Positivism as an ontology believes that the world exists independently from the author and can therefore be studied and explained. This model of thinking is often simply (though misleadingly) described as ‘empirical’; it unquestionably dominates the natural sciences. The apple that fell and hit Sir Isaac Newton on the head existed outside of him, and beyond a bit of bruising on both him and the apple, it was unchanged and independent of him. The properties of the apple did not change as a result of its interaction with Newton or with Newton’s beliefs about it.
Proponents of positivism in the social sciences, and political science more specifically, perceive the political world as an independent object that we can study. The act of observing a phenomenon, hypothesizing about it, collecting data, and evaluating our hypothesis doesn’t change the phenomenon. Observability and measurability matter in this framework, with validity and reliability being critical to our studies. Reliability ensures our measures are ‘objective’ and that other researchers obtain the same value using the same tool or criteria. Validity is our belief that the thing we are measuring actually and accurately captures the phenomenon of interest – that thing, all of that thing, and nothing else. By using these tools, positivists believe that we can accurately and completely describe and understand the social world.
This approach, which often gets subsumed under the label ‘empirical,’ dominates most US political science outlets. It also plays a large role in Dutch, German, Nordic, and Swiss political science, and is significant in British political science as well.
The primary non-positivist approach is interpretivism. Interpretivist approaches emphasize that the social world is not independent of the researcher, or of the individuals in it. They are thus particularly interested in these intersubjective constructions of reality. What do people mean by doing X? What associations does it have, how do they think about it, what does it mean for them? Where a positivist might study protestor motivations and classify or count them, an interpretivist might be interested in why individuals have certain associations with protesting. A hypothetical protestor might be motivated by a belief in justice. A positivist would tally that, or perhaps get clarification on justice for whom or what. An interpretivist would likely follow up to understand how the protestor links their actions to the creation of justice, and/or what the protestor means by justice.
In this framework, reliability and validity are not relevant concepts. Indeed, interpretivists emphasize that individual interpretations can indeed be unique, and that their expressions can be influenced by interaction with the researcher in eliciting those interpretations. Determining causality is also not a significant goal of this type of analysis, though some researchers may be interested in the social construction of causality – how people come to believe that x leads to y – protesting leads to policy change, for example. Again, many interpretivists reject the idea that we can ever craft a causal explanation of social behavior because the social world is constructed by its participants.
Much like positivist researchers, interpretive researchers engage in intensive training in how to conduct their data collection and analysis. Many though not all of these approaches fall into what some social science methodologists describe as “Big-Q” qualitative methods, and courses exist to train researchers in techniques such as hermeneutical analysis and phenomenology.
Not many researchers are well enough trained to engage in both positivist and intepretivist analysis at a professional level. In one unusual example, Tess Wise has studied the phenomenon of bankruptcy in the United States using both sets of methods. In a positivist study, she and coauthor Andreas Wiedemann (Wiedemann & Wise, 2020) use quantitative methods to understand how the availability of private credit and patterns of beliefs about personal responsibility combine to create distinct trends in support for government (vs private) funding of social goods like education, transportation, and housing. They do this with an observational study of state-level outcomes and a survey. In a separate study (Wise, 2019), she analyzes the narratives that middle-class Americans who have exhausted their access to private credit (i.e., those in bankruptcy proceedings) tell to rationalize their behavior and understand their own experiences. To do this, she uses semiotics, which analyzes actions, symbols such as language, and the links between them.