Missing Elements in Political Inquiry

Missing Elements in Political Inquiry PDF Author: Judith A. Gillespie
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Gillespie presents a collection of essays that consider missing elements in four key areas of political analysis. Two concepts, precision and coherence, are introduced to help deal with the staggering number of variables in political life which make formal modelling so difficult. Missing elements in dynamic models, in linkage models, and in integrative models are also identified, and new approaches and solutions for work in political studies suggested.

Missing Elements in Political Inquiry

Missing Elements in Political Inquiry PDF Author: Judith A. Gillespie
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Gillespie presents a collection of essays that consider missing elements in four key areas of political analysis. Two concepts, precision and coherence, are introduced to help deal with the staggering number of variables in political life which make formal modelling so difficult. Missing elements in dynamic models, in linkage models, and in integrative models are also identified, and new approaches and solutions for work in political studies suggested.

Missing Elements in Political Inquiry

Missing Elements in Political Inquiry PDF Author: Judith A. Gillespie
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Gillespie presents a collection of essays that consider missing elements in four key areas of political analysis. Two concepts, precision and coherence, are introduced to help deal with the staggering number of variables in political life which make formal modelling so difficult. Missing elements in dynamic models, in linkage models, and in integrative models are also identified, and new approaches and solutions for work in political studies suggested.

Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics

Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics PDF Author: Benjamin A. Most
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611175933
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Through the use of logic, simulation, and empirical data, Benjamin A. Most and Harvey Starr develop and demonstrate a nuanced and more appropriate conceptualization of explanation in international relations and foreign policy in Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics. They demonstrate that a concern with the logical underpinnings of research raises a series of theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological issues that must be addressed if theory and research design are to meet the challenges of cumulation in the study of international relations (or any area of social science). The authors argue for understanding the critical, yet subtle, interplay of the elements with a research triad composed of theory, logic, and method.

Tropes of Politics

Tropes of Politics PDF Author: John S. Nelson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299158347
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Talk is of central importance to politics of almost every kind—it’s no accident that when the ancient Greeks first attempted to examine politics systematically, they developed the study of rhetoric. In Tropes of Politics, John Nelson applies rhetorical analysis first to political theory, and then to politics in practice. He offers a full and deep critical examination of political science and political theory as fields of study, and then undertakes a series of creative examinations of political rhetoric, including a deconstruction of deliberation and debate by the U.S. Senate prior to the Gulf War. Using the neglected arts of argument refined by the rhetoric of inquiry, Nelson traces how everyday words like consent and debate construct politics in much the same way that poets such as Mamet and Shakespeare construct plays, and he shows how we are remaking our politics even as we speak. Tropes of Politics explores how politicians take stands and political scientists probe representation, how experts become informed even as citizens become authorities, how students actually reinvent government while professors merely model politics, how senators wage war yet keep comity among themselves. The action, Nelson shows, is in the tropes: these figures of speech and images of deed can persuade us to turn from ideologies like liberalism toward spectacles about democracy or movements into environmentalism and feminism. His argument is that inventive attention to tropes can mean better participation in politics. And the argument is in the tropes—evidence itself as sights or citations, governments as machines or men, politics as hardball or softball, deliberations as freedoms or constraints, borders as fringes or friends.

Influence and Power

Influence and Power PDF Author: Ruth Zimmerling
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402029942
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Some years ago, on request of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), an empirical investigation „On the state and the orientation of political science in the Federal Republic of Germany“ was conducted by Carl Böhret. Among other interesting 1 information, in the paper that was subsequently published the author presented the results of a survey among 254 political scientists in the Federal Republic on what they considered to be the sine qua non basic concepts of the discipline. In various respects, the data are remarkable. 2 On the one hand, the enormous diversity of the answers corroborates statistically what has long been known from experience, i. e. , the existence of an extremely wide variety of standpoints, perspectives, and approaches within the discipline. An interesting case in point is the concept of power. Somewhat surprisingly, ‘power’ was not the most frequently mentioned term. But, it did, of course, end up at the very top of the list, in third place behind ‘conflict’ and ‘interest’. What is noteworthy is that it gained this position by being named only 81 times, that is, by less than a third of the respondents. This is no insignificant detail. Certainly, to that minority of scholars whose conceptions of politics do include ‘power’ as an indispensable basic concept, the approaches of the vast majority of their colleagues for whom, as their answers in the survey reveal, ‘power’ does not play an eminent role must appear, in an 3 important sense, mistaken or perhaps even incomprehensible.

What Should Political Theory Be Now?

What Should Political Theory Be Now? PDF Author: John S. Nelson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438414404
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
Confronted with the alienation of political theory from the practice of politics, prominent theorists respond in this book to the growing question: What should political theory be now? New and original contributions by such thinkers as Charles Anderson, John Gunnell, Terence Ball, Paul Kress, Ira Strauber, and William Connolly analyze the current malaise in the field and offer remedies for it. Each contribution is at once an argument about what is to be done in political theory and an exemplar of how to do it. Spurred by the Shambaugh Conference on Political Theory, this cross-disciplinary effort addresses two major issues: What is the proper stance for theorizing about politics? What are the priority projects for current political theory? The contributions encompass many of the major themes concerning political theorists today, including criticism as a project for current political theory, dangers in the latter-day disengagement of political theory from politics, theorists' perplexity within and about history, issues of reason, and the relationships among science, theory, and politics. The viewpoints presented are diverse, yet the contributors to this volume are typical of political theorists generally. Almost all share inklings of actual or incipient disasters reaching from politics into theory and vice versa.

The Rhetorical Turn

The Rhetorical Turn PDF Author: Herbert W. Simons
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226759032
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
We have only recently started to challenge the notion that "serious" inquiry can be free of rhetoric, that it can rely exclusively on "hard" fact and "cold" logic in support of its claims. Increasingly, scholars are shifting their attention from methods of proof to the heuristic methods of debate and discussion—the art of rhetoric—to examine how scholarly discourse is shaped by tropes and figures, by the naming and framing of issues, and by the need to adapt arguments to ends, audiences, and circumstances. Herbert W. Simons and the contributors to this important collection of essays provide impressive evidence that the new movement referred to as the rhetorical turn offers a rigorous way to look within and across the disciplines. The Rhetorical Turn moves from biology to politics via excursions into the rhetorics of psychoanalysis, decision science, and conversational analysis. Topics explored include how rhetorical invention guides scientific invention, how rhetoric assists political judgment, and how it integrates varying approaches to meta-theory. Concluding with four philosophical essays, this volume of case studies demonstrates how the inventive and persuasive dimensions of scholarly discourse point the way to forms of argument appropriate to our postmodern age.

Rethinking Democratic Innovation

Rethinking Democratic Innovation PDF Author: Frank Hendriks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192664409
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Rethinking Democratic Innovation takes a fresh look at diverging visions of improving democratic governance and asks whether these existing tensions could be made productive. Could different visions of democratic revitalisation complement and correct each other in ways that are good for democracy? Is it conceivable that combined approaches address a larger part of the democratic challenge, while isolated approaches, centralizing deliberative or plebiscitary democracy, are confined to more limited areas of concern? This book ultimately provides an affirmative answer, outlining the scope for hybrid democratic innovations that thrive on exploiting, not eliminating, tensions between diverging visions of improved democracy. Supplementing democratic theory with a cultural perspective, this book contributes to a deeper understanding of plans and methods geared toward improving democratic governance. Revisiting Mary Douglas's seminal take on culture as pollution reduction, processes of democratic innovation are understood as instances of cultural cleaning in public governance. The book recognizes that democratic cleaning will never be finished but can be done in ways that are more productive. Reflecting on varieties of hybrid democratic innovation - deliberative referendums, participatory budgeting-new style, and more - the author posits that more versatile, connective, and embedded innovations stand a better chance of high performance on a broader spectrum than democratic innovations falling short of these qualities.

Experimentalist Governance

Experimentalist Governance PDF Author: Bernardo Rangoni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198849915
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
What does non-hierarchical governance mean? Under what conditions are actors more likely to engage in non-hierarchical processes? Which trajectories best capture their long-term evolution? Through which mechanisms do they overcome gridlock? To respond to these questions at the heart of regulatory governance, the book develops an analytical framework that draws on contemporary debates but seeks to overcome their limitations. Notably, it offers a definition of non-hierarchical (experimentalist) governance that goes beyond institutional structures, giving due attention to actors' choices and strategies. It shows that contrary to expectations, functional and political pressures were more influential than distributions of legal power, and bolstered one another. Strong functional demands and political opposition affect actors' de facto capacity of using powers that, de jure, might be in their own hands. Indeed, actors can use non-hierarchical governance to aid learning as well as the creation of political support. Conversely, they may override legal constraints and impose their views on others, if they are equipped with confidence and powerful reform coalitions beforehand. The book also challenges conservative views that non-hierarchical governance is doomed to wither away, showing that, on the contrary, it is often self-reinforcing. Finally, the book shows that far from being mutually exclusive, positive (shadow of hierarchy) and negative (penalty default) mechanisms typically combine to avoid gridlock. The book examines when, how, and why non-hierarchical institutions affect policy processes and outcomes by analysing five crucial domains (electricity, gas, communications, finance, and pharmaceuticals) in the European Union. It combines temporal, cross-sectoral, and within-case comparisons with process-tracing to show the conditions, trajectories, and mechanisms of non-hierarchical governance.

Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy

Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy PDF Author: Daniel H. Cole
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191098
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
Elinor (Lin) Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her pathbreaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons"; but she also made important contributions to several other fields of political economy and public policy. The range of topics she covered and the multiple methods she used might convey the mistaken impression that her body of work is disjointed and incoherent. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin, alone or with various coauthors (most notably including her husband and partner, Vincent), supplemented by others expanding on their work, brings together the common strands of research that serve to tie her impressive oeuvre together. That oeuvre, together with Vincent's own impressive body of work, has come to define a distinctive school of political-economic thought, the "Bloomington School." Each of the four volumes is organized around a central theme of Lin’s work. Volume 2 examines the most well-known part of Lin’s legacy: her empirical, analytical, and theoretical work demonstrating that, in many cases, local resource users can solve collective-action problems through common-property management regimes. The volume comprises various papers relating to and building on the findings of her masterpiece, Governing the Commons (1990), including some lesser-known papers. Part I focuses on the all-important distinction between biophysical resources and the humanly devised institutions designed to govern them. Part II moves to the policy level, addressing how various sets of humanly devised institutions work better or worse, in various social and ecological circumstances, for the long-run sustainability of biophysical resources. Part III takes us full circle back to Ostrom’s first work (as part of her PhD) on water resources in Southern California, which was a topic she returned to, along with her students, throughout her career (and totaling more than 50 years’ worth of studies), with the specific intention of gathering data for dynamic (or, at least, comparative static) longitudinal analyses of combined social (including institutional) and ecological change. In sum, this volume presents what is, at least at present, thought to be Lin’s greatest legacy to social science: how resources can be sustainably managed over very long periods of time by the collective action of ordinary people, in addition to or without markets and states.