Summary
Contents
Subject index
The SAGE Handbook of Political Science presents a major retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline. Comprising three volumes of contributions from expert authors from around the world, the handbook aims to frame, assess and synthesize research in the field, helping to define and identify its current and future developments. It does so from a truly global and cross-area perspective. Chapters cover a broad range of aspects, from providing a general introduction to exploring important subfields within the discipline. Each chapter is designed to provide a state-of-the-art and comprehensive overview of the topic by incorporating cross-cutting global, interdisciplinary, and, where this applies, gender perspectives. The Handbook is arranged over seven core thematic sections: Part 1: Political Theory; Part 2: Methods; Part 3: Political Sociology; Part 4: Comparative Politics; Part 5: Public Policies and Administration; Part 6: International Relations; and Part 7: Major Challenges for Politics and Political Science in the 21st Century.
Methodology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches1
Methodology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches1
Introduction
Political methodology deals with all issues related to how to do empirical political research (non-empirical work, such as pure formal or normative theory, is excluded here). Methodology, as it is understood here, simply refers to the ways in which we acquire knowledge and comprises a multitude of specific methods and techniques. As such, it is embedded in an epistemological tradition of ‘critical rationalism’ (Karl Popper: 1963) and ‘scientific realism’ (Moses, Chapter 27, this Handbook). This has been summarized as the ‘twofold conviction that the world consists of causal mechanisms that exist independently of our study – or even awareness – of them, and that the methods of science hold ...
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