Ian Shapiro

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

Donald Green and I have previously criticized contemporary political science for being too method driven, not sufficiently problem driven (Green and Shapiro 1994; 1996). In various ways, many have responded that our critique fails to take full account of how inevitably theory laden empirical research is. Here I agree with many of these basic claims, but I argue that they do not weaken the contention that empirical research and explanatory theories should be problem driven. Rather, they suggest that one central task for political scientists should be to identify, criticize, and suggest plausible alternatives to the theoretical assumptions, interpretations of political conditions, and above all the specifications of problems that underlie prevailing empirical accounts and research programs, and to do it in ways that can spark novel and promising problem-driven research agendas. My procedure will be to develop and extend our arguments for problem-driven over method-driven approaches to the study of politics. Green and I made the case for starting with a problem in the world, next coming to grips with previous attempts that have been made to study it, and then defining the research task by reference to the value added. We argued that method-driven research leads to self-serving construction of problems, misuse of data in various ways, and related pathologies summed up in the old adage that if the only tool you have is a hammer everything around you starts to look like a nail.

Problems and methods in the study of politics

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Problems and Prospects for Democratic Settlements: South Africa as a Model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?

Intense ethnic, racial, and religious violence led many to classify South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine as intractable conflicts. Yet they diverged, with only South Africa achieving a lasting settlement. The authors explain why. The authors analyze them as a distinctive type of negotiated transition. The ancién regime is an imperfect democracy, subject to electoral constraints and legitimated by democratic principles that it violates. This constrains negotiations but helps manage difficult commitment problems. The authors show how the principals navigated constraints and took advantage of opportunities in South Africa but have failed—so far—to do so in the other two conflicts.

On Non-domination†

My aim here is to defend a view of non-domination as providing a better basis for justice than the going alternatives. I differentiate it from two kinds of alternatives: those whose proponents reject my claim that non-domination is the bedrock of justice and those who agree with me but understand non-domination differently than I do. The first group divides into partisans of equality, on the one hand, and of freedom, on the other. Their arguments concern me in the first half of the essay. Then I turn to conceptions of non-domination put forward by Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Michael Walzer, Quentin Skinner, and Philip Pettit. There is considerable overlap among these various views and between them and mine but there are also notable disagreements. I spell out what is at stake in the alternative formulations, indicating why my own conception, rooted in power-based resourcism, is preferable.

Pathologies revisited: Reflections on our critics

More than three decades after its advent in political science, rational choice theory has yet to add appreciably to the stock of knowledge about politics. In Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory we traced this failure to methodological defects rooted in the aspiration to come up with universal theories of politics. After responding to criticisms of our argument, we elaborate on our earlier recommendations about how to improve the quality of rational choice applications. Building on suggestions of contributors to this volume, we lay out an empirically based research program designed to delineate the conditions under which rational choice explanations are likely to be useful.

Democratic Innovation: South Africa in Comparative Context

This review essay of four recent books on democratic transitions is written from the standpoint of contemporary South African politics. Each of the books takes the Schumpetarian model of democratic politics for granted, and in the course of evaluating them the author explores the advantages and limitations of that model for thinking about the prospects for democracy in South Africa. He concludes that the Schumpeterian model diverts attention from questions that should concern promoters of democracy. The most important such questions deal with the internal structure of political parties, public organizations, and civil institutions.

On the Second Edition of Lukes' Third Face

In this article I argue for two propositions. The first is that Lukes has established the possibility of powers third face, but that the most interesting social science questions about it are empirical: How often does it operate and under what conditions? These are topics for empirical research, not armchair reflection. The second proposition I defend is that the most interesting normative questions about power are best thought of as questions of institutional design geared to preventing domination without interfering with the legitimate exercise of power. Examples in support of both propositions are supplied.

Order, Conflict, and Violence: Introduction: integrating the study of order, conflict, and violence

There might appear to be little that binds the study of order and the study of violence and conflict. Bloodshed in its multiple forms – interstate war, civil conflict, crime – is often seen as something separate from, and almost unrelated to, the domains of “normal” politics that constitute what we think of as order. Students of political, social, and economic institutions simply assume that violence is absent and order established, never considering that the maintenance of such institutions might involve the ongoing management of conflict and the more or less direct threat of violence. Likewise, students of violence and conflict tend to focus on places and periods in which order has collapsed, rarely considering how violence is used to create order at the national and local levels, maintain it, and uphold it in the face of challenges. In Charles Tilly’s (1975, 42) famous formulation: war makes states. Clearly, order is necessary for managing violence as much as the threat of violence is crucial in cementing order. Yet the question of how order emerges and how it is sustained is but the flip side of understanding the dynamics of conflict. On the one hand, order requires the active taming of conflict. However, this is often impossible without an actual or threatened recourse to violence. In gametheoretic language, violence is off the equilibrium path of order. On the other hand, violent conflict entails the successful contestation of existing order, and its collapse. Put otherwise, violence is employed both by those who wish to upend an existing order and by those who want to sustain it. The lack of integration between the study of order and the study of conflict and violence is in part a natural consequence of disciplinary and

Gross Concepts in Political Argument

POLITICAL THEORISTS OFTEN fail to appreciate that any claim about how politics is to be organized must be a relational claim involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends. If they did, they would see that to defend the standard contending views in many of the controversies that occupy them is silly. In what follows I work through a number of debates about the nature of right, law, autonomy, utility, freedom, virtue, and justice, showing this to be true. I argue, further, that political theorists frequently think in terms of gross concepts: They reduce what are actually relational claims to claims about one or another of the components of the relation. This not only obscures the phenomena they wish to analyze, it also generates debates that can never be resolved because the alternatives that are opposed to one another are vulnerable within their own terms. Finally I offer a pair of explanations for why gross concepts persist in political theory, and suggest a way for avoiding their trap.

The Real World of Democratic Theory

Preface ix INTRODUCTION Revisiting Democracys Place 1 CHAPTER ONE: John Lockes Democratic Theory 39 CHAPTER TWO: Tyranny and Democracy: Refl ections on Some Recent Literature 68 CHAPTER THREE: Problems and Prospects for Democratic Settlements: South Africa as a Model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland? by Courtney Jung, Ellen Lust-Okar, and Ian Shapiro 80 CHAPTER FOUR: Players, Preconditions, and Peace: Why Talks Fail and How They Might Succeed by Ellen Lust and Ian Shapiro 143 CHAPTER FIVE: Containment and Democratic Cosmopolitanism 157 CHAPTER SIX: The Political Uses of Public Opinion: Lessons from the Estate Tax Repeal by Mayling Birney, Ian Shapiro, and Michael Graetz 180 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Constitutional Politics of Abortion in the United States 219 CHAPTER EIGHT: Democratic Justice : A Reply to Critics 251 Appendix to Chapter Three: Surveys of Israeli Business Elites 275 Appendix to Chapter Six: Polls on the Repeal or the Fairness of the Estate Tax 277 Index 279