METHODOLOGIES FOR RESEARCHING CONCEPTS’ FIELDS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This article aims to consider advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to research of concepts’ fields of political science within the main streams or traditions of political science research methodologies. Political science methodologies are understood as complex combinations of theoretical vantage-points and perspectives that define the use of specific analytical techniques and justify the practical reasons for applying a set of methods or analytical tools to a given political phenomenon. This article attempts to compare research programmes for analysing concepts’ fields of political science within different combinations of theoretical approaches as methodologies that are known in Anglo-Saxon political science as analytical traditions. A combination of political science theories and methodologies with the study of concepts as a discipline of applied linguistics constitutes an interpretative framework of this article. A complex combination of interrelated concepts’ field forms the concepts’ sphere of political science, which is made of a variety of different concepts. To study them means to adjust an analytical study toolbox. Since the main politological research methodologies are also theories about ontology and epistemology of the political science they have and inner structure and dynamics of their own. This article proves that methodological approaches and analytical traditions based on an Anglo-Saxon and a German classification of C. Hay and K. vom Beyme, differ significantly in their heuristic potentials: every methodology has its advantages and limitations however constructivism has substantial advantages over institutionalists, functionalist and rationalist approaches, even though each of them has its own value in researching the concepts’ fields of political science in their complexity. Behaviouralism was not taken for consideration in this article since it requires a separate analytical paper of its own. As an important and, at the same time, rather controversial strain of thought and methodology in political science, behaviouralism focuses exclusively on the outcomes of behaviour that can be registered and quantified thus it basically denies a place for concepts, conceptions, and ideas in general.