Introduction to Rein Taagepera, ‘Science walks on two legs, but social sciences try to hop on one’
| Author | Marian Sawer,Theresa Reidy,Mark Kesselman |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512117698348 |
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Karl Deutsch Lecture |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512117698348
International Political Science Review
2018, Vol. 39(1) 144
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512117698348
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Introduction to Rein Taagepera,
‘Science walks on two legs, but
social sciences try to hop on one’
Rein Taagepera was awarded the Karl Deutsch Award at the 24th World Congress of the International
Political Science Association, Poznań, Poland, in July 2016. The editors are pleased to publish a
revised version of the lecture he delivered at the award ceremony. The lecture is a wide-ranging
and provocative critique of what he considers a fundamental design flaw in much quantitative
research in political science, as well as a proposal for how to remedy the problem.
The Karl Deutsch Award honours a political scientist engaged in cross-disciplinary research and
previous recipients include Pippa Norris (2014), Alfred C Stepan (2012) and Giovanni Sartori
(2009). International Political Science Review (IPSR) has instituted an essay series by recipients
of the Karl Deutsch Award and Taagepera’s contribution is an excellent addition to the series. The
first essay, by Stepan, was published in the November 2016 issue of IPSR.
Karl Deutsch (1912–1992) was one of the most distinguished social scientists of the twentieth
century. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Harvard Universities as
well as leading the International Institute of Comparative Social Research at the Science Centre in
Berlin. Karl Deutsch was at the vanguard of the behavioural revolution in political science and so
Taagepera’s thoughtful and reflective contribution on logical modelling and statistical approaches
in political science was especially fitting.
In his essay, Taagepera documents his own intellectual formation which was shaped by his early
life in Estonia and his training as a scientist focused on nuclear and solid state physics. He maps
his transition to political science and provides an overview of some of his most important contribu-
tions to the study of electoral politics. He is a persuasive advocate of the scientific method and is
especially convincing in his point that science requires a combination of logical modelling and
empirical testing. He argues that ‘a cancer is eating at the social sciences’ as he laments inappropri-
ate use and overuse of statistical description. Otherwise put, he claims that political science often
‘hops on one leg.’ Further, he points out that much research in our discipline is based on the naïve
and inaccurate assumption that statistical relationships are linear – which in fact is rarely the case
in the social and political world. He challenges political scientists to develop and test more sophis-
ticated models that reflect this complexity. In order to do so, he asserts that, rather than simply
measuring connections, political scientists need to measure connections among connections.
As editors, we hope that his essay will provoke political scientists into wider reflection on what
is studied and, what is published, in political science.
Mark Kesselman, Marian Sawer and Theresa Reidy
698348IPS0010.1177/0192512117698348International Political Science Review
research-article2017
Introduction
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