POS 190 Political Analysis and Research

Intent and focus of the course

• On successful completion of this module a student will be able to:

• Demonstrate knowledge of the range of analytical and methodological approaches

in Politics and International Studies.

• Critically evaluate and apply theories and methods in Politics and International

Studies

• Gain an understanding of major conceptual and analytical debates in Politics and

International Studies

• Think critically, analyze texts and structure essays in the field of Politics and

International Studies

• Analyze aspects of politics and international studies from a variety of perspectives

• Apply theories to case studies

• Critically evaluate the relationship between knowledge, power and policy.

The scope and limits of political analysis

 The term political analysis is ambiguous. It is often associated

with analytical politics, which is synonymous with rational choice

theory.

• Diversity of analytical strategies for those engaged in the analysis

of “the political”.

 Though rationalism is one such strategy, and a highly distinctive, influential and important one at
that, it is but one strategy among many. It has no privileged or exclusive claim on the analysis of
the political or the label political analysis.

• “political analysis”: neutral with respect to analytical strategies and traditions. Hence, inclusive.

 From the descriptive to the prescriptive.

Notes on “political analysis”

• First, the political should be defined in such a way as to encompass the entire sphere of the social.

• Events, processes and practices should be labelled “non-political” or “extra-political” simply by virtue
of the specific setting or context in which they occur.

• All events, processes and practices which occur within the social

sphere have the potentials to be political and hence, to be amenable to political analysis.

• The realm of government is no more innately political (same with culture, law or the domestic sphere).
Consequently, the division of domestic labor is no less political- and no less appropriate a subject for
political analysis ‒ that the regulation of the domestic division of labor by the state. Indeed, one might
well argue that any adequate analysis of the politics of the regulation of the domestic division of labor
itself entails a political analysis of the domestic division of labor.

Obvious question?

• What makes political analysis political? What distinguished political analysis from cultural or
sociological analyses which might also claim to encompass the entire sphere of the social? What is here
required is the political itself.

• What makes political analysis political is the emphasis it places on the political aspect of social
relations. In the same way, what makes a cultural analysis cultural is the emphasis it places on the
cultural aspect of social relations.

• Definition: politics and the political as concerned with distribution, exercise and consequences of
power.

 A political analysis is, then, one which draws attention to the power relations

Implicated in social relations. In this sense, politics is not defined by the locus

of its operation but by its nature as a process.

Notes on “political analysis”

• The role of extra-political variables.

• Not all aspects of the social can be captured in political terms, not that the political is indistinguishable,
say from the economic or the cultural. Economic and cultural processes may be inherently political ‒ in
so far as they concern relations of power they more certainly are ‒ but this does not mean that they are
exhausted by this description.

• Political analysts simply cannot afford to leave the analysis of economics to economists, history to
historians and so forth. In so far as there are economic and/or cultural conditions of existence of political
dynamics, these need to be acknowledged and interrogated by political analysts.

• Disciplinary boundaries have always been arbitrarily drawn (interdependence)

• For, in a world of (acknowledged) interdependence, rigidly disciplinary approaches to social, political
and economic analysis will tend to find themselves reliant upon assumptions generated by other
disciplinary approaches to social, political and economic analysis will tend to find themselves reliant
upon assumptions generated by other disciplinary specialisms whose validity they are either incapable
or unwilling to adjudicate.

• The clear danger is that the conclusions of our analyses may increasingly come to depend upon
externally generated assumptions whose empirical content we do not regard ourselves worthy to judge.

Case: political-economic imperatives of globalization and social democratic regimes

• This is a now all too familiar experience and is nowhere clearer than in the literature on the political
economic imperatives globalization supposedly summons for social democratic regimes. Here the debate
circles endlessly around the nature and degree of negotiability of the constraints that economic
integration is seen to imply. Opinions vary ‒ wildly.

• Yet what is almost entirely absent from such discussions is any attempt to describe empirically, let
alone to evaluate, the precise nature of social democratic regimes external economic relations ‒ with
respect to trade, finance and foreign direct investment (FDI).

 The debate on the constraints implied by globalization (real or imagined) is but one example.
What it, and others like it, suggest is that, as political analysts we simply cannot afford, if ever we
could, to get by without a rather more thorough grasp of the cognate disciplines on whose
assumptions we have increasingly come to rely.
 That implies a political analysis which refuses to restrict its analytical attentions to obviously
political variables and processes; in one sense it implies, too, an interdisciplinary political
analysis.
 Issues of interdependence and international economic integration raise a final issue, crucial to
the practice of contemporary political analysis.
 Relationship: between the domestic and the international (political science and international
relations)
 Issue: conventional approaches to the social sciences, based on rigid disciplinary and sub-
disciplinary fault lines and demarcations, do not prepare us well for a world of interdependence.