Can Politics Be Regarded as a Science?
Can the study of politics be regarded as a science?
The debate as whether politics can be regarded as a science is ‘complex, voluminous and multi-faceted one’ . The origins of political analysis lie in the philosophical tradition of Plato and Aristotle whose work was fundamentally rooted in the normative. At the very early stages of politics as an academic discipline, the great thinkers of the time were not concerned with empirical evidence; instead basing their ideas on literary analysis. The emphasis on the normative that comes with the traditional study of politics suggests that politics is not a science as it cannot be objective. This was followed by the emergence of the normative model of political analysis and what Peter Lasslett called the ‘the death of political philosophy’. This movement was spearheaded by Machiavelli who was known as the father of the ‘politics model’ of political science. For example, he changes the value-laden question (what is better?) into a scientific one; what is safer? The shift from the prescriptive to the descriptive and impartial suggests that political thought has shifted away from the traditional philosophical to the scientific model. The empirical model of political thought emphasised the importance of experience as the basis for knowledge and this later developed into positivism which dictates that the social sciences should adhere to the methods of the natural sciences . An extreme version of this was also created called ‘logical positivism’ which stated that only statements which were empirically verifiable and aimed to say something about the meaning of political concepts are legitimate .
In fact the empirical model is seen as the foundation of comparative politics that is now the standard form of analysis in the UK and the US. This method seeks to develop generalizations by comparing different states or political systems. This produces slightly more informative results as one is more likely to be able to produce an
The debate as whether politics can be regarded as a science is ‘complex, voluminous and multi-faceted one’ . The origins of political analysis lie in the philosophical tradition of Plato and Aristotle whose work was fundamentally rooted in the normative. At the very early stages of politics as an academic discipline, the great thinkers of the time were not concerned with empirical evidence; instead basing their ideas on literary analysis. The emphasis on the normative that comes with the traditional study of politics suggests that politics is not a science as it cannot be objective. This was followed by the emergence of the normative model of political analysis and what Peter Lasslett called the ‘the death of political philosophy’. This movement was spearheaded by Machiavelli who was known as the father of the ‘politics model’ of political science. For example, he changes the value-laden question (what is better?) into a scientific one; what is safer? The shift from the prescriptive to the descriptive and impartial suggests that political thought has shifted away from the traditional philosophical to the scientific model. The empirical model of political thought emphasised the importance of experience as the basis for knowledge and this later developed into positivism which dictates that the social sciences should adhere to the methods of the natural sciences . An extreme version of this was also created called ‘logical positivism’ which stated that only statements which were empirically verifiable and aimed to say something about the meaning of political concepts are legitimate .
In fact the empirical model is seen as the foundation of comparative politics that is now the standard form of analysis in the UK and the US. This method seeks to develop generalizations by comparing different states or political systems. This produces slightly more informative results as one is more likely to be able to produce an