, one who performed original experiments not merely to destroy old theories but to provide the basis for new theories. A reaction against the ivory tower theoreticians culminated in those who claimed to have no use for theory, arguing that empirical acquisition of knowledge was the only way to the truth. A pure empiricist would simply graph data and see if he got a straight line relation between variables. If so, he had a good "empirical" relationship that would make useful predictions. The theory behind the correlation was irrelevant.

The Scientific Method: A Bit of Both

The modern scientific method is really a combination of empirical and conceptual research. Using known experimental data a scientist formulates a working hypothesis to explain some aspect of nature. He then performs new experiments designed to test predictions of the theory, to support it or disprove it. Einstein is often cited as an example of a conceptual researcher, but he based his theories on experimental observations and proposed experiments, real and thought, which would test his theories. On the other hand, Edison is often considered an empiricist, the "Edisonian method" being a by-word for trial and error. But Edison appreciated the work of theorists and hired some of the best. Random screening of myriad possibilities is still valuable: pharmaceutical companies looking for new drugs do this, sometimes with great success. Personally, I tend to be a semi-empiricist. In graduate school I used the Hammett linear free-energy relation (a semi-empirical equation) to gain insight into chemical transition states. So I don't debate on "conceptual vs. empirical research." There is a range of possibilities between both the forms, all of which have their uses.

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Conceptual vs. Empirical Research: Which Is Better? - Enago Academy

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Scientific research is often divided into two classes: conceptual research and empirical research. There used to be distinct ways of doing research and a researcher would proudly claim to be one or the other, praising his method and scorning the alternative. Today the distinction is not so clear.

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Walsh makes a strong claim in this article in which he believes that political philosophy is not a subset of Political Science. He defends his claim by explaining that political theory answers distinct questions and uses different methods than the discipline of Political Science.

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On the necessarily non-empirical nature of political philosophy (or why political philosophy is not a sub-discipline of political science)

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On the necessarily non-empirical nature of political philosophy (or why political philosophy is not a sub-discipline of political science)

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Keywords: Methodology, Political Philosophy, Political Scienc, Immunity Thesis.

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ABSTRACT
Is political philosophy a part or a sub-discipline of political science? In this paper I defend the claim that, although there is substantial overlap between the two, political philosophy is not a mere subset of political science, since it has distinct questions upon which it is focused as well as methods that are often remarkably distinct from those of political science. Those questions are immune to resolution by empirical methods, Accordingly, I political philosophy is not a part of political science because it deals with questions that cannot be resolved entirely using empirical methods. It is, in this sense, 'speculative' to a degree that political science is not.

政治哲学是政治学的一部分或一个分支么？本文支持一种观点：尽管二者颇有重叠，但政治哲学并非仅仅政治学的一个子系统，因为它聚焦不同的问题，并有一套跟政治学迥异的方法。这些问题不是实证方法所能是解决的。它处理在问题不能全由实证方法解决，故而不属于政治学。政治哲学是思辨的，而政治学则不大是。

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Adrian Walsh is a Political Philosopher who writes on philosophy of economics, distributive justice and issues of methodology.

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On the necessarily non-empirical nature of political philosophy (or why political philosophy is not a sub-discipline of political science)

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ABSTRACT Is political philosophy a part or a sub-discipline of political science? In this paper I defend the claim that, although there is substantial overlap between the two, political philosophy is not a mere subset of political science, since it has distinct questions upon which it is focused as well as methods that are often remarkably distinct from those of political science.

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Failures of Contemporary Political Science.

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Failures of Contemporary Political Science.

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In this article Sly points out where common problems within the discipline occur. He does this by creating a small sketch of what the discipline would look like if it in fact was discipline. Sly believes indoctrination and control play big factors within the field. HE believes we should not just accept these ideologies because they come from experts.

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THE NONSENSE AND NON-SCIENCE OF POLITICAL SCIENCE A POLITICALLY INCORRECT VIEW OF ‘POLY-T(R)IC(K)S’

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THE NONSENSE AND NON-SCIENCE OF POLITICAL SCIENCE A POLITICALLY INCORRECT VIEW OF ‘POLY-T(R)IC(K)S’

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Key Words:  Contemporary Political Science, Scientific Questions, Indoctrination.

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In this article Shapiro argues that contemporary politcal science is method driven and not problem driven. Shapiro believes method driven research leads to self-serving construction of problems, and the misuse of data in various ways. The main focus of the article is the procedure Shapiro develops for solving problems within the discipline of political science using a problem-driven approach.

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Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It

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Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It

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Keywords: Method Driven, Empirical research, Theoretical Assumptions,

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In this article Dryzek focuses on the traditions within the field of political. He argues that for any progress to take place in science rational choices must be made within competing theories and traditions. Dryzek believes that this type of progress is not possible within the discipline because Empirical Data is the only form of Data acknowledged.

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Keywords: Rational choices, Empirical Problems, Scientific Progress, Research Traditions.

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This articles highlights the difference between empirical and conceptual data. Johnson argues that conceptual data is often over looked within the major of political science, which in turn hinders progress within the field

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Conceptual Problems and Obstacles to Progress in Political Science. 

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Conceptual Problems and Obstacles to Progress in Political Science. 

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Keywords: Political culture, social capital, scientific progress, conceptual problems

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When they assess competing theories political scientists typically rely exclusively and naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are parasitic on conceptual commitments. This, in turn, hinders their ability to both persuasively conduct and critically assess substantive research. I use four decades of research on political culture as a vehicle for demonstrating how conceptual problems pose obstacles to progress in political science.

Kinder, Donald (1998) 'Opinion and Action in the Realm of Politics', in D. Gilbert et al. (eds) The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II, 4th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Google Scholar

Wildavsky, Aaron (1987) 'Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation', American Political Science Review 81: 3-21.
Google Scholar

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Conceptual Problems as Obstacles to Progress in Political Science: Four Decades of Political Culture Research - James Johnson, 2003

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When they assess competing theories political scientists typically rely exclusively and naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are parasitic on conceptual commitments.

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Modern ideas and events are overlooked in the teachings of many Political Science Professors. 

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Modern ideas and events are overlooked in the teachings of many Political Science Professors. 