Schram, Sanford F., and Brian Caterino, eds. Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method.

• Author: Chiang, Howard H.
• Position: Book review

Schram, Sanford F., and Brian Caterino, eds. Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method. New York: New York University Press, 2006. viii + 304 pages. Paper, $24.

The essays in this volume directly respond to Bent Flyvbjerg's Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (2001), which has been considered by many as the scholarly manifesto for the Perestroika Movement in political science. In a nutshell, both Flyvbjerg's book and the Perestroika Movement challenge the dominant trend in the field to prioritize quantitative analyses while simultaneously marginalizing alternative methods of inquiry (including political philosophy) that are more qualitatively oriented. But, as some of the authors in this volume correctly note, the Movement is not necessarily aimed at silencing the use of formal modeling, statistical methods, and other imitations of "hard science" per se. If anything, proponents of the Movement call for some kind of "methodological/epistemic pluralism," by which researchers could employ the kinds of research methodology most appropriate for their research problem. Even if the kinds of research methodology they have employed do not emulate the "hard sciences," their work would still be considered on the same ground as those quantitatively oriented research papers that leading journals in the profession, such as the American Political Science Review, prefer to publish. Besides arguing for the importance of this "methodological/epistemic pluralism," many of the authors in this volume also endorse Flyvbjerg's contention that a big component of social-science research is its practical implication (social science as primarily concerned with "phronesis," or practical knowledge).

The book is divided into three parts, and despite their different titles--"The Flyvbjerg Debate," "Phronesis Reconsidered," and "Making Political Science Matter"--all fourteen chapters revolve around the arguments made by Flyvbjerg in his book. Although the first three of the five chapters in Part I are reprints of articles published elsewhere, two of them set up the working framework for the remaining essays remarkably well. These are an article by David Laitin that lays out a loud critique of Flyvbjerg's book and an article by Flyvbjerg himself defending his work while showing how Laitin has misinterpreted it in many significant ways (both originally appeared in Politics & Society). The two...