Abstract: | Model of methodological and theoretical pluralism, developed after the
behavioral revolution, allows different methods and purposes of approach
in research of political spheres of social life. For many years, it seemed that
the current consensus is not threatened, that the acceptance of the status
quo is widespread. As it turned out, however, post-behavioral order and
peace were hiding under the surface of old conflicts and contradictions,
and generated new ones. Somewhat like 100 years ago, at the beginning
of the new century, they flowed on the surface – colliding with each other
– as completely different visions of policy research, based on a different
meaning of objectivity and truth and the role that the gained knowledge
plays in the society.
In October 2000, to a dozen American political scientists and publishers
of professional magazines there was sent an e-mail, signed “Mr. Perestroika”,
containing harsh criticism of the system of forces existing in the American
political science, under which there is a strong dominance of representatives
of science-oriented mathematical modeling and quantitative methods, and
representatives of other approaches are being discriminated against. This
letter, commonly called the “Perestroika Manifesto”, has rapidly spread in
the network, gaining a few hundred followers within a few weeks. It became
the nucleus of an informal Perestroika Movement, which brought together
a larger group of political scientists dissatisfied with the current model of
discipline. They performed against the domination of investigator-driven
assumptions of logical positivism and radical behaviorism, based on the
assumption that it is possible to predict the political behavior on the basis
of the theories of rationality. They also questioned focusing on discovering
universal, independent of context, truths about politics, based on testing
causal hypotheses with regard to the behavior of political actors and the
quest to build a general theory. This results in their opinion that there is the
marginalization of other studies aimed at clarifying and resolving specific
issues and, on the other hand, the need of search for a more explicit link
between theory and practice.
Supporters of the Perestroika Movement do not reject entirely quantitative
methods, only tend to criticize their absolutizing character, involving
the complete discrediting of approaches which are not referring to the
quantification of data or treating this type of treatment only as a complementary
knowledge considerations based on normative narrative. Therefore,
they generally tend to the concept of methodological triangulation, in
which quantitative techniques may complement and partially be a form of
verification of qualitative methods in various research issues, of course, if
you can combine both types of approaches.
They are clearly in favor of the primacy of the essence of research method.
From this point of view, based on compliance with the applicable rules of
methodological research, they do not have to be in this respect particularly
innovative, hyper-precise or mathematicised. They should, however, contain
a well-constructed argumentation, allowing reliably resolve
important
issues. The result should be to restore compounds research and theoretical
knowledge with the real problems of political life, moving away from the
extreme containment and academic character towards the relationship of
knowledge about politics of social practice. |