by Dan Nexon
19 May 2011, 1822 EDT
PTJ has one of the most sophisticated ways of thinking about different positions in the field of International Relations (and, by extension, the social sciences), but his approach may be too abstract for some. I therefore submit for comments the “Political Science Methodology Flowchart” (version 1.3b).
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
The trajectory towards post-structuralism is a nice touch. Oui! We should work in Deutsch somewhere in there, perhaps near the configurationalist part…
So one of the ‘take-homes’ here is that positivists who use qualitative methods are incoherent? Yoiks, don’t let the APSA qual section see this. Or, rather, don’t let that half of the qual section see this.
Actually, I would say that it’s a good thing that neither the term “qualitative” nor the term “positivist” actually appears in the flowchart. Three cheers for more analytically precise terms, even — perhaps especially — “incoherent much?”
I think you should have another option after start. Are you a cylon? Yes? At least you can avoid charges of anthropocentricity
I’m not sure that I get where you’re going with “configurationalist.” In anthropology, this term is associated with Benedict’s “Patterns of Culture,” while most of the political science folks who’d make a “No covering laws, but we care about causation” argument don’t so much make “national character” kinds of arguments. Rather, I think a lot of us subscribe either to some form of Tilly’s proposition: “big structures and sequences never repeat
themselves, but result from differing combinations and sequences of mechanisms
with very general scope” (which, now that I read it, could be said to look a bit like Benedict’s configurationalism, without the culturalist baggage), or to something that looks like Lisa Wedeen’s work (which comes out of the “culture as practice” approach).
Perhaps this was not your point, but I’d be interested in hearing an account of what you mean by “configurationalist.”
Actually those are very much what I mean by “configurationism” – the idea that phenomena of interest result from concatenations (whether mechanisms, processed, variables or whatever) that are historically particular and/or dependent on their arrangement, i.e., their configuration. In consequence, generalization cannot be rooted in law-like relationships between independent variables. See, e.g., Katznelson’s writings on historical institutionalism or Tilly’s work (which you allude to). I prefer the term because I see it as more general than (but descriptively accurate) some of the alternatives.
Where would you place the researcher who uses the Weberian Ideal Types that Jackson talks about in his analyticist chapter? I would imagine configurationalist (mechanisms, processes, etc. as ideal types) but I just wanted to check.
Also, what do you mean by theorist? Can you give some examples?
Thanks!
1) Yes: Configurationalism is meant to be inclusive of singular causal analysis.
2) I meant everything from normative political theory to social theory to IR theory.
So this is where Waltz might sit?