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• Published: 12 December 2017

Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations

• Christina Boswell 1 &
• Katherine Smith 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  44 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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• Politics and international relations
• Science, technology and society
• Social policy

A Correction to this article was published on 20 February 2018

This article has been updated

Political scientists are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy ‘impact’, most notably via Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case studies, and ‘pathways to impact’ statements in UK Research Council funding applications. Yet the assumptions underpinning these frameworks often fail to reflect available evidence and theories. Notions of ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ are typically premised on simplistic, linear models of the policy process, according to which policy-makers are keen to ‘utilise’ expertise to produce more ‘effective’ policies. Such accounts overlook the rich body of literature in political science, policy studies, and sociology of knowledge, which offer more complex and nuanced accounts. Drawing on this wider literature, this paper sets out four different approaches to theorising the relationship: (1) knowledge shapes policy; (2) politics shapes knowledge; (3) co-production; and (4) autonomous spheres. We consider what each of these four approaches suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.

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Introduction

The new research ‘impact’ agenda is likely to have a profound effect on the social science research community in wide-ranging ways, shaping the sorts of research questions and methods scholars are selecting, their networks and collaborations, as well as changing institutional structures of support within higher education institutions. Yet concepts and models for defining and measuring impact have been subject to surprisingly little social scientific scrutiny. While there is an extensive literature on research-policy relations across fields of social science (notably in sociology, science and technology studies, social policy, political science and public management), only a very narrow range of these contributions have been marshalled to develop guidance and practice on ‘impact’. Indeed, prevalent guidelines and models are frequently based on surprisingly simple and linear ideas about how research can be ‘utilised’ to produce more effective policies (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ).

In this article, we seek to advance the debate on impact by setting out four different approaches to theorising research-policy relations, drawn from wider social science literature. Each set of theories is categorised according to its core assumptions about the inter-relations between the two spheres. The first approach focuses on a ‘supply’ model of research-policy relations, examining how knowledge and ideas shape policy. The second challenges the idea that research is independent of politics and policy, instead focusing on how political power shapes knowledge. The third approach takes this line further, suggesting that research knowledge and governance are co-produced through an ongoing process of mutual constitution. And the fourth approach offers a radically contrasting account, suggesting that there is no overarching causality between science and politics, but that politics only selectively appropriates and gives meaning to scientific findings. Figure  1 offers a simple representation of these four ways of modelling the relations.

Research-policy relations

This figure represents in visual form the direction of influence between research, expert knowledge and science; and policy and politics. The first panel represents theories assuming that research shapes policy. The second panel depicts the idea that policy and politics shape the production of research. In the third panel, the circular arrows convey the idea of research and policy being mutually constitutive. While the fourth panel suggests that there is no direct causal relationship between research and policy, but that instead, the two ‘systems’ only selectively pick up on signals from the other system.

This four-way schema offers a useful resource in two main ways. First, it offers a classificatory tool for mapping, comparing and analysing a range of often disparate theoretical approaches in the emerging field of knowledge-policy relations–theories that emanate from a wide set of social science disciplines, and are informed by quite divergent assumptions about knowledge and governance. The second, more applied, use of the schema is to identify the plurality of ways of conceptualising knowledge-policy relations. In doing so, we demonstrate that prevalent models of impact are based on one particular set of assumptions about the role of research in policy, and not necessarily the most theoretically sophisticated at that. By briefly setting out each of the four sets of theories, we show how each is based on quite distinct assumptions about knowledge and policy, and that each has different implications for how we might go about defining and measuring impact.

The ‘impact’ agenda in UK research funding

The emphasis on ‘research impact’ has been increasing steadily across a number of OECD countries over the past decade, notably Australia (Donovan, 2008 ; Chubb and Watermeyer, 2016 ), Canada (Canadian Academy of Health Sciences CAHS, 2009 ), the Netherlands (Mostert et al., 2010 ) and the USA (Grant et al., 2010 ) but the influence of this agenda is particularly pronounced in the UK, which can be seen as something of a pioneer in implementing these approaches (see Bornmann, 2013 and Grant et al., 2010 for useful comparative overviews). There are currently two major incentives for social scientists in the UK to demonstrate that their research influences policy. First, the national appraisal mechanism for assessing university research (which informs decisions about the distribution of core research funding), known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), has begun awarding 20% of overall scores to institutions on the basis of case studies of research impact (UK higher education funding bodies 2011 ). Second, accounts of the work that will be undertaken to achieve research impact (‘pathways to impact’) now form a significant section of grant application processes for the UK funding councils (Research Councils UK, Undated ). The upshot is that obtaining core research funding and project-specific grants from publicly funded sources in the UK are now strongly dependent on researchers’ abilities to respond adequately to questions about the non-academic value of their work (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ).

The current focus on ‘research impact’ reflects a longer-standing concern with the societal return on public funding of science (Brewer, 2011 ; Clarke, 2010 ). This agenda was given particular impetus by New Labour government commitments to taking a more ‘evidence-based’ approach to policymaking (Labour Party, 1997 ), with official statements evoking a simple, linear conceptualisation of the relationship between research and policy (e.g., Cabinet Office, 1999 , 2000 ; Blunkett, 2000 ). It is this kind of thinking that appears to have shaped tools and guidance on impact (Smith, 2013a ). Indeed, while different public bodies have adopted a variety of models, RCUK and REF advisory documents tend to share a number of common features (AHRC, 2014 , 2015 ; ESRC, 2014a , 2014b , 2014c ; MRC, 2014 ; Research Councils UK, Undated): (i) a consensus that researchers have a responsibility to articulate the impact of their research to non-academic audiences; (ii) an assumption (most explicit in the REF impact case studies) that this impact can be documented and measured; (iii) a belief that the distribution of research funding should (at least to some extent) reflect researchers’ ability to achieve ‘impact’; and, following from this, (iv) an expectation that researchers’ own efforts to achieve research impact will play a significant role in explaining why some research has impact beyond academia and some does not.

This approach is exemplified in HEFCE’s template for REF2014 impact ‘case studies’ (REF, 2014, 2011 ). The template calls for an account of the ‘underpinning research’ that exerted impact, implying that impact is achieved through policy-makers adjusting their beliefs in response to clearly delineated research findings. The implication is that research findings are created independently of policy or politics: research is treated as an exogenous variable that feeds into policy-making. Secondly, such findings are expected to have been published as ‘outputs’ that are rated 2*, or ‘nationally leading in terms of their originality, significance and rigour’ (REF2014, 2014 ). Thus a clear link is posited between the quality of research and the desirability of rewarding impact: impactful research should meet a certain quality threshold. Thirdly, researchers are required to chart how their findings came to exert impact, and to provide evidence to corroborate their claims. Evocative of the ‘pathways to impact’ section of RCUK grant proposals (Research Councils UK, Undated ), this requirement implies that researchers can trace the effects of their work through describing a series of concrete activities and information flows – events, meetings, media coverage, and so on.

There is currently no agreed way of tracking research impacts and, in this context, some academics have identified more specific frameworks and approaches, including the ‘payback framework’ (Donovan and Hanney, 2011 ) and the ‘research contribution framework’ (Morton, 2015 ). However, others have criticised the simplistic and linear conceptualisations of research-policy relations that appear to underpin the UK’s overarching approach to research impact, particularly those with in-depth knowledge of the policy process and/or the relationship between research and policy (Greenhalgh et al., 2016 ; Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). Theories of public policy have shown that policy-making rarely occurs in such neat sequential stages (Cairney, 2016 ), and that evidence often plays a rather limited role in decision-making (Boswell, 2009a ). In the context of such criticisms and concerns, we consider the rich body of literature from political science, policy studies, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies, which has informed understandings of the complex relationship between knowledge and policy. Drawing on this wider literature, we now set out four different approaches to theorising the relationship, and consider their implications for the impact agenda.

Four approaches to conceptualising research-policy relations

Knowledge shapes policy.

A range of theories and models of the relationship between academic knowledge and policy were developed by US and UK scholars in the 1970s and 1980s (Blume, 1977 ; Caplan, 1979 ; Rein, 1980 ; Weiss, 1977 , 1979 ). Notably, a number of contributions produced ‘instrumental’ models of knowledge utilisation (see Weiss, 1979 for an overview), according to which knowledge either ‘drives’ policy, or policy problems stimulate research to provide direct solutions (again, see Weiss, 1979 ). Much of the work undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that while there are occasional examples of research feeding into policy in this manner, such simple models failed to capture the intricacies of the interactions between research and policy (Rein, 1980 ; Weiss, 1979 ). Yet, it was precisely these simple, instrumental notions of the role of research in policy that seem to have become increasingly embedded within UK policy, including higher education policy, leading Parsons to reflect that the Labour government’s commitments to ‘evidence-based policymaking’ marked:

not so much a step forward as a step backwards: a return to the quest for a positivist yellow brick road leading to a promised policy dry ground-somewhere, over Charles Lindblom - where we can know ‘what works’ and from which government can exercise strategic guidance. (Parsons, 2002 , p 45)

Understandably, official commitments to employing evidence in a direct, linear sense triggered a raft of assessments of the extent to which particular policies do reflect the available evidence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these found the government’s use of evidence has been highly selective (e.g., Boswell 2009a , 2009b ; Katikireddi et al., 2011 ; Naughton, 2005 ; Stevens, 2007 ) and this, in turn, has triggered renewed interest in two, more complex models of the ways in which research knowledge shapes policy, each of which has very different implications for the research impact agenda.

The first of these approaches seeks to address what is perceived as a ‘gap’ between the research and policy communities. On this account, research has the potential to be highly relevant to policy, but its impact is often reduced by problems of communication. Research may not be disseminated in a form that is relevant or accessible to policy-makers; or officials have insufficient resources to process and apply research findings. For example, Lomas ( 2000 ) and Lavis ( 2006 ) both underline the importance of achieving shared understandings between researchers and policymakers, arguing that increased interaction between the two groups will improve the use of research in policy. These authors tend to assume that research would be more frequently employed by policymakers if only they could better access and understand the findings and if the findings were of relevance. Thus the focus is on improving the mechanisms of communication, and the levels of trust, between researchers and policymakers. A stronger version of this ‘gap’ account posits that this reflects a deeper cultural gap between researchers and policy actors. Thus Caplan ( 1979 ) suggests that these actors should be seen as distinct ‘communities’ guided by different values and beliefs–a notion we discuss further in the fourth set of theories, considered later in the paper.

The weaker version of this ‘gap’ approach, however, suggests that there are various practical steps that can be taken to improve the flow of knowledge from research to policy. Indeed, several reviews of knowledge transfer provide practical recommendations for researchers seeking to influence policy (Contandriopoulos et al., 2010 ; Innvaer et al., 2002 ; Mitton et al., 2007 ; Nutley et al., 2003 ; Oliver et al., 2013 ; Walter et al., 2005 ), suggesting researchers should ensure research is accessible, by providing clear, concise, timely summaries of the research, tailored to appropriate audiences; and develop ongoing, collaborative relationships with potential users to increase levels of trust and shared definitions of policy problems and responses. In structural terms, the findings of these reviews call for improved communication channels, via ‘knowledge broker’ roles and/or knowledge transfer training and sufficiently high incentives for researchers and research users to engage in knowledge exchange. Of the various conceptualisations of the relationship between research knowledge and policy, it is this way of thinking which appears to have had most influence on current approaches to incentivising research impact in the UK. As we shall see, however, the approach is widely criticised by the alternative theories of research-policy relations we explore later in the article.

A second popular theory of how research shapes policy emerges from Weiss’ ( 1977 , 1979 ) notion of the ‘enlightenment’ function of knowledge in policymaking. This account proposes that knowledge shapes policy through diffuse processes, resulting from the activities of various, overlapping networks, which contribute to broader, incremental and often largely conceptual changes (Hird, 2005 ; Walt, 1994 ). Radaelli’s ( 1995 ) notion of ‘knowledge creep’ is one of several more recent conceptualisations to build on this idea, and we can find similar assumptions in ideational theories of policy change (Béland, 2009 ; Hall, 1993 ; Schmidt, 2008 ). The implication of these accounts is that research influences policy over long periods through gradual changes in actors’ perceptions and ways of thinking (an idea that is also evident in theories of co-production, as discussed later) rather than through immediate, direct impacts. Whilst this body of work does not discount the possibility that research might contribute to what eventually become significant shifts in policy approaches, it suggests that assessments aiming to trace the impact of research on particular policy outcomes are likely to miss a potentially broader, more diffuse kind of conceptual influence.

The implications of this way of conceptualising the relationship between academic knowledge and policy for ideas about research impact are more challenging (indeed, the ‘enlightenment’ model has been criticised by some scholars seeking to improve the use of evidence in policy for its lack of practical utility (Nutley et al., 2007 )). Taking the more conceptual influence of research seriously suggests that incentives for achieving impact ought to shift away from individual researchers and projects to consider how to support the collective diffusion of much more diverse (potentially interdisciplinary) bodies of work. Given that multiple authors are likely to be involved, and that various factors unrelated to the underpinning research (or its communication) are likely to inform when and how knowledge shapes policy, it seems to make little sense to reward individual researchers (or even teams of researchers) for ‘achieving’ research impact. Instead, research impact might be supported by encouraging groups of researchers to work together on developing policy messages from diverse studies on particular policy topics (or, to support knowledge brokers to do this kind of work).

This is a very different model from both the RCUK pathways to impact approach, which encourages individual researchers or research teams to try to achieve research impacts on the back of single studies, and the REF impact case study approach, which encourages single institutions to narrate stories of impact based solely on the work of researchers they employ. Indeed, recent assessments of the REF impact case study approach have specifically highlighted the tendency not to adequately support these kinds of synthesised approaches to achieving impact (Manville et al., 2015 ; Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). For the moment, while some of the guidance documents relating to the UK impact agenda do acknowledge conceptual forms of influence, the mechanisms for monitoring and rewarding impact seem preoccupied with ‘instrumental’ research impact achieved on the back of research undertaken by individual researchers or small groups within single institutions.

Politics shapes knowledge

Perhaps the most obvious critique of the ‘knowledge shapes policy’ model reverses this relationship to highlight the various ways in which policies and politics shape knowledge and the use of knowledge. There is a rich body of literature theorising how state-building and modern techniques of governance have shaped the production of social knowledge (Foucault, 1991 , Heclo, 1974 ; Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1996 ), as well as how power relations are implicated in the construction of expert authority (Gramsci, 2009 ). What these diverse contributions share is the notion that an underlying political project is driving research production and utilisation, whether that project is the production of self-regulating subjects (as some Foucauldian interpretations suggest) or the continuing dominance of ruling elites and ideologies (as Gramscian analyses tend to posit). From this perspective, research utilisation in policymaking is understood as profoundly constrained; whilst those involved in the construction of policy are not necessarily consciously aware of the forces shaping their decisions, any attempt to engage with research must be understood as part of a wider political project. At the very least, such analyses suggest that only research that can be used to support these dominant ideas and interests will be employed in policymaking, while research that challenges dominant ideas will be discounted (see Wright et al., 2007 ). A stronger interpretation would hold that the research process is itself shaped by the ‘powerful interests’ directing policy agendas (e.g., Navarro, 2004 ).

The more applied literature concerning the relationship between research and policy also provides examples of this way of thinking about the relationship. In her overview of various ‘models’ of the relationship between research and policy, Weiss, for example, describes what she calls the ‘political model’, where research is deployed to support pre-given policy preferences; as well as a ‘tactical model’, where research is used as a method of delaying the decision-making process, providing policymakers with some ‘breathing space’ (Weiss, 1979 ). In the first case, the research process itself is not necessarily informed by politics but the decision to employ research (or not) is entirely political. In other words, political ideology and/or more strategic party politics inform the ways in which political actors respond to research evidence (e.g., Bambra, 2013 ). In the second, the commissioning of research might itself be understood as a political act (or, at least, an act that creates political benefits–see Bailey and Scott‐Jones 1984 ). In either case, efforts to reward researchers for ‘achieving’ research impact would seem misplaced.

The extent to which politics can shape research is perhaps most overt in research that is directly commissioned by sources with particular political/policy interests; reviews have repeatedly demonstrated that research funded by commercial sources, such as the pharmaceutical (e.g., Lundh et al., 2012 ) and tobacco industries (e.g., Bero, 2005 ), is more likely to present findings that are useful to those interests (see also Bailey and Scott‐Jones, 1984 ). In other contexts, it has been suggested that researchers may struggle to maintain their independence where research is commissioned directly, or indirectly, by government sources (e.g., Barnes, 1996 ; Smith, 2010 ). This kind of political influence may be felt both overtly and subtly, with researchers responding to signals from research funders as to what is likely to be funded (and what is not), what they are hoping (or expecting) to be found and what they are not (Knorr-Cetina, 1981 ; Smith, 2010 ), as we discuss further in the following section.

A second group of theories which call attention to the way in which politics can shape knowledge focus on the impact of institutions and organisational structures on policymaking and research. Similar to the previous group of theories, such accounts assume that the wider structures in which actors are located are key to explaining policy outcomes. Whilst the more political accounts discussed above highlight the ways in which power relations and elite interests can shape research and its use, these theories focus on organisational and decision-making structures. The most well-known of such theories are the various forms of institutionalism, of which ‘historical institutionalism’ is one of the most widely employed forms (see Immergut, 1998 for an overview). From this perspective, rather than constituting the collective result of individual preferences, policy processes (including efforts to engage with research) are considered to be significantly shaped by the historically constructed institutions and policy procedures within which they are embedded (Immergut, 1998 ).

Those who have contributed to the development of this genre of work have emphasised that such theories do not suggest that particular policy outcomes are inevitable –and indeed, as we discussed in the previous sections, under certain conditions existing paradigms can be superseded by new ideas, leading to substantial policy change (Hall, 1993 ). However, such theories do suggest that it becomes increasingly difficult to change the overall direction of a policy trajectory as previous decisions become ever more deeply embedded in institutional structures and ways of thinking (e.g., Kay, 2005 ). Employing these kinds of theories, Smith ( 2013b ) has demonstrated how the institutionalisation of particular ideas about health and economic policy function as filters to research-based ideas about health inequalities, encouraging those ideas that support existing institutionalised ideas (or ‘policy paradigms’) to move into policy, while blocking or significantly transforming more challenging ideas.

This way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and policy suggests that research is constantly being influenced by policy and politics and that efforts to bring researchers and policymakers closer together are like to exacerbate this in ways that may not be desirable. At best, from this perspective, the research impact agenda seems likely to reward some academics (and not others) for achieving impacts that had far more to do with political interests and agendas than the research or impact activities of those academics. At worst, the impact agenda will lead to the increasing politicisation of research (and an associated reduction in academic freedom). Indeed, some of the most critical responses to the impact agenda are informed by these kinds of concerns. Cohen ( 2000 ) and Hammersley ( 2005 ), for example, have warned that the restrictions being placed on publicly-funded research to be ‘useful’ to policy audiences is limiting the potential for academics to promote ideas that are out-of-line with government policies. Likewise, Davey Smith et al., ( 2001 ), argue that efforts to achieve evidence-based policy may, in fact, do more to stimulate research that is shaped by policy needs than to encourage better use of research in policy-making.

Co-production

A third way of theorising research-policy relations has emerged from science and technology studies (STS), and posits a much more complex inter-relationship between knowledge production and governance. This approach is encapsulated in the idea of ‘co-production’: the claim that knowledge and governance are mutually constitutive (Jasanoff, 2004 ).

Similar to the approaches discussed in the last section, such accounts see knowledge as profoundly shaped by politics. But the notion of co-production focuses not just on the social and political constitution of science. It is also attentive to the other direction of influence: the ways in which governance is itself constituted by scientific knowledge. So rather than limiting its attention to how politics shapes knowledge, the notion of co-production posits that scientific and expert knowledge contribute to the construction of political reality (an idea that is, in some ways, simply a stronger version of Weiss’ ( 1979 ) account of the enlightenment function of research, discussed earlier). Knowledge provides the concepts, data and tools that underpin our knowledge of social and policy problems and appropriate modes of steering (Voß and Freeman, 2016 ). Sheila Jasanoff ( 2004 ) is arguably the most influential exponent of this approach. In her book States of Knowledge , she explores how knowledge-making is an inherent part of the practices of state-making and governance. States ‘are made of knowledge, just as knowledge is constituted by states’ (Jasanoff, 2004 , p 3). Moreover, STS scholars have shown how science does not just produce knowledge and theories that help define social problems and appropriate responses. It also produces skills, machines, instruments and technologies that are deployed in governance (Pickering, 1995 ).

An important concept informing this approach is that of performativity. This is the idea that social enquiry and its methods are ‘productive’: rather than simply describing social reality, they help to make or enact the social world (Law and Urry, 2004 ). Indeed, social science needs to be understood as fundamentally embedded in, produced by, but also productive of the social world (Giddens, 1990 ). Social science thus has effects–it creates concepts and labels, classifications and distinctions, comparisons and techniques that transform the social world. Such concepts and techniques can also help bring into existence the social objects they describe. Osborne and Rose ( 1999 ) illustrate this idea with the case of public opinion, a social phenomenon that was effectively created in the 1930s through the emergence of new methods of polling and survey analysis, and is now thoroughly normalised as an object of social scientific enquiry. Similarly, Donald MacKenzie ( 2006 ) has explored the performativity of economic models, showing how the theory of options shaped practices in trading and hedging in the financial sector from the 1970s onwards. Similar ideas have been explored by Colin Hay ( 2007 ) in his discussion of political disaffection. He argues that public choice theory has contributed to the ‘marketisation’ of party politics, implying that such theories have been ‘performative’ (although he does not use this term).

Theories of co-production also show how science can produce social problems. Through its various scientific and technical innovations, science does not simply solve governance problems, but it also creates new ones (Jasanoff, 2004 ). The frantic pace of development and progress in science and technology produce a continuous stream of new problems and solutions, which governments often struggle to keep pace with. So new research does not just offer ways of ordering the social world, but can also destabilise existing structures and modes of governance. In areas of policy that are highly dependent on technology and science–such as energy, health, agriculture or defence - policy develops almost in pursuit of science, in an attempt to catch up with, harness and regulate the new technologies and practices it has produced. Thus science creates the very problems that need to be addressed through political intervention (Beck, 1992 ). The demand for ever more problem-solving knowledge is effectively built into the structure of policy-research relations.

What implications do these approaches have for defining and measuring impact? First, they suggest that we cannot neatly disentangle processes of knowledge production from those of governance. This is not merely an epistemological question–a challenge of finding the right methods or observational techniques to allow us to separate out how social scientific findings have influenced politics or policy (although this is of course difficult to do). It represents a more fundamental ontological problem, in that social scientific knowledge is co-constitutive of politics. Imagine, for example, trying to chart the ‘impact’ of public choice theories on politics. We would not only face the methodological challenge of charting the subtle and incremental processes through which a wide variety of social actors (including politicians, campaigners, lobbyists and the media) appropriated public choice theories about political agency. We would also need to understand the ongoing feedback effects through which such ideas brought about shifts in the behaviour of these actors, in turn gradually transforming political behaviour. If we accept the possibility of such effects, then we need to also consider how such shifts may in turn validate the theories that originally produced them, enhancing their authority and influence. The relationship between social science and politics in this example is one of continuous mutual influence and reinforcement.

Second, the notion of co-production suggests that social science may itself produce social problems that require political responses. Studies of public opinion offer a good example of this. A survey of public attitudes may ‘discover’ unarticulated claims and preferences, which produce new demands for political action. In 2014, Jeffery et al., ( 2014 ) found a strong desire on the part of the English respondents they surveyed for institutions that better represented and articulated ‘English’ views. This could be charted as ‘impact’ insofar as the findings of the survey were picked up by politicians and influenced claims-making about UK constitutional reform (and indeed it was submitted as a case study to REF2014). But the research can also be understood as producing a new set of political problems. It encouraged a number of survey respondents to articulate a set of preferences which may previously have been nascent or unspecified. These preferences were then presented as a collective and coherent political claim, which in turn implied the need for enhanced political representation and constitutional reform. Research thus contributed to the construction of a new social problem requiring a political response. As with the case of public choice theory, we can also posit a feedback effect, whereby the social and political adjustments generated by the research might in turn further validate the findings. As politicians sought to represent and mobilise these preferences, this created further political expectations and demands, thereby substantiating the initial research claim that the English desire their own institutions.

One implication of this account is that REF or HEFCE models do not do justice to the more pervasive (but often subtle) influence of social science on policy. Another is that they overlook the feedback effects described above, whereby the political adjustments enacted through social science in turn validate (or possible discredit) the authority of research findings or methods. And a third is that they may actively encourage forms of interference that create more problems than they solve. Policy impact may not always be benign, as we noted earlier.

Assuming we accept such impacts as desirable, how might these processes of co-production be best captured and accredited? They would require quite resource-intensive methodologies, as well as forms of expertise that are not necessarily available across disciplines. Each case study would effectively be a social scientific project in its own right, explored though a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as ethnography (as Baim-Lance and Vindrola-Padros, 2015 , argue in more detail) process tracing, discourse analysis, interviews and surveys. It is hard to imagine sufficient resource being available for such indepth enquiry, or, indeed, for buy-in to such models and methodologies from across (non-social science) disciplines.

Autonomous spheres

Our final approach to theorising research-policy relations understands science and politics as distinct spheres, each operating according to a separate logic and system of meaning. As we saw earlier, one version of this account is Caplan’s ( 1979 ) ‘two communities’ thesis, which identifies a ‘cultural gap’ between researchers and policymakers. This conceptualisation has been subject to a range of critiques, not least, as Lindquist ( 1990 ) points out, the fact that this way of thinking about the relationship excludes a range of potentially important actors, such as journalists, consultants and lobbyists. Despite this, whilst not always referring to Caplan’s ( 1979 ) work directly, many contemporary assessments of the limited use of research in policy and practice frequently mirror Caplan’s observations by highlighting perceived ‘gaps’ between researchers, policymakers and/or practitioners as a fundamental barrier to the use of research.

In this section, we focus on a more radical account of this ‘gap’, associated with the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (e.g., Luhmann, 1996 ). On a Luhmannian systems theory account, science and politics are both understood as self-referential or ‘autopoietic’ systems. Although mutually dependent in important ways (they could not survive in a recognisable form without one another), each operates according to its own logic or ‘communicative code’, which determines which communications are relevant to the system. There is no causality or direct influence across systems: rather, operations in one system are selectively perceived and given meaning according to the codes and logics of another system. Thus it does not make sense to conceive of flows, diffusion or causality across systems, and STS concepts such as ‘performativity’ or ‘co-production’ need to be carefully re-specified in terms of how one system ‘models’ and responds to the operations of another.

Luhmann understands the primary building blocks of modern society not as individuals or groups, but as functionally differentiated social systems. Modern societies are increasingly sub-divided into specialised, self-referential systems such as education, health, economy, religion, welfare, science or politics. Each of these systems operates according to its own distinct codes, programmes, logic and mode of inclusion. Unlike on Caplan’s account, these systems are not distinguished in terms of members or institutions. Systems do not consist of discrete groups of people, indeed one person or one organisation can participate in several different systems. However, systems are distinguished in terms of sets of differentiated roles and activities. Each system retains its distinctiveness through developing its own criteria of selection, which help it reduce complexity by only selecting those communications which are relevant to the system.

On this account, science and politics are separate function-systems. Science (including social science) operates according to a binary code of true/false. In other words, it defines relevant communication based on whether it is concerned with establishing truth claims. The system of politics, meanwhile, selects relevant communication on the basis of the binary code of government/opposition. The political system selects and gives meaning to communication based on its relevance to the pursuit of political power and the capacity to adopt collectively binding decisions. At first sight, this seems to be a very narrow way of conceiving social systems. For example, scientists are not just preoccupied with validating truth claims; they are clearly also concerned with winning grants, enhancing their academic reputation, or influencing government policies. But these preoccupations are characterised as participating in different systems. For example, a public funding decision has a distinct meaning and relevance in the systems of science, politics and the economy.

From this perspective, there can be no overarching causality operating between two systems, although it is easy to see how appealing such causal attributions might be to observers. To be sure, one event can have effects across different systems. A government research grant has meaning for both the system of politics and that of science. Yet As Luhmann puts it, the ‘preconditions and consequences of events differ completely according to system reference’, and observers should not ‘cross-identify events over boundaries’ (Luhmann, 1991 , p 1438). Instead, Luhmann conceives of the relationship as highly selective connections between systems and their environments. Systems that are reliant on other systems in their environment develop models, or assumed regularities, to help them keep tabs on the other system. For example, science will develop a certain way of observing and anticipating political decision-making relevant to science: a set of beliefs about how and when decisions are produced, what drives them, and what effects they may have on science funding or regulation. These models can be understood as internally constructed filters to help select what is relevant from what is noise or redundancy. They help the system to sort through what is expected and what is unpredicted, what is a relevant signal and what is an irritation (Luhmann, 1991 , p 1432).

If we accept that science and politics are guided by distinct logics or communicative codes, the challenge becomes one of reconstructing how each system might selectively pick up signals from the other. We need to understand what sort of perceptual filters are developed and stabilised for the purpose of screening out relevant signals from noise; and how information from the other system might be constructed and connected to the receiving system’s identities and functions. The implication is that we need to turn our attention to how the system of politics ‘models’ the system of science, and how it selectively appropriates and gives meaning to the signals produced by that system.

This segues nicely into the earlier discussion of our first set of theories, and the need for a more sophisticated theory of politics than those provided by prevalent models of research-policy relations. Such a theory would require an account of how the political system makes sense of its environment, and selectively draws on different types of resources to secure legitimacy or support (Boswell, 2009a ). A number of theories from public policy can contribute towards such an endeavour. Notably, theories of information-processing offer potential to examine how organisations in the public administration selectively pick up signals from their environment about social problems (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones, 1993 ). Cohen and colleagues’ ( 1972 ) ‘garbage can model’ of policymaking, as taken up by Kingdon ( 1995 [1984]), offers a neat way of theorising how different ideas or ‘solutions’ are picked up depending on the political and problem streams–again, an idea broadly compatible with the systems theory approach, in that it views ‘ideas’ and ‘politics’ as operating according to different temporalities and logics (Boswell and Rodrigues, 2016 ).

What are the implications of systems theory for impact? A systems theoretic approach would be wary of the attempt to demonstrate ‘impact’, as it assumes a specious causality between science and politics. Instead, we need to try to adopt the perspective of politics, and make sense of how and why the political system picks up data, methods or techniques from social science. And we can attempt to observe how, from the perspective of social science, political decisions or goals might affect the selection and framing of research questions, and the communication of research findings. But we cannot integrate these observations into a single set of causal mechanisms. Viewed from ‘inside’ of each system, the other remains a ‘black box’: an infinitely complex set of communications and operations which can only be very crudely modelled and selectively responded to.

What this implies is that an impact case study could at best chart how politics appropriated and gave meaning to particular data, methods or techniques. But the ‘underpinning research’ that produced these data or techniques, or academic efforts to promote this research, would derive rather limited credit for such take-up. Far more important would be dynamics internal to the political system, such as the political salience of the issue, or how well the research in question was attuned to dominant political framings of policy problems (Kingdon, 1995 [1984]; Cairney, 2016 ), or how far research was seen as an authoritative mode of knowledge for guiding decisions (Boswell, 2009b ). Moreover, it would remain open how far political take-up reflected a preoccupation with signalling legitimacy, rather than informing policy interventions. After all, if research is valued by politics as a means of substantiating claims or bolstering credibility, then presumably this implies a symbolic rather than instrumental rationale for using research (Boswell, 2009a ).

In short, the systems theoretic account guides us towards an interrogation of the political context of knowledge utilisation; but the more we probe the logic of knowledge appropriation in politics, the less we can accredit research. What makes for politically useful knowledge is fundamentally distinct from what makes for good science. Thus any link between high quality science and impact is exposed as contingent. It may well be that politics needs to ‘quality control’ the science it invokes to insure against its invalidation by critics–but this is only as an insurance against critique. And it may want to ensure the robustness of science as a safeguard against making mistakes that would cost political support. But again, this concern with rigour is incidental to the core concerns of politics. Politics is not fundamentally preoccupied with what is true, but with what is relevant to securing power and producing collectively binding decisions.

Current approaches to research impact appear to have been informed by simplistic supply-side models within our first category of ‘knowledge shapes policy’. As we have suggested in this article, such accounts have been widely debunked by theorists of research-policy relations, as well as by many empirical studies of research ‘impact’. And yet the REF and HEFCE models, and much of the literature on knowledge utilisation, continue to remain faithful to this problematic account. Part of the reason for the sustained commitment to these models is that they offer a reassuring narrative to both policy-makers and researchers. Politicians and public servants can demonstrate the rigour and authority of their claims by invoking research, and they can secure legitimacy by signalling that their decisions are well-grounded (Boswell, 2009a ), or they can invoke the need for research as a rationale for delaying action (Fuller, 2005 ). At the same time, researchers can secure additional resources and credit for developing compelling narratives about the impact of their research (Dunlop, 2017 ). Yet these accounts bely the complexity of research-policy relations and, indeed, of policy processes and policy change (Cohen et al., 1972 ; Smith and Katikireddi, 2013 ). If we are to avoid continually reinventing broken wheels, we suggest a new, more theoretically informed approach to thinking about research impact is required.

The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique, and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques. Rather, our aim has been to set out four alternative, sophisticated accounts of the relationship between research and policy and to consider what a research impact agenda might look like if it were informed by these other approaches. Such an exercise is necessarily hypothetical and almost impossible to test in an empirical sense, since the UK’s approach to research impact has already been informed by a relatively simple and linear conceptualisation of research-policy relations (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). This means there are strong incentives for institutions to ‘play the game’ according to the rules that have been set by providing relatively simple and linear ‘stories’ of research impact, as Meagher and Martin’s ( 2017 ) analysis of REF2014 impact case studies for mathematics attests (see also Murphy, 2017 on ‘gaming’ in REF and Watermeyer and Hendgecoe 2016 on ‘impact mercantilsm’). However, as other countries evolve different approaches to research impact, it may become possible to empirically assess both the claims we set out here and the practical implications of such alternative approaches.

The first of the four models we outline offered a subtler ‘enlightenment’ conception of how research can influence policy. It implied that research can lead to ideational adjustments through diffuse and incremental processes, typically influenced by a wide body of research rather than individual findings. This account challenges the notion that researchers or institutions should be rewarded for claims about the impact of individual studies, though potentially supports efforts to encourage knowledge exchange. The second set of theories implied that policy and politics shape knowledge production and use, and were altogether more sceptical of the impact agenda. They suggested that it was naïve to assume that researchers can speak truth to power, implying that researchers should not be rewarded for their supposed impact since policy actors employ research for political, rather than empirical/intellectual, reasons. The third set of theories on co-production implied the need for a far more sophisticated methodology for examining how research and governance are mutually constitutive. They also argued that social science should not necessarily be understood as the ‘solution’ to social problems, since it can itself create such problems. And the fourth approach, which posits that science and politics are autonomous systems, suggested that we can best understand impact through a theory of how politics selectively observes and gives meaning to communications emanating from the system of science. Viewed from this perspective, the impact agenda has been designed to suit the needs of a political, rather than scientific, system and should be treated cautiously by researchers given its potential to divert science from its core task of developing truth claims.

Both the second and fourth accounts suggest that the very idea of trying to incentivize the use of research in policy is flawed. On these accounts, we should be cautious about adopting systems that reward researchers for influencing policy. Such impacts are spurious, in that their apparent influence is down to pre-given interests or independent political dynamics; or they are the result of researchers aligning research questions and approaches to pre-fit political agendas. By rewarding researchers for achieving impact we are adopting an arbitrary incentive system that is at best decoupled from research quality, and at worst, threatens the integrity and independence of social science.

For those more sympathetic to the idea of ‘research impact’, the first and third approaches might offer more hope. Nonetheless, neither approach suggests that the current approach is likely to achieve its intended goals. Indeed, both caution against rewarding individual researchers for ‘achieving’ research impact based on narrow indicators (e.g., citations in policy documents). The enlightenment model suggests that research impact involves subtle, incremental and diffuse ideational adjustments over a long period of time, which are generated by a wide range of research insights rather than specific individual findings. This suggests that a system for rewarding impact should not focus on individual research projects or groups and their linear effects on particular policies. Rather, impact frameworks should reward collaborative endeavours that build incrementally on a wider body of work; that develop longer-term relationships with a range of non-academic audiences (not only policymakers and other ‘elites’); and that may bring about subtle conceptual shifts, rather than clearly identifiable policy changes. This in turn implies the need for more complex research designs and methodologies for charting such influence over a far longer time-frame, and avoid incentives to over-claim credit for particular groups or projects. This perspective coheres with those arguing for a shift away from trying to measure and incentivize research impacts to focus instead on incentivizing and rewarding knowledge exchange processes (e.g., Upton et al., 2014 ). From this view, Spaapen and van Drooge’s ( 2011 ) approach of focusing on ‘productive interactions’ between science and society (which emerged out of an FP7 project called Social Impact Assessment Methods for research and funding instruments-SIAMPI), seems like a more defensible means of assessing research impact. The notion of co-production similarly suggests the need for more in-depth, ethnographic or process-tracing methods for reconstructing the complex relationships between research and policy (as outlined by Baim-Lance and Vindrola-Padros, 2015 ). Systems for rewarding impact should also be aware of the two-way relationship between research and governance, including the ways in which social science can itself affect the social and political world, imagining and enacting new social problems.

Arguably, the highest impact research is that which serves to re-shape the social world it seeks to describe. This implies that models to promote engagement with knowledge users need to be attentive not just to the complex pathways to research impact, but also to the very real ethical implications of research influence (implications that do not currently appear to be considered in either REF impact case studies or RCUK pathways to impact statements–Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). Not only can the impact agenda affect the practices of social science, as is widely recognised in social science literature; social science can also instigate new policy problems. Proponents of policy impact should have a care what they wish for.

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On page 7 of the PDF, in the second paragraph under the subheading “Conclusion” the first sentence “The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique (e.g., ADD REFS) and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques” has been corrected to “The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique, and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques”.

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Boswell, C., Smith, K. Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations. Palgrave Commun 3 , 44 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0042-z

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• 4.9: Review Questions
• 4.10: Critical Thinking Questions
• 4.11: Critical Thinking Questions

• 5.1: Conceptualization in Political Science
• 5.2: Operationalization
• 5.3: Measurement
• 5.4: Key Terms/Glossary
• 5.5: Summary
• 5.6: Review Questions
• 5.7: Critical Thinking Questions
• 5.8: Suggestions for Further Study

• 6.1: Introduction- Building with a Blueprint
• 6.2: Types of Design- Experimental and Nonexperimental Designs
• 6.3: Components of Design- Sampling
• 6.4: Components of Design- Observations
• 6.5: Key Terms/Glossary
• 6.6: Summary
• 6.7: Review Questions
• 6.8: Critical Thinking Questions
• 6.9: Suggestions for Further Study

• 7.1: What are Qualitative Methods?
• 7.2: Interviews
• 7.3: Exploring Documentary Sources
• 7.4: Ethnographic Research
• 7.5: Case Studies
• 7.6: Key Terms/Glossary
• 7.7: Summary
• 7.8: Review Questions
• 7.9: Critical Thinking Questions
• 7.10: Suggestions for Further Study

• 8.1: What are Quantitative Methods
• 8.2: Making Sense of Data
• 8.3: Introduction to Statistical Inference and Hypothesis Testing
• 8.4: Interpreting Statistical Tables in Political Science Articles
• 8.6: Summary
• 8.7: Review Questions
• 8.8: Critical Thinking Questions
• 8.9: Suggestions for Further Study
• 8.5: Key Terms

• 9.1: Ethics in Political Research
• 9.2: Research Ethics
• 9.3: Navigating Qualitative Data Collection
• 9.4: Research Ethics in Quantitative Research
• 9.5: Ethically Analyzing and Sharing Co-generated Knowledge
• 9.6: Key Terms/Glossary
• 9.7: Summary
• 9.8: Review Questions
• 9.9: Critical Thinking Questions
• 9.10: Suggestions for Further Study

• 10.1: Congratulations!
• 10.2: The Path Forward
• 10.3: Frontiers of Political Science Research Methods
• 10.4: How to Contribute to this OER

• Detailed Licensing

Thumbnail: Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in the Thomas Jefferson Building. (Public Domain;  Carol M. Highsmith  via Wikipedia )

Introduction to Political Science Research Methods - 1st Edition

(4 reviews)

Josh Franco, Rancho San Diego, CA

Charlotte Lee, Berkeley, CA

Kau Vue, Fresno, CA

Publisher: Academic Senate for California Community Colleges

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Eliot Dickinson, Professor, Western Oregon University on 4/5/24

I can compare it to a major research methods textbook that I used for years. That book has 15 chapters, while this one has ten, which is actually more conducive to the 11-week quarter system still found on the West Coast. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

I can compare it to a major research methods textbook that I used for years. That book has 15 chapters, while this one has ten, which is actually more conducive to the 11-week quarter system still found on the West Coast.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is factually accurate, free of significant errors, and objective in its analysis.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This text can be used for years, as the examples and cases are relevant for our times.

Clarity rating: 5

The text is written in a way that the average college freshman will be able to understand.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is consistent from chapter to chapter, from beginning to end, with a glossary of key terms at the end of each chapter.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is broken up into very readable chapters that are not overwhelming. Students will appreciate this aspect of the text, since it is succinct and offers units of reasonable length.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

It is organized like most other research methods textbooks. It includes opening chapters on the history and development of political science, so that it can also be used in a "Scope and Methods of PS" course.

Interface rating: 5

The text is easy to navigate with both a brief table of contents and a detailed table of contents, and the images and charts are clear throughout.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

It reads well although there there is a typo in the first paragraph of the first page and another typo on the third page. It would be helpful to correct these in future editions.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text is culturally and politically correct. It's perfectly accessible to everyone.

This is a valuable contribution to higher education and, being an open resource, is helpful to students.

Reviewed by Hakseon Lee, Professor, James Madison University on 3/23/24

Most materials that are supposed to be taught at an introductory political science research methods are covered. Quantitative analysis section is relatively short, but considering it is an "intro" textbook, it's understandable. BTW Including Ch. 9... read more

Most materials that are supposed to be taught at an introductory political science research methods are covered. Quantitative analysis section is relatively short, but considering it is an "intro" textbook, it's understandable. BTW Including Ch. 9 Research Ethics is very helpful for students understand research on “human subjects” more in depth.

Overall, explanations of abstract and complex concepts are well presented. The concepts and definitions provided in the glossary are accurate as well.

The textbook is written for undergraduate political science major students, and the level of complexity is quite relevant to them. Research methods materials are not fast changing subject and the textbook’s contents have longevity.

The textbook is written very clearly and easy to understand. After each chapter, summary of each subsection in chapters are provided in a very succinct and clear way, and I believe the summary sections are beneficial to students

Even though the textbook is written by several authors, they followed the same format of each chapter: providing clear learning objectives, summary, review questions, critical thinking questions, suggestions for further study, and references. Students will not be confused at all reading chapter by chapter.

Having total of 10 chapters, the textbook can be easily used module by module structure. Each chapter has subsections which have clear learning objectives, and this will be helpful for instructors who plan to use the textbook sequentially.

Overall organization and structure follow conventional existing textbooks’ organization/structure. Majority of undergraduate research methods class are taught from history and development of research methods to quantitative analysis step by step, and the textbook follows the usual organization/structure.

The book is very much reader friendly. Table of contents are very well organized and readers can have an easy overlook of the textbook.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I have not found significant or consistent grammatical errors at all.

Introducing diverse coauthors with cartoon images at the beginning of the textbook is helpful for students to learn about diverse authors. Also, examples used have diverse backgrounds.

Reviewed by Huei-Jyun Ye, Assistant Professor, Wabash College on 10/23/23

This textbook covers the scientific method of studying politics, theory and hypothesis building, conceptualization and operationalization, elements of research design, qualitative methods, quantitative methods, and research ethics. For the very... read more

This textbook covers the scientific method of studying politics, theory and hypothesis building, conceptualization and operationalization, elements of research design, qualitative methods, quantitative methods, and research ethics. For the very intro level (for freshmen or sophomores), this textbook will serve well. For advanced undergraduate courses, this textbook lacks an introduction to specific research methods like surveys, experiments, case comparisons, etc. This textbook touches a little bit on qualitative and quantitative approaches but does not explain the methods political scientists use. I feel this is a tradeoff for an introduction textbook. Instructors who are seeking materials explaining methods will need to find other supplements. Other than that, I would recommend using this book to explain the process of doing political science research.

The explanations of political science research methods are spot-on and comprehensible. I do not find big mistakes in the chapters.

I believe we can use this textbook for a long time as most of the concepts are standards of the field. Some examples address timely concerns that political scientists have been working on. The studies referred to in the textbook are also not obsolete.

The textbook is overall clear and easy to read. The authors make good efforts to explain the jargon in plain language. For example, when introducing conceptualization and operationalization, the author asks questions as if they were students and provides answers to explain the ideas. Different from throwing all the jargon and definitions to readers’ faces, students may find this conversation style more accessible.

The authors do a good job of setting a tone for this textbook, even though it is written by multiple authors. Each chapter starts with an outline, followed by content, glossary, summary, review questions, and suggestions for further study. Readers can expect all these elements in every chapter.

The chapters can be easily turned into sequential modules. What is even better is that the authors provide learning objectives for each section, not just for chapters. This design makes it easier for instructors to break down each chapter into smaller tasks. Students can know what to expect or take away from the subsections in each module. The summary and review questions at the end of each chapter also serve as a good wrap-up for individual modules.

The organization of the chapters is logical and straightforward. The subsections within each chapter are well-connected. Students would not have any problem building up their understanding of the research inquiry process when they read over the textbook.

The Introduction to Political Science Research Methods is reader-friendly. I have no difficulty in following the sections, and the formatting, including figures and tables, does not go off the place. Also, the PDF keeps the bookmarks so that readers can clearly see the structure on the sidebar and jump to different sections easily.

I do not notice major grammatical errors.

This book uses studies on various topics and has broad cultural implications. I appreciate that the examples and studies that the authors choose to demonstrate how to do political science research cover diversity and equity in society. The authors also present different schools of view without imposing a specific paradigm on the readers.

I recommend this book.

Reviewed by Lindsay Benstead, Professor of Politics & Global Affairs, Portland State University on 8/12/23

This textbook covers topics in a comprehensive overview of methodology used in Political Science. It is suitable for an introductory course (e.g., 100-200 level), in that it covers the 'History and Development of the Empirical Study of Politics,"... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This textbook covers topics in a comprehensive overview of methodology used in Political Science. It is suitable for an introductory course (e.g., 100-200 level), in that it covers the 'History and Development of the Empirical Study of Politics," which includes basic facts about the history of the field of Politics. It then covers topics in quantitative and qualitative analysis. Importantly, it includes a section on ethics.

In my review of the textbook and use in designing a new course, I found the information presented in the textbook to be accurate.

Since this textbook covers foundational topics in research methods, it is likely to remain relevant for a decade or more.

This textbook is written in a clear way that will be understood by students in introductory political science methods courses (e.g., 100-200 level). This is not to say that more advanced students would not benefit from reading this textbook, but only if they are undergraduate or graduate students just beginning their study of research methods in the field.

This book is internally consistent. In addition to content in each chapter, it includes m/c questions, open-ended questions, and resources for further study. These are presented at the end of each chapter in such a way that they can consistently be assigned to students on a weekly basis and used in the preparation of exams and quizzes.

Each chapter is broken up into multiple sections, making it easy for instructors to present the material in modular and easily digestible ways.

The book is well organized, proceeding in a logical way from introductory material through quantitative topics, followed by qualitative methods and research ethics.

The pdf interface is easily navigated.

There are not grammatical errors in the book that I noted.

The textbook has several authors. The authors provide cartoon images of themselves. The group of authors come from diverse backgrounds, making the book more likely to help students from diverse backgrounds know that Political Science is their field of study.

Table of Contents

• About the Authors
• History of this OER
• Table of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Chapter 1- Introduction
• Chapter 2- History and Development of the Empirical Study of Politics
• Chapter 3- The Scientific Method
• Chapter 4- Theories, Hypotheses, Variables, and Units
• Chapter 5- Conceptualization, Operationalization, Measurement
• Chapter 6- Elements of Research Design
• Chapter 7- Qualitative Methods
• Chapter 8- Quantitative Research Methods and Means of Analysis 
• Chapter 9- Research Ethics
• Chapter 10- Conclusion

Ancillary Material

• Academic Senate for California Community Colleges

About the Book

Welcome to the official website for  Introduction to Political Science Research Methods  and  Polimetrics: A Stata Companion to Introduction to Political Science Research Methods  workbook!

Introduction to Political Science Research Methods,  authored by Dr. Josh Franco, Dr. Charlotte Lee, Kau Vue, Dr. Dino Bozonelos, Dr. Masahiro Omae, and Dr. Steven Cauchon, is an Open Education Resource textbook licensed CC BY-NC that surveys the research methods employed in political science. The textbook includes chapters that cover: history and development of the empirical study of politics; the scientific method; theories, hypotheses, variables, and units; conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of political concepts; elements of research design including the logic of sampling; qualitative and quantitative research methods and means of analysis; and research ethics.

Polimetrics: A Stata Companion,  authored by Dr. Josh Franco, is an Open Education Resource workbook licensed CC BY-NC and designed as a Stata companion to  Introduction to Political Science Research Methods . This workbook provides a tour of the Stata software, an introduction to cross-sectional, time series, and panel data, and an introduction to a variety of models. I review models where the outcome is linear, binary, ordinal, categorical, and count. Additionally, I have an interpretation chapter on survival models.

About the Contributors

Dr. Josh Franco, Cuyamaca College, Political Science: Josh Franco is a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor at Cuyamaca College in east San Diego County, California. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science, B.A. in public policy, and A.A. in economics and political science. Dr. Franco has five years of experience working in the California State Government and U.S. House of Representatives. Additionally, he was recently published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Political Science Education.

Dr. Charlotte Lee, Berkeley City College, Political Science: Charlotte Lee is full-time faculty at Berkeley City College. She teaches courses in political science and global studies. She has conducted fieldwork in Eastern Europe and China, culminating in several peer-reviewed publications in comparative politics, and will draw on that research in writing OER materials on qualitative research methods. Dr. Lee has participated in several Peralta district wide OER workshops. In February 2019, she co-facilitated an ASCCC OER Task Force webinar on resources in political science. Her Ph.D. is in political science from Stanford University.

Kau Vue, M.A. M.P.A., Fresno City College, Political Science: Kau Vue is an instructor of political science at Fresno City College in Fresno, California. She holds an M.A. in political science, a Master’s in Public Administration (M.P.A.) and a B.A. in political science and economics.

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Political Science

What this handout is about.

This handout will help you to recognize and to follow writing standards in political science. The first step toward accomplishing this goal is to develop a basic understanding of political science and the kind of work political scientists do.

Defining politics and political science

Political scientist Harold Laswell said it best: at its most basic level, politics is the struggle of “who gets what, when, how.” This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers. Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works. Think about the title of your course or re-read the course description in your syllabus. You’ll find that your course covers a particular sector of the large world of “politics” and brings with it a set of topics, issues, and approaches to information that may be helpful to consider as you begin a writing assignment. The diverse structure of political science reflects the diverse kinds of problems the discipline attempts to analyze and explain. In fact, political science includes at least eight major sub-fields:

• American politics examines political behavior and institutions in the United States.
• Comparative politics analyzes and compares political systems within and across different geographic regions.
• International relations investigates relations among nation states and the activities of international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as international actors such as terrorists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multi-national corporations (MNCs).
• Political theory analyzes fundamental political concepts such as power and democracy and foundational questions, like “How should the individual and the state relate?”
• Political methodology deals with the ways that political scientists ask and investigate questions.
• Public policy examines the process by which governments make public decisions.
• Public administration studies the ways that government policies are implemented.
• Public law focuses on the role of law and courts in the political process.

What is scientific about political science?

Investigating relationships.

Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called “hard” sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves as engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. Based on these revelations, they attempt to state general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists’ writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it.

Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach. You can learn more about writing for political theory classes in the section “Writing in Political Theory” below.

Building theories

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know whether presidential elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis:

“When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, presidential incumbents are not reelected.”

Collecting data

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable (the phenomenon that is affected by other variables) would be the reelection of incumbent presidents; the independent variable (the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable) would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent presidents and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a presidential election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

However, research in political science seldom yields immediately conclusive results. In this case, for example, although in most recent presidential elections our hypothesis holds true, President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 despite the fact that the national unemployment rate was 17%. To explain this important exception and to make certain that other factors besides high unemployment rates were not primarily responsible for the defeat of incumbent presidents in other election years, you would need to do further research. So you can see how political scientists use the scientific method to build ever more precise and persuasive theories and how you might begin to think about the topics that interest you as you write your paper.

Clear, consistent, objective writing

Since political scientists construct and assess theories in accordance with the principles of the scientific method, writing in the field conveys the rigor, objectivity, and logical consistency that characterize this method. Thus political scientists avoid the use of impressionistic or metaphorical language, or language which appeals primarily to our senses, emotions, or moral beliefs. In other words, rather than persuade you with the elegance of their prose or the moral virtue of their beliefs, political scientists persuade through their command of the facts and their ability to relate those facts to theories that can withstand the test of empirical investigation. In writing of this sort, clarity and concision are at a premium. To achieve such clarity and concision, political scientists precisely define any terms or concepts that are important to the arguments that they make. This precision often requires that they “operationalize” key terms or concepts. “Operationalizing” simply means that important—but possibly vague or abstract—concepts like “justice” are defined in ways that allow them to be measured or tested through scientific investigation.

Fortunately, you will generally not be expected to devise or operationalize key concepts entirely on your own. In most cases, your professor or the authors of assigned readings will already have defined and/or operationalized concepts that are important to your research. And in the event that someone hasn’t already come up with precisely the definition you need, other political scientists will in all likelihood have written enough on the topic that you’re investigating to give you some clear guidance on how to proceed. For this reason, it is always a good idea to explore what research has already been done on your topic before you begin to construct your own argument. See our handout on making an academic argument .

Example of an operationalized term

To give you an example of the kind of rigor and objectivity political scientists aim for in their writing, let’s examine how someone might operationalize a term. Reading through this example should clarify the level of analysis and precision that you will be expected to employ in your writing. Here’s how you might define key concepts in a way that allows us to measure them.

We are all familiar with the term “democracy.” If you were asked to define this term, you might make a statement like the following:

“Democracy is government by the people.”

You would, of course, be correct—democracy is government by the people. But, in order to evaluate whether or not a particular government is fully democratic or is more or less democratic when compared with other governments, we would need to have more precise criteria with which to measure or assess democracy. For example, here are some criteria that political scientists have suggested are indicators of democracy:

• Freedom to form and join organizations
• Freedom of expression
• Right to vote
• Eligibility for public office
• Right of political leaders to compete for support
• Right of political leaders to compete for votes
• Alternative sources of information
• Free and fair elections
• Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference

If we adopt these nine criteria, we now have a definition that will allow us to measure democracy empirically. Thus, if you want to determine whether Brazil is more democratic than Sweden, you can evaluate each country in terms of the degree to which it fulfills the above criteria.

What counts as good writing in political science?

While rigor, clarity, and concision will be valued in any piece of writing in political science, knowing the kind of writing task you’ve been assigned will help you to write a good paper. Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper.

Writing political science research papers

Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a persuasive argument in favor of your perspective. In order for you to successfully meet this challenge, your research paper should include the following components:

• An introduction
• A problem statement
• A discussion of methodology
• A literature review
• A description and evaluation of your research findings
• A summary of your findings

Here’s a brief description of each component.

In the introduction of your research paper, you need to give the reader some basic background information on your topic that suggests why the question you are investigating is interesting and important. You will also need to provide the reader with a statement of the research problem you are attempting to address and a basic outline of your paper as a whole. The problem statement presents not only the general research problem you will address but also the hypotheses that you will consider. In the methodology section, you will explain to the reader the research methods you used to investigate your research topic and to test the hypotheses that you have formulated. For example, did you conduct interviews, use statistical analysis, rely upon previous research studies, or some combination of all of these methodological approaches?

Before you can develop each of the above components of your research paper, you will need to conduct a literature review. A literature review involves reading and analyzing what other researchers have written on your topic before going on to do research of your own. There are some very pragmatic reasons for doing this work. First, as insightful as your ideas may be, someone else may have had similar ideas and have already done research to test them. By reading what they have written on your topic, you can ensure that you don’t repeat, but rather learn from, work that has already been done. Second, to demonstrate the soundness of your hypotheses and methodology, you will need to indicate how you have borrowed from and/or improved upon the ideas of others.

By referring to what other researchers have found on your topic, you will have established a frame of reference that enables the reader to understand the full significance of your research results. Thus, once you have conducted your literature review, you will be in a position to present your research findings. In presenting these findings, you will need to refer back to your original hypotheses and explain the manner and degree to which your results fit with what you anticipated you would find. If you see strong support for your argument or perhaps some unexpected results that your original hypotheses cannot account for, this section is the place to convey such important information to your reader. This is also the place to suggest further lines of research that will help refine, clarify inconsistencies with, or provide additional support for your hypotheses. Finally, in the summary section of your paper, reiterate the significance of your research and your research findings and speculate upon the path that future research efforts should take.

Writing in political theory

Political theory differs from other subfields in political science in that it deals primarily with historical and normative, rather than empirical, analysis. In other words, political theorists are less concerned with the scientific measurement of political phenomena than with understanding how important political ideas develop over time. And they are less concerned with evaluating how things are than in debating how they should be. A return to our democracy example will make these distinctions clearer and give you some clues about how to write well in political theory.

Earlier, we talked about how to define democracy empirically so that it can be measured and tested in accordance with scientific principles. Political theorists also define democracy, but they use a different standard of measurement. Their definitions of democracy reflect their interest in political ideals—for example, liberty, equality, and citizenship—rather than scientific measurement. So, when writing about democracy from the perspective of a political theorist, you may be asked to make an argument about the proper way to define citizenship in a democratic society. Should citizens of a democratic society be expected to engage in decision-making and administration of government, or should they be satisfied with casting votes every couple of years?

In order to substantiate your position on such questions, you will need to pay special attention to two interrelated components of your writing: (1) the logical consistency of your ideas and (2) the manner in which you use the arguments of other theorists to support your own. First, you need to make sure that your conclusion and all points leading up to it follow from your original premises or assumptions. If, for example, you argue that democracy is a system of government through which citizens develop their full capacities as human beings, then your notion of citizenship will somehow need to support this broad definition of democracy. A narrow view of citizenship based exclusively or primarily on voting probably will not do. Whatever you argue, however, you will need to be sure to demonstrate in your analysis that you have considered the arguments of other theorists who have written about these issues. In some cases, their arguments will provide support for your own; in others, they will raise criticisms and concerns that you will need to address if you are going to make a convincing case for your point of view.

Drafting your paper

If you have used material from outside sources in your paper, be sure to cite them appropriately in your paper. In political science, writers most often use the APA or Turabian (a version of the Chicago Manual of Style) style guides when formatting references. Check with your instructor if they have not specified a citation style in the assignment. For more information on constructing citations, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Although all assignments are different, the preceding outlines provide a clear and simple guide that should help you in writing papers in any sub-field of political science. If you find that you need more assistance than this short guide provides, refer to the list of additional resources below or make an appointment to see a tutor at the Writing Center.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Becker, Howard S. 2007. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article , 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cuba, Lee. 2002. A Short Guide to Writing About Social Science , 4th ed. New York: Longman.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Scott, Gregory M., and Stephen M. Garrison. 1998. The Political Science Student Writer’s Manual , 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Turabian, Kate. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, Dissertations , 9th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Introduction: Doing Qualitative Research in Politics: Building Theory and Formulating Policy

• First Online: 06 March 2018

Cite this chapter

• Angela Kachuyevski 3 &
• Lisa M. Samuel 4  

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Within the social sciences, a robust epistemological debate exists over how the study of social phenomena should be conducted in order to build empirical understanding and theoretical knowledge, and to inform policy making. In political science the result has been a tendency toward quantitative analysis, including large-n studies and formal models, given their purported relative strength in external validity. Qualitative researchers have been counseled to approximate the “scientific” approach, defined as following the conventions of quantitative models as closely as possible. Yet, many contextual and process-oriented research questions within political science are not conducive to quantitative analysis. In this introductory chapter, Kachuyevski and Samuel present the conceptual framework of the book, outlining both the validity and the utility of in-depth qualitative analysis, particularly in policy-relevant research.

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Given the scope of this work, while we make this acknowledgment we do not engage with this debate.

We use the term “politics of knowledge ” to refer not simply to the so-called quantitative/qualitative divide, but also to the politics associated with the use by researchers of one approach versus the other, and the corresponding effect this may have on their advancing in academe. As Yanow and Schwartz-Shea ( 2006 ) quite rightly note, for junior faculty who conduct qualitative research, there are problems of publication and tenure and promotion; for all faculty, problems may arise in the form of contentions with departmental colleagues who do not value qualitative research and who are resistant to hiring new faculty with qualitative orientations. However, given the parameters of this project, we will not engage with this latter aspect of the politics of knowledge.

Indeed, feminists using this approach have been inspired to do so when they seek to get away from existing theoretical accounts of the matter at hand. In so doing, they work within a broad, non-specific theoretical framework that may include influences from postpositivist, critical, and/or queer theories, among others (Ackerly and True 2010 ).

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Dessler, David. 2003. The Positivist-Interpretivist Controversy. Qualitative Methods 1(2): 21–24.

Elman, Colin, and Diana Kapiszewski. 2014. Data Access and Research Transparency in the Qualitative Tradition. PS: Political Science & Politics 47(1): 43–47.

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Kachuyevski, A., Samuel, L.M. (2018). Introduction: Doing Qualitative Research in Politics: Building Theory and Formulating Policy. In: Kachuyevski, A., Samuel, L. (eds) Doing Qualitative Research in Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72230-6_1

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POLSC101: Introduction to Political Science

Research in political science.

This handout is designed to teach you how to conduct original political science research. While you won't be asked to write a research paper, this handout provides important information on the "scientific" approach used by political scientists. Pay particularly close attention to the section that answers the question "what is scientific about political science?"

If you were going to conduct research in biology or chemistry, what would you do? You would probably create a hypothesis, and then design an experiment to test your hypothesis. Based on the results of your experiment, you would draw conclusions. Political scientists follow similar procedures. Like a scientist who researches biology or chemistry, political scientists rely on objectivity, data, and procedure to draw conclusions. This article explains the process of operationalizing variables. Why is that an important step in social science research?

Defining politics and political science

Political scientist Harold Laswell said it best: at its most basic level, politics is the struggle of "who gets what, when, how". This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a small municipal budget or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers. Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works. Think about the title of your course or re-read the course description in your syllabus. You'll find that your course covers a particular sector of the large world of "politics" and brings with it a set of topics, issues, and approaches to information that may be helpful to consider as you begin a writing assignment. The diverse structure of political science reflects the diverse kinds of problems the discipline attempts to analyze and explain. In fact, political science includes at least eight major sub-fields:

• American politics examines political behavior and institutions in the United States.
• Comparative politics analyzes and compares political systems within and across different geographic regions.
• International relations investigates relations among nation-states and the activities of international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO, as well as international actors such as terrorists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multi-national corporations (MNCs).
• Political theory analyzes fundamental political concepts such as power and democracy and foundational questions, like "How should the individual and the state relate?"
• Political methodology deals with the ways that political scientists ask and investigate questions.
• Public policy examines the process by which governments make public decisions.
• Public administration studies the ways that government policies are implemented.
• Public law focuses on the role of law and courts in the political process.

What is scientific about political science?

Investigating relationships

Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called "hard" sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves as engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. Based on these revelations, they attempt to state general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists' writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it.

Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach. You can learn more about writing for political theory classes in the section "Writing in Political Theory" below.

Building theories

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know whether presidential elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis: "When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, presidential incumbents are not reelected".

Collecting data

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable (the phenomenon that is affected by other variables) would be the reelection of incumbent presidents; the independent variable (the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable) would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent presidents and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a presidential election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

However, research in political science seldom yields immediately conclusive results. In this case, for example, although in most recent presidential elections our hypothesis holds true, President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 despite the fact that the national unemployment rate was 17%. To explain this important exception and to make certain that other factors besides high unemployment rates were not primarily responsible for the defeat of incumbent presidents in other election years, you would need to do further research. So you can see how political scientists use the scientific method to build ever more precise and persuasive theories and how you might begin to think about the topics that interest you as you write your paper.

Clear, consistent, objective writing

Since political scientists construct and assess theories in accordance with the principles of the scientific method, writing in the field conveys the rigor, objectivity, and logical consistency that characterize this method. Thus political scientists avoid the use of impressionistic or metaphorical language, or language which appeals primarily to our senses, emotions, or moral beliefs. In other words, rather than persuade you with the elegance of their prose or the moral virtue of their beliefs, political scientists persuade through their command of the facts and their ability to relate those facts to theories that can withstand the test of empirical investigation. In writing of this sort, clarity and concision are at a premium. To achieve such clarity and concision, political scientists precisely define any terms or concepts that are important to the arguments that they make. This precision often requires that they "operationalize" key terms or concepts. "Operationalizing" simply means that important – but possibly vague or abstract – concepts like "justice" are defined in ways that allow them to be measured or tested through scientific investigation.

Fortunately, you will generally not be expected to devise or operationalize key concepts entirely on your own. In most cases, your professor or the authors of assigned readings will already have defined and/or operationalized concepts that are important to your research. And in the event that someone hasn't already come up with precisely the definition you need, other political scientists will in all likelihood have written enough on the topic that you're investigating to give you some clear guidance on how to proceed. For this reason, it is always a good idea to explore what research has already been done on your topic before you begin to construct your own argument. (See our handout on making an academic argument.)

Example of an operationalized term

To give you an example of the kind of "rigor" and "objectivity" political scientists aim for in their writing, let's examine how someone might operationalize a term. Reading through this example should clarify the level of analysis and precision that you will be expected to employ in your writing. Here's how you might define key concepts in a way that allows us to measure them.

We are all familiar with the term "democracy". If you were asked to define this term, you might make a statement like the following: "Democracy is government by the people". You would, of course, be correct – democracy is government by the people. But, in order to evaluate whether or not a particular government is fully democratic or is more or less democratic when compared with other governments, we would need to have more precise criteria with which to measure or assess democracy. Most political scientists agree that these criteria should include the following rights and freedoms for citizens:

• Freedom to form and join organizations
• Freedom of expression
• Right to vote
• Eligibility for public office
• Right of political leaders to compete for support
• Right of political leaders to compete for votes
• Alternative sources of information
• Free and fair elections
• Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference

By adopting these nine criteria, we now have a definition that will allow us to measure democracy. Thus, if you want to determine whether Brazil is more democratic than Sweden, you can evaluate each country in terms of the degree to which it fulfills the above criteria.

What counts as good writing in political science?

While rigor, clarity, and concision will be valued in any piece of writing in political science, knowing the kind of writing task you've been assigned will help you to write a good paper. Two of the most common kinds of writing assignments in political science are the research paper and the theory paper.

Writing political science research papers

Your instructors use research paper assignments as a means of assessing your ability to understand a complex problem in the field, to develop a perspective on this problem, and to make a persuasive argument in favor of your perspective. In order for you to successfully meet this challenge, your research paper should include the following components: (1) an introduction, (2) a problem statement, (3) a discussion of methodology, (4) a literature review, (5) a description and evaluation of your research findings, and (6) a summary of your findings. Here's a brief description of each component.

In the introduction of your research paper, you need to give the reader some basic background information on your topic that suggests why the question you are investigating is interesting and important. You will also need to provide the reader with a statement of the research problem you are attempting to address and a basic outline of your paper as a whole. The problem statement presents not only the general research problem you will address but also the hypotheses that you will consider. In the methodology section, you will explain to the reader the research methods you used to investigate your research topic and to test the hypotheses that you have formulated. For example, did you conduct interviews, use statistical analysis, rely upon previous research studies, or some combination of all of these methodological approaches?

Before you can develop each of the above components of your research paper, you will need to conduct a literature review. A literature review involves reading and analyzing what other researchers have written on your topic before going on to do research of your own. There are some very pragmatic reasons for doing this work. First, as insightful as your ideas may be, someone else may have had similar ideas and have already done research to test them. By reading what they have written on your topic, you can ensure that you don't repeat, but rather learn from, work that has already been done. Second, to demonstrate the soundness of your hypotheses and methodology, you will need to indicate how you have borrowed from and/or improved upon the ideas of others.

By referring to what other researchers have found on your topic, you will have established a frame of reference that enables the reader to understand the full significance of your research results. Thus, once you have conducted your literature review, you will be in a position to present your research findings. In presenting these findings, you will need to refer back to your original hypotheses and explain the manner and degree to which your results fit with what you anticipated you would find. If you see strong support for your argument or perhaps some unexpected results that your original hypotheses cannot account for, this section is the place to convey such important information to your reader. This is also the place to suggest further lines of research that will help refine, clarify inconsistencies with, or provide additional support for your hypotheses. Finally, in the summary section of your paper, reiterate the significance of your research and your research findings and speculate upon the path that future research efforts should take.

Writing in political theory

Political theory differs from other subfields in political science in that it deals primarily with historical and normative, rather than empirical, analysis. In other words, political theorists are less concerned with the scientific measurement of political phenomena than with understanding how important political ideas develop over time. And they are less concerned with evaluating how things are than in debating how they should be. A return to our democracy example will make these distinctions clearer and give you some clues about how to write well in political theory.

Earlier, we talked about how to define democracy empirically so that it can be measured and tested in accordance with scientific principles. Political theorists also define democracy, but they use a different standard of measurement. Their definitions of democracy reflect their interest in political ideals – for example, liberty, equality, and citizenship – rather than scientific measurement. So, when writing about democracy from the perspective of a political theorist, you may be asked to make an argument about the proper way to define citizenship in a democratic society. Should citizens of a democratic society be expected to engage in decision-making and administration of government, or should they be satisfied with casting votes every couple of years?

In order to substantiate your position on such questions, you will need to pay special attention to two interrelated components of your writing: (1) the logical consistency of your ideas and (2) the manner in which you use the arguments of other theorists to support your own. First, you need to make sure that your conclusion and all points leading up to it follow from your original premises or assumptions. If, for example, you argue that democracy is a system of government through which citizens develop their full capacities as human beings, then your notion of citizenship will somehow need to support this broad definition of democracy. A narrow view of citizenship based exclusively or primarily on voting probably will not do. Whatever you argue, however, you will need to be sure to demonstrate in your analysis that you have considered the arguments of other theorists who have written about these issues. In some cases, their arguments will provide support for your own; in others, they will raise criticisms and concerns that you will need to address if you are going to make a convincing case for your point of view.

Drafting your paper

If you have used material from outside sources in your paper, be sure to cite them appropriately in your paper. In political science, writers most often use the APA or Turabian (a version of the Chicago Manual of Style) style guides when formatting references. Check with your instructor if he or she has not specified a citation style in the assignment. For more information on constructing citations, see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Although all assignments are different, the preceding outlines provide a clear and simple guide that should help you in writing papers in any sub-field of political science. If you find that you need more assistance than this short guide provides, refer to the list of additional resources below or make an appointment to see a tutor at the Writing Center.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

Becker, Howard S. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cuba, Lee. 2002. A Short Guide to Writing about Social Science , Fourth Edition. New York: Longman.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How . New York, London: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, inc.

Scott, Gregory M. and Stephen M. Garrison. 1998. The Political Science Student Writer's Manual , Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.

Turabian, Kate L. 1996. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers , Theses, and Dissertations, Sixth Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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The Politics of International Conflict Process: Initiation, Escalation, and Resolution

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Conflict is an everlasting theme in international relations. The history of human civilization can arguably be perceived as a history of wars, disputes, and clashes in which political actors strive to maximize their utilities. The consequences of political violence are devastating. From Plato to Machiavelli, from Clausewitz to Schelling, social scientists conduct extensive research on conflict management approaches. Deterrence, signalling, issue linkage, economic interdependence, for example, are widely acknowledged as often-used solutions in conflict mitigation. Unfortunately, despite the large body of scholarly literature, global peace is still a wish than reality in contemporary politics. The Arab Winter during the 2010s, the Russian-Ukraine Crisis from 2022, the Israel-Hamas War in 2023 all reveal that the world today remains fragile as high-level confrontations are frequent. What is urgently in need, therefore, are novel views and perspectives regarding the politics of international conflict and the process to peace. The primary goal of this collection is to advance our understanding on the causes, continuation, and management of conflict. While its primary focus is on violent conflicts such as war, transnational terrorism, mass resistance groups, this Research Topic also welcomes a variety of contributions related to non-violent competitions and confrontations among communal, civil, transnational, and interstate actors. The latter encompasses religious and partisan animosity, arms races, trade disputes, and many others. This collection is committed to methodological pluralism. Thus, both formal and informal theories, both quantitative and qualitative empirical works are solicited. Notably, contributions to this Research Topic should not only contribute to the scholarly discourse on conflict process, but should also have implications to policy practitioners and other audiences outside of academia. We are particularly interested in original research papers, reviews and policy reports that explore the following topics: • When, why and how do conflicts start? • Why do some peacemaking efforts succeed in preventing the escalation of interstate violence while some other attempts unintentionally lead to intensifying confrontation between rival parties? • What are the pivotal factors influencing the chance of mediation success? • How to resolve strategic disagreements, disputes, and bias through peaceful mechanisms?

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Political Process and Crime Research Paper

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If politics is the authoritative allocation of values, then crime and politics are inextricably linked. Substantive criminal laws articulate, as do few others, the basic values of society. Agencies of law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice possess a near-monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and exercise vast power in deciding whether and how to enforce the law. The criminal justice system is composed of a sizable set of government officials who together have an important impact on politics. The symbols of crime affect the nature of political promise and expectation.

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, crime, morality, and public authority.

Substantive criminal laws both reflect and reinforce the dominant morality in society. Many proscriptions of the criminal law are virtually universal and not politically problematic—for example, taboos against incest and prohibitions against murder and theft—yet consensual affirmation of these values reinforces existing structures of political authority. Other laws are not so widely accepted, and they reflect the power of dominant groups in society. But whatever the degrees of consensus about the substantive criminal laws, their administration is likely to be problematic and to pose problems requiring resolution through political processes.

At times, specific controversies in the criminal law are tied to larger concerns of political theory about the nature and function of the state. For example, classical liberal political theory (Mill) informs the position of those who oppose the prosecution of so-called victimless crimes, whereas another philosophical tradition embracing a broader role for the state underlies the arguments of those who would permit legislation proscribing victimless crimes (Devlin). For example, during a long period the common law accepted marriage and later the right to chastise as absolute defenses in criminal cases where men were charged with assault and battery of their wives. As such, these rules reinforced the dependence of women upon men. Similarly, the ways in which criminal laws were construed and enforced strengthened the institution of slavery and thwarted efforts to organize labor. Decisions to treat acts of political rebellion as ‘‘common crimes’’ rather than acts of conscience have also had the effect of defusing political opposition and reaffirming the authority of dominant elites (Balbus). The selection and administration of sanctions also reflect political considerations. In eighteenth-century England, policies to expand provisions for capital punishment, as well as nineteenth-century efforts to restrict them, were shaped by considerations of how best to enhance the authority of the Crown. In twentieth-century America, restrictions on capital punishment followed an increase in the political power of blacks. Criminal trials have also long been used to consolidate political power. Throughout history, and especially in the modern era, revolutionary regimes and military victors have mounted political trials to consolidate support and to brand opponents as common criminals (Kirchheimer).

The Politics of Law Enforcement and Administration

Law enforcement and administration are connected with politics on a number of levels. Dominant political theory and ideology affect the structure, organization, and expectations of a society’s criminal justice institutions. In turn, these institutions affect the ways in which the criminal law is enforced and administered.

Political Culture, Theory, and Ideology

Although the connection between political theory and ideology and concrete practice is neither direct nor always clear, the links are there, and to understand practices and institutional arrangements, one must appreciate the theoretical and ideological milieu that justifies and legitimizes them. Theories of authority and the nature and function of the state vary widely, and it is such factors that in part account for variations in concrete institutional practices in the criminal process. In this sense, social and political theory are at the root of the criminal process.

To illustrate, a major tradition in continental political theory and legal philosophy has emphasized the autonomous nature of the state and justified strong central authority (Hegel). This tradition stands in sharp contrast to the liberal democratic tradition of Great Britain and the United States, which has been intensely skeptical of authority, has celebrated pluralism, and has advocated the decentralization and fragmentation of power (Locke; Hartz). These differing traditions have influenced both the structure of and expectations about governmental institutions, including the criminal process (Tocqueville). The influences of American political thought on the criminal process are exemplified by the importance given to the rights of the criminally accused in the Bill of Rights, and by the tradition of local, decentralized administration of justice. The connections among ideology, political culture, and the criminal process in nonwestern and socialist countries are even more striking (Bayley; Li).

There are numerous other contrasts between Anglo-American and continental criminal justice that are related to the differing political traditions. A public criminal law as distinct from private tort law, public prosecutors in contrast to private prosecution by the victim, a national police force, and a comprehensive national judicial system—all signs of highly developed central authority—emerged much earlier and have evolved more fully on the Continent than in England and the United States. The American political tradition, in particular, has been intensely skeptical of central authority and strong positive government, and has resisted the penetration of remote political authority by means of the criminal law into the daily affairs of citizens. This has led to local control and local administration of criminal justice to a degree unheard of in Europe. In the United States, most major officials in the criminal justice system—judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, court clerks, and in a few jurisdictions, public defenders as well—are elected locally, a practice that is regarded by many continental observers as inconsistent with the ideals of evenhanded administration. Indeed, in the United States both the financing and the administration of criminal justice firmly remain a function of local (as opposed to even state) government. As a consequence, American criminal justice officials are expected not only to administer the law evenhandedly, but also to be responsive to their local publics, tasks that often foster irreconcilable tensions.

Contrasting continental with American views on plea-bargaining illustrates the importance of different traditions of theory and ideology in understanding the operations of the criminal justice system. In West Germany, for example, pleabargaining is viewed with disdain as a practice that is only slightly short of corruption and one that would undermine the very authority and integrity of the state. In contrast, even though there is considerable debate over pleabargaining, the practice is generally accepted in the United States as a valuable, if problematic, tool for flexible and efficient administration of justice. This and other practices, such as rules of evidence and the right to silence, must be understood in light of different traditions in political thought about the nature and authority of the state.

The Administration of Criminal Justice

Because of its local orientation and the weakness of state and national governments, the administration of criminal justice in the United States has long reflected local political culture. Indeed, in America the history of the administration of criminal justice is primarily an aspect of the history of local governments. This history reveals how the styles, aims, and practices of the police and courts have varied according to local political influences. In the urban centers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such influence was direct and immediate. Those engaged in gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, extortion, and the like often developed close ties with police and other public officials in order to ensure against investigation and arrest. Laws were also used selectively to control newly arrived immigrants, mediate tensions between contentious community groups, combat efforts to organize labor, and protect persons and property (Walker).

The distinguishing features of accounts of law enforcement officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the unbridled use of discretion and the frequency of appeals to particularistic (as opposed to universalistic) values. Bribery, appeals to friendship, family and political influences, racism, and prejudice of all kinds served to lighten official responses to crime in some cases and to heighten them in others. Some accounts detail the routine and perfunctory nature of arrest and proceedings against the riffraff of the ‘‘criminal classes’’ (Friedman and Percival).

But even with the decline of widespread corruption and the rise of a full-time professional criminal justice system in the mid-twentieth century, local political culture continues to shape policies of law enforcement and administration. Although there is now little direct political influence on the day-to-day activities of the police and courts in most American cities, the type of political culture dominant in a community still significantly affects what types of police officials are recruited and what policies they pursue. In one community, police might routinely arrest everyone for whom there is probable cause, whereas in another they may negotiate among disputants, overlook some offenses, and the like. Such differences are systematically related to differences in political cultures (Wilson). Similar patterns are found in courthouses. Courts in reformed ‘‘good government’’ communities are less likely to embrace plea-bargaining and are more inclined to hand down harsher sentences than are courts in communities where traditional political machines prevail. As with the police, this is because officials with different backgrounds and experiences are recruited in the various types of communities (Levin; Feeley). For example, the styles, policies, and practices of police, prosecutors, and courts in the older, ethnically mixed industrial cities with traditions of well-organized local party organizations are quite different from those in the newer cities of the West, which have neither the ethnic mix nor the tradition of tight-knit party organizations.

It is a general proposition that policies of public-service institutions are formed and significantly shaped by those at the lowest level of administration. This proposition applies to the administration of criminal justice. The criminal process is an overdetermined system—there are more rules to enforce than resources for enforcement, the same conduct can be variously defined, even the most carefully drawn rules permit considerable leeway of interpretation, decisionmaking takes place in settings of low visibility, officials are charged with contradictory tasks, and there are few organizational devices for overseeing and supervising subordinates. As a consequence, law enforcement and administration are selective and discretionary. One result is that actual policy, the law-in-action, is shaped to a considerable extent by the adaptation of formal rules to individual values and by the organizational exigencies of those who are charged with enforcement and administration. Such factors go a long way toward accounting for the patrol, investigation, and arrest practices of police (Wilson; Skolnick), decisions by courts (Feeley; Vera Institute), and policies of prison administrators (Sykes).

This inevitability of discretion fuels the politics of the administration of justice. In their broadest form, these politics require selecting from a number of competing and antagonistic values emphasized by various agents of law enforcement and administration. One writer has constructed ideal types of clusters of values that compete for attention: the ‘‘crime-control model’’ emphasizes maximization of public safety through swift and efficient proceedings and reliance on expertise; whereas the ‘‘due process model’’ emphasizes the protection of individual rights, is skeptical of fact-finding by public officials, and requires careful, contested proceedings at each stage of the criminal process. Debate over these values, reinforced as it is with community expectations, limited resources, and the semiautonomous and antagonistic nature of various criminal agencies, constitutes the politics of the administration of criminal justice (Packer).

Practical Politics and The Criminal Process

Prosecutors, politics, and patronage.

In the United States, the criminal justice system serves direct practical political purposes as well. Owing to the salience of crime as a public issue and the visibility of their positions, many criminal justice officials use their offices as stepping-stones to higher public office. For example, a great many members of congress and governors have served as criminal prosecutors, and the mayors of a number of large American cities have been police chiefs.

To be effective, political organizations must have the ability to reward activists, and law enforcement and courthouse positions have traditionally been used for this purpose. These positions have been especially valuable because they provide security, high pay, and high prestige and often require little work. Studies of the classic urban political machines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal that various appointments in police forces and courthouses (from bailiffs to high court judges) were effectively used to reward supporters and induce loyalty to the local political organization. Although the expansion of civil service rules and the introduction of ‘‘good government’’ reforms have muted this practice, police and courthouse positions, which in many states are still exempt from merit selection rules, continue to be used as political patronage (Levin; Feeley).

Crime and Symbolic Politics

Historically in Western democratic societies crime and crime policy have not been a highly salient political issue in electoral politics. However, for a variety of reasons crime does emerge as a major political issue from time to time. In the early twentieth century in the United States, crime emerged as a major concern on the national political agenda, and resulted in the passage of several new federal criminal statutes, including prohibition, the Mann Act (prohibiting ‘‘White Slavery’’) and laws making bank robbery a federal offense, the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), and the establishment of a Presidential crime commission (The Wickersham Commission). In the latter part of the twentieth century, crime again emerged as a salient issue in the United States and throughout Western Europe, and again it had a significant impact on the political process. Judges began to impose longer sentences and legislatures provided for still tougher sentences under determinate sentencing, mandatory minimum sentencing, truth-in-sentencing, ‘‘three-strikes’’ sentencing laws, and the like. Similarly, courts began cutting back on rules of criminal procedure, making it somewhat easier to secure convictions and impose the death penalty, which was a resurgence in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, after near de facto abolition in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these responses were brought about by a steadily rising crime rate during the 1960s through the 1980s, but the changes were sought by specific groups that were organized to press for them. Since the 1970s in the United States, prison guards and law enforcement organizations have been potent forces in political campaigns, providing substantial sums and endorsements to candidates who support ‘‘law and order’’ proposals. This issue dynamic first emerged on the national political agenda in the 1964 presidential race between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, and has periodically resurfaced in presidential races since then. One of the most significant aspects of this development has been the rise of victims’ rights organizations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, victims rights groups formed, often spearheaded by the family member of a victim of a serious crime, and for the first time victims as a group became a powerful political force. This unprecedented development has led to changes in several areas of the criminal law. One of the first such groups to form was Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which organized courtwatch groups that put pressure on judges to convict those charged with drunk driving (rather than downgrade the charge) and impose stiffer sentences. Others followed in their wake: victims groups sought and obtained the right of victims to address the court at sentencing (the so-called victims’ impact statement) and at parole, successfully lobbied legislatures for sexual predator notification law, changes in criminal procedure and rules of evidence to reduce the trauma for child victims and victims of sexual assault to testify in court. And beginning in the 1980s, in the wake of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, groups supporting gun control were energized and combined with law enforcement agencies to successfully lobby for stricter gun control legislation on both the state and national levels.

There are two quite different explanations for the emergence of crime as an electoral issue in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. One holds that as crime increased, segments of the electorate and politicians responded by pressing for new policies to address the problems. However, another view holds that the issue is more complicated. Although the fear of crime is widespread and deep-seated, most citizens have limited direct personal experience with crime and the administration of criminal justice. Some argue that crime must be understood in terms of ‘‘symbolic politics’’ (Edelman). They hold that it is the combination of intense concerns coupled with limited direct experience that makes crime such a potent symbolic issue. This can be termed the dramaturgy of law and order. To illustrate, crime is a valuable political opponent. It is a universally despised enemy that has no defenders. At a societal level, crusades against crime serve to reinforce dominant cultural values and social solidarity (Erikson). At an organizational level, the intense emotional arousal that is generated over crime policies can be an important factor in binding voluntary organizations together (Gusfield). This theoretical perspective is nicely illustrated by a careful study of those who supported a particularly tough version of a ‘‘three-strikes’’ law adopted by voters in an initiative that provided for sentences of twenty-five years to life for those convicted of a third felony (Tyler and Boeckman). The authors of this study interviewed a random sample of voters to identify factors that predicted support for or opposition to this law. Support for these dramatically increased sentences, they found, was not associated with a belief that the criminal justice system had been too lenient. Those who thought the system was too harsh were just as likely to support this law as those who thought it was too lenient. Rather, the best predictors of support for the tough new law were those who felt that there was too much racial and ethnic mixing and conflict in society, and those who felt that authority in the family was diminishing. In short, these findings are consistent with the perspective of those who hold that much of politics, and especially the politics of law and order, is symbolic politics in the sense that crime (and other issues) may be convenient ‘‘condensation’’ symbols and proxies for insecurities of a more personal and direct nature (Scheingold). The success of this strategy, or at least the continued salience of crime and crime policy as an important issue in national politics, has led one observer to suggest that modern politics is the practice of ‘‘governing through crime.’’

A more straightforward approach might counter with the observation that crime and public safety emerged as a salient issue on the political agendas of North American and European countries in the late 1960s as crime rates escalated, and that since the mid-1990s it has begun to recede, after about a decade of declining crime rates. Perhaps, but one of the big changes that has occurred since the 1970s is the emergence of organized interest groups—and particularly victims rights groups—which have crime policy as their central if not only focus. In countries where single-interest groups can easily organize and flourish, such as the United States and Great Britain, this may lead to deep and permanent changes.

Crime and the political process are linked on many levels. Political theory, ideology, and culture foster expectations about the substance and form of the criminal justice system. The structure of political institutions shapes the structure, and hence the substance and administration, of the criminal law. Discretion, inevitable in an overdetermined system, gives rise to the politics of administration. Local political organizations rely upon the criminal process for their support, and in turn the criminal process is shaped by them. The symbols of crime, law, and order shape political rhetoric and public expectation.

Bibliography:

• BALBUS, ISAAC. The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels before the American Criminal Courts. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1973.
• BAYLEY, DAVID Forces of Order: Police Behavior in Japan and the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
• DEVLIN, PATRICK. The Enforcement of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
• EDELMAN, MURRAY. The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964.
• ERIKSON, KAI Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Wiley, 1966.
• FEELEY, MALCOLM The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1979.
• FRIEDMAN, LAWRENCE, and PERCIVAL, ROBERT V. The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870–1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
• GUSFIELD, JOSEPH Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.
• HARTZ, LOUIS. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.
• HEGEL, GEORG F. The Philosophy of History (1881). Translated by J. Sibree. Prefaces by Charles Hegel and J. Sibree. New introduction by Carl J. Friedrich. New York: Dover, 1956.
• KIRCHHEIMER, OTTO. Political Justice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.
• LEVIN, MARTIN Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.
• LI, VICTOR Law without Lawyers: A Comparative View of Law in China and the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1978.
• LOCKE, JOHN. The Second Treatise of Government (1690). Edited with an introduction by Thomas P. Reardon. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952.
• MILL, JOHN STUART. On Liberty (1859). Edited with an introduction by Currin V. Shields. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956.
• PACKER, HERBERT The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968.
• SCHEINGOLD, STUART. The Politics of Law and Order. New York: Longman, 1984.
• SKOLNICK, JEROME Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, 2d ed. New York: Wiley, 1975.
• SYKES, GRESHAM The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958.
• TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE. Democracy in America (1835). 2 vols. The Henry Reeve text (translation) as revised by Francis Bowen. Further corrected and edited with introduction, editorial notes, and bibliographies by Phillips Bradley. Foreword by Harold J. Laski. New York: Knopf, 1945.
• TYLER, TOM, and BOECKMAN, ROBERT. ‘‘Three Strikes and You’re Out, but Why? The Psychology of Public Support for Punishing Rule Breakers.’’ Law and Society Review 31 (1997): 237.
• Vera Institute of Justice. Felony Arrests: Their Prosecution and Disposition in New York City’s Courts. ed. New York: Longman, 1981.
• WALKER, SAMUEL Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. WILSON, JAMES Q. Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968.

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Methodology, overview of survey methodologies.

The analysis of changes in party identification over time is based on a compilation of survey estimates conducted by telephone between 1994 and 2018 and online surveys conducted on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel between 2019 and 2023. Data from telephone surveys is adjusted to account for differences in survey mode; for details on the adjustment process, refer to Appendix A .

The data from 1994 to 2018 is based on 262 telephone surveys and more than 355,000 interviews among registered voters conducted by Pew Research Center from January 1994 to December 2018. These surveys are combined into one large data file that can be sorted according to a range of demographic characteristics, with comparisons made across different time periods. Yearly totals are calculated by combining all surveys for the calendar year, with appropriate weights applied. The table shows the number of surveys and interviews conducted each year as well as the margin of error for each yearly sample.

The data from 2019 to 2023 is based on American Trends Panel annual profile surveys conducted each summer. These surveys included at least 10,000 respondents and were conducted online. The methodology for the 2023 American Trends Panel profile survey is below.

The 2023 American Trends Panel profile survey methodology

The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. Panelists who do not have internet access at home are provided with a tablet and wireless internet connection. Interviews are conducted in both English and Spanish. The panel is being managed by Ipsos.

The most current data in this report is drawn from ATP Wave 133, conducted from Aug. 7 to Aug 27, 2023. A total of 11,945 panelists responded out of 12,925 who were sampled, for a response rate of 92%. The cumulative response rate accounting for nonresponse to the recruitment surveys and attrition is 4%. The break-off rate among panelists who logged on to the survey and completed at least one item is less than 1%. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 11,945 respondents is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points. The survey interviewed 10,124 registered voters, for a sampling error of plus or minus 1.3 percentage point.

Panel recruitment

The ATP was created in 2014, with the first cohort of panelists invited to join the panel at the end of a large, national, landline and cellphone random-digit-dial survey that was conducted in both English and Spanish. Two additional recruitments were conducted using the same method in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Across these three surveys, a total of 19,718 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 9,942 (50%) agreed to participate.

In August 2018, the ATP switched from telephone to address-based sampling (ABS) recruitment. A study cover letter and a pre-incentive are mailed to a stratified, random sample of households selected from the U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File. This Postal Service file has been estimated to cover as much as 98% of the population, although some studies suggest that the coverage could be in the low 90% range. 1 Within each sampled household, the adult with the next birthday is asked to participate. Other details of the ABS recruitment protocol have changed over time but are available upon request. 2

We have recruited a national sample of U.S. adults to the ATP approximately once per year since 2014. In some years, the recruitment has included additional effort (known as an “oversample”) to boost sample size with underrepresented groups. For example, Hispanic adults, Black adults and Asian adults were oversampled in 2019, 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Across the six address-based recruitments, a total of 23,862 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 20,917 agreed to join the panel and completed an initial profile survey. Of the 30,859 individuals who have ever joined the ATP, 12,925 remained active panelists and continued to receive survey invitations at the time this survey was conducted.

The American Trends Panel never uses breakout routers or chains that direct respondents to additional surveys.

Sample design

The overall target population for this survey was noninstitutionalized persons ages 18 and older living in the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. All active panel members were invited to participate in this wave.

Questionnaire development and testing

The questionnaire was developed by Pew Research Center in consultation with Ipsos. The web program was rigorously tested on both PC and mobile devices by the Ipsos project management team and Pew Research Center researchers. The Ipsos project management team also populated test data that was analyzed in SPSS to ensure the logic and randomizations were working as intended before launching the survey.

All respondents were offered a post-paid incentive for their participation. Respondents could choose to receive the post-paid incentive in the form of a check or a gift code to Amazon.com or could choose to decline the incentive. Incentive amounts ranged from $5 to $20 depending on whether the respondent belongs to a part of the population that is harder or easier to reach. Differential incentive amounts were designed to increase panel survey participation among groups that traditionally have low survey response propensities.

Data collection protocol

The data collection field period for this survey was Aug. 7 to Aug. 27, 2023. Postcard notifications were mailed to all ATP panelists with a known residential address on Aug. 7.

Invitations were sent out in two separate launches: soft launch and full launch. Ninety panelists were included in the soft launch, which began with an initial invitation sent on Aug. 7. The ATP panelists chosen for the initial soft launch were known responders who had completed previous ATP surveys within one day of receiving their invitation. All remaining English- and Spanish-speaking sampled panelists were included in the full launch and were sent an invitation on Aug. 8.

All panelists with an email address received an email invitation and up to five email reminders if they did not respond to the survey. All ATP panelists who consented to SMS messages received an SMS invitation and up to five SMS reminders. On Aug. 25, interactive voice recording reminder calls were made to 39 tablet households that previously provided consent to receive these reminders.

Data quality checks

To ensure high-quality data, the Center’s researchers performed data quality checks to identify any respondents showing clear patterns of satisficing. This includes checking for very high rates of leaving questions blank, as well as always selecting the first or last answer presented. As a result of this checking, two ATP respondents were removed from the survey dataset prior to weighting and analysis.

The ATP data is weighted in a multistep process that accounts for multiple stages of sampling and nonresponse that occur at different points in the survey process. First, each panelist begins with a base weight that reflects their probability of selection for their initial recruitment survey. These weights are then rescaled and adjusted to account for changes in the design of ATP recruitment surveys from year to year. Finally, the weights are calibrated to align with the population benchmarks in the accompanying table to correct for nonresponse to recruitment surveys and panel attrition. If only a subsample of panelists was invited to participate in the wave, this weight is adjusted to account for any differential probabilities of selection.

Among the panelists who completed the survey, this weight is then calibrated again to align with the population benchmarks identified in the accompanying table and trimmed at the 1st and 99.5th percentiles to reduce the loss in precision stemming from variance in the weights. Sampling errors and tests of statistical significance take into account the effect of weighting.

The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey.

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request. In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

Dispositions and response rates

How family income tiers are calculated

Family income data reported in this study is adjusted for household size and cost-of-living differences by geography. Panelists then are assigned to income tiers that are based on the median adjusted family income of all American Trends Panel members. The process uses the following steps:

• First, panelists are assigned to the midpoint of the income range they selected in a family income question that was measured on either the most recent annual profile survey or, for newly recruited panelists, their recruitment survey. This provides an approximate income value that can be used in calculations for the adjustment.
• Next, these income values are adjusted for the cost of living in the geographic area where the panelist lives. This is calculated using price indexes published by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. These indexes, known as Regional Price Parities (RPP), compare the prices of goods and services across all U.S. metropolitan statistical areas as well as non-metro areas with the national average prices for the same goods and services. The most recent available data at the time of the annual profile survey is from 2021. Those who fall outside of metropolitan statistical areas are assigned the overall RPP for their state’s non-metropolitan area.
• Family incomes are further adjusted for the number of people in a household using the methodology from Pew Research Center’s previous work on the American middle class . This is done because a four-person household with an income of say, $50,000, faces a tighter budget constraint than a two-person household with the same income.
• Panelists are then assigned an income tier:
• Lower-income adults are in families with adjusted family incomes that are less than half the median adjusted family income for the full ATP at the time of the most recent annual profile survey.
• Lower middle income indicates adjusted family incomes from half to less than two-thirds of the median.
• Middle income indicates adjusted incomes from two-thirds to less than double the median.
• Upper middle income indicates adjusted family incomes from double to less than triple the median.
• Upper income indicates adjusted family incomes that are at least triple the median.

The median adjusted family income for the panel is roughly $71,800. Using this median income, the middle-income range is about $47,900 to $143,600. Lower-income families have adjusted incomes less than $35,900 and lower-middle-income families have adjusted incomes from $35,900 to less than $47,900. Meanwhile, upper-middle-income families have adjusted incomes from $143,600 to less than $215,400, and upper-income families have adjusted incomes $215,400 or greater. (All figures expressed in 2022 dollars and scaled to a household size of three.) If a panelist did not provide their income and/or their household size, they are assigned “no answer” in the income tier variable.

Two examples of how a given area’s cost-of-living adjustment was calculated are as follows: The Anniston-Oxford metropolitan area in Alabama is a relatively inexpensive area, with a price level that is 16.2% less than the national average. The San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metropolitan area in California is one of the most expensive areas, with a price level that is 19.8% higher than the national average. Income in the sample is adjusted to make up for this difference. As a result, a family with an income of $41,900 in the Anniston-Oxford area is as well off financially as a family of the same size with an income of $59,900 in San Francisco. 

© Pew Research Center, 2024

• AAPOR Task Force on Address-based Sampling. 2016. “ AAPOR Report: Address-based Sampling .” ↩
• Email [email protected] . ↩

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