QUALITATIVE POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Qualitative Political Analysis

Qualitative Political Analysis

Introduction

Qualitative research methods include any techniques, except those focused primarily on counting, measuring, and analyzing statistical data, to study any social phenomenon. Qualitative social research grew out of and retains the human-centered and literary focus of the humanities. A qualitative study typically involves fieldwork, in which the researcher, rather than remaining in the office or laboratory, goes instead to the settings where the people being studied live, work, play, and so forth. The techniques employed range from passive, such as observation and gathering existing artifacts or records with minimal interaction with others, through active, including creating new documentation, interviewing people, and participating in their lives. Such methods have application in all of the social sciences, but have had a particular trajectory in the research conducted by political scientists.

Current Status of Qualitative Methods

Discussions of qualitative methods often divide the scientific world into two camps, those who accept a natural-science approach and insist on quantification as central to the development of positive facts and those who prefer a qualitative approach to human understanding of social phenomena. At one level, these two camps are imaginary, based on the stereotypes researchers assign to each other. At this level, the argument is often correctly characterized as superficial and unwarranted, and further discussion of qualitative methods could end here. The truth, however, is more complicated than that (Gibson, 1995). If long-standing conflict is conceived as a symptom that tends to arise in the presence of larger philosophical dissension in the social sciences, then qualitative methods deserve closer examination. This is especially the case for political science, which has been unusually slow to find more than token accommodations for qualitative methods in its repertoire of research techniques (Gibson, 1995).

New Knowledge in a Scholarly Venue

The leading edge of research for any discipline tends to appear in current papers from colloquia, symposia, and scholarly conferences. The American Political Science Association (APSA) produces the largest body of such research, with members concentrated in North America but also present in many other countries. (Scott, 1990) A close examination of the electronic databases for heaps annual meetings since 1999 (available online and through the association) reveals several obvious qualities. The first is how difficult it is to find qualitative work. A casual browser of the conference program is unlikely to run across any. Electronic keyword searches, however, do yield results. Where social science research predominates in the APSA, papers with titles or abstracts containing qualitative terms cluster in just a few of the better established divisions (for example, the sections on presidency research, on race, ethnicity, and politics, and on foreign policy). Another quality of the work found through the APSA database is the wide variety of techniques reported in the scattering of papers scheduled for delivery, ranging from participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and other field research, to case studies, documentaries, and archival reports, to narrative and rhetorical analyses, to critical/cultural readings of texts. Finally, social scientists using these techniques may adopt in their reports an ...