Scott Ashworth - Theory and Credibility: Integrating Theoretical and Empirical Social Science

1. xi
2. xv

We first started thinking systematically about the themes in this book when we had the opportunity to direct the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) Summer Institute in 2011. When we joined the EITM team, we thought we had a pretty good understanding of how theory and empirics fit together. As you can see from the publication date of this book, that turned out not to be the case.

Writing down our ideas, and especially trying to teach them to a group of truly outstanding students, forced us to confront the many ways in which they were incomplete, ill formed, and often wrong. It also set us on a path whereby we were given frequent opportunities to write, think, and debate about these issues with colleagues around the world. Those conversations were essential for straightening out our thinking.

Some of the most important conversations took place at our home institution, the Harris School at the University of Chicago. At the same time we were starting to grapple with these difficult intellectual issues, we and a core group of colleagues were working to build a research group at Harris whose animating idea was to foster a robust dialogue between theory and empirics. Our experiences as part of this intellectual communityin seminars, through co-authorships, and by training graduate students togetherhelped us learn what a fruitful interaction between theory and empirics looks like.

A decade on, we certainly do not have all of the issues figured out. But we have learned some lessons along the way that not only clarified our thinking but changed the way we do our research. We hope they might be of similar value to other scholars.

First and foremost, we wrote this book for PhD students who are thinking about how they can contribute to substantive literatures that are important to them and about how the kind of work they want to do fits into the larger enterprise of political science. It is easy to lose the forest for the trees during graduate training. In the midst of a formal theory or methods class, it can be hard to see how either enterprise connects to the other, much less how the two together relate to the research questions that animate you. We hope that reading this book alongside that training will help you gain perspective on why you are learning what you are learning and how you will ultimately put it to use.

Graduate students are not, however, our only target audience. Our own experience suggests that gaining new perspective on these issues can be valuable, even post-tenure. So we hope this book will also be read by colleagues who are interested in exploring or revisiting questions about how theory and empirics work together to advance our disciplinary goals.

And, of course, it would make a nice stocking stuffer for anyone on your list with an interest in formal theory and causal inference.

There are two ways to think about using this book. One is as a book to read. If thats your plan, we recommend starting at the beginning and going to the end. The other is as a classroom text. In that case, there are a few options.

We think this book could make a useful contribution to several different kinds of classes offered in political science PhD programs. The most straightforward use is in a class designed to introduce students to the logic of social scientific inquiry.

A second use is as a supplementary reading in a formal theory or causal inference course. In the former, is designed to help students think conceptually about issues of substantive identification without getting lost in the technical details that are covered in their textbooks. In both cases, showing how the technical work of the course will pay off in terms of substance may be motivating for many students.

A third use is as an early context-setting reading in a more applied course or field seminar. The book provides several tools that will be useful to students as they read particular research contributions or work to make sense of literatures. For instance, both the framework presented in can be applied to almost any paper. We think doing so will be a clarifying exercise for many students.

Finally, at the Harris School, we teach a graduate course specifically about the interaction of theory and empirics. is organized. In each chapter, we describe one of the ways in which theory and empirics interact. We then discuss several papers that illustrate the idea. Each paper adds something new. But an instructor could nonetheless pick and choose one or two sections from each of these chapters along with their introductions and conclusions. And, indeed, there are certain substantive threads that run across chapters (e.g., the role of parties in congress, the relationship between the economy and civil conflict, electoral accountability). So the picking and choosing can be done in a way that creates substantive coherence.

One final note concerns technicality, which weve tried to keep to a minimum. Our focus is on conceptual understanding. This book is intended as a complement for textbooks in formal theory or causal inference, not a substitute. We believe reading this book will be most valuable to those who are concurrently learning those topics or have had at least some prior exposure.