Enhancing the Methodological Repertoire of Historical Research in the Social Sciences
Enhancing the Methodological Repertoire of Historical Research in the Social Sciences
by Gregory Wawro and Ira Katznelson (Political Science)
This project focuses on the development and application of quantitative methods for historical research in political science. The project is motivated by criticisms expressed by prominent scholars in the discipline of history and in the area of American Political Development within political science. One of their core concerns is that the way quantitative methods are currently employed by political scientists pays inadequate attention to issues of temporality, periodicity, specificity, and context. The PIs argue that these concerns can be addressed by using methods that allow for parameter variation across the dimension of time, incorporating the richness and complexity of historical analysis while maintaining the rigor necessary for testing causal claims. The project will initially focus on historical research on the U.S. Congress, demonstrating the feasibility and advantages of the methods that the PIs advocate with applications from their own work, and then will expand to cover additional institutional and behavioral sites of inquiry.
This project pushes existing boundaries of research in history and political science by tackling problems and issues that are central to the conduct of historical work. Political scientists are turning more and more to the past to broaden and deepen our understanding of political behavior and institutions, using the additional cases and variation that history has to offer for model building and testing. However, as prominent historians have rightly pointed out, political scientists are not making the most of these opportunities because they frequently treat history simply as data with the implicit assumption of an equivalence among facts and particulars found in various periods and contexts. The methodological approaches that the PIs argue for will overcome these problems and advance quantitative research on politics in a way that will broaden its appeal to a wider range of scholars. Multilevel models—especially ones that employ priors that incorporate temporal dynamics—enable parameters that indicate relations among variables to vary, and thus can capture the kind of complexity that characterizes the development and evolution of historical processes.
The papers and book produced from this project will help to break down barriers between history and political science, enriching work in both disciplines. The project will advance an ongoing dialogue about the challenges and pathways for progress in the conduct of historical social science. While not developing new methods from scratch, the project will make significant extensions to existing approaches by applying them in ways that are innovative to political science. By exposing historically-oriented researchers to these methods and making them more accessible, the project will contribute new additions to the standard methodological toolkit in political science. Although historians are not likely to employ the methods that we advocate, they will be more prone to respect the historical work done in political science and to incorporate the findings of that work into their scholarship. The book will consist of three parts. The first will be an extended response to the critics of historical political science research, arguing that it is, in fact, possible for analytical and empirical scholars to rigorously address the issues they raise and demonstrating the costs of not being prepared to work in this way. The second part will be a thoroughly developed discussion of the logic and character of the proposed alternative approaches to methods and research. The third part will be a handbook of tools that can be deployed as solutions to the various theoretical and empirical problems associated with quantitative historical work. The PIs will make templates of computer code available that will aid interested researchers in implementing the methods that the PIs advocate.
