Qualitative political Analysis: Online Lecture - Unit 2 Nature of Political Analysis

Some Finishing Touches from Unit 1:

Concept vs Content

The essence of writing a paper is that you are producing ideas, not rehashing them.  There are two things that you have to take into consideration in writing, content and concepts.  When we speak here of content, it is the raw facts that come from the research, whether it is library research, a survey of literatures, a survey of studies, or actual field work.  They work hand-in-hand with concepts - existing or new political ideas.

What do you do with these?  Say for example, you have interviews.  These are content.  Same as survey material, which you then present in graphs, charts, or tables.  They are all content.  But a very important question is, what concepts can you use these content for.  You will not just have a bunch of quotes or numbers.

Remember that when you write, you have a thesis.  An argument that you are trying to prove.  The concepts are the things that will become the things that will prove your thesis.  Let's use as an example my recent paper presented in Sweden.  It's thesis is that "solid waste management is implemented properly through local autonomy.'  And I had interviews on how local barangays are able to implement the provisions of RA 9003.  I also have numerical data from city hall on the success rate of the city in diverting solid waste materials.  

But before I lump all my quotes or paraphrases, I organize and outline the topics which lead to the argument.  And the outlines composed of the following political concepts:  political structure of the city, political actors, and the localization process.  It is these concepts which I talked about in the paper, and the quotes and numerical data were used to as evidences.

Note:  You do not quote and explain.  You state your ideas, then prove it with the evidences.  Whether in the form of quotes, paraphrases, numbers, or even pictures. 

Media Analysis vs Conferences

As statesmen and women, we analyze the condition of the state.  We are also scientists who produce or innovate ideas.  Political analysis is involved in both, and it is important that you do one or both of them.

Speaking through the media and providing the public a political analysis has similarities and differences with that of a conference.  When you speak through media, you are being a political analyst.  You are commenting on conditions of the present, and occasionally on the prospects of the future.  When you speak at a conference you are delivering your discoveries (conducted through rigorous research) to the community of political scientists and any other stakeholder involved in your niche.

But whether you are speaking to the media or at a conference, one thing in common is the need for both INSIGHT and RIGOR,

Analysis given before the media may seem to have less rigor because you have to speak on something current that is going on in the Philippines or outside.  But in fact the rigor has already been accomplished from years devoted to studying a specific area of politics: ie. elections, corruption, environment.  This is part of the essence of being an expert in a chosen field.  Rigor in conferences involve painstaking process of accepting and rejecting participants, qualifications of respondents, streamlining questions for interview or survey, validating them, among others.  These are what helps make what you discover valid, acceptable, and fairly accurate.  

Insight is actually the result of analysis.  It is informing people of what goes on deep in the political world.  And this involves being able to do one or more of the following: classifying things (e.g. explaining what's going on by being able to classify governments, classify actions of people), abstracting or differentiating or finding similarities (e.g. explaining how something happened by differentiating events, people, institutions.  Sometimes, instead of differences, you need to look at similarities), contextualizing or by being able to relate concepts to the setting of the political events (e.g. explaining how something occurred by tracing history, identifying geographic background, identifying social background), predicting or being able to observe patterns and their implications.

With that let us procede to unit 2.

 

Nature of Political Analysis

Political analysis explains the political world.  Usually, what we explain are political events or phenomena/phenomenon (phenomenology), such as impeachment, or elections or voting, or doing politics in media, or doing politics in the street.  Take note of the given samples, and let us connect them with the above ideas of CONCEPT and CONTENT.  Content are the raw data.  Note that I mentioned as samples of phenomenon both elections and voting.  Because they are two different concepts and as such given different terms.  How about the samples: doing politics in media, and doing politics in the street?  They are political events.  Are they different concepts?  Are there terms that actually encapsulate one and the other?  Do they both fall under the umbrella term of "political participation?"  (note also that we are in a way abstracting and doing classifying here)    

But sometimes, in order to arrive at understanding political events, we also need to understand political beings (ontology).  These beings are what we call 1) political actors in behavioralism/post behavioralism, and 2) political institutions in institutionalism/neo-institutionalim.

Political beings can, at times, be less concrete and more abstract.  Because in a more general sense, ontology is about understanding "what."  And these whats in politics can also be immaterial things such as, values, ideologies, even music.  They can also be other concepts or can be other non-living material things such as media, books, or even food.\

We need to understand the nature of what we analyze before we can procede to the actual act of analysis.  Because if the analysis does not match the thing being analyzed. then the result may not lead to insight.  The following three are the nature of analysis based on what kind of research is being done.  

Normative Analysis

The information here is best answered through your reading by Pietrzyk-Reeves, 2017.

a. Pietrzyk-Reeves, 2017

What I'll be giving here is a guide, along with the practicalities unique to our department.  Normativism was the very beginning of political science.  In fact, it was the beginning of political philosophy.  And why sometimes, political science is classified as a branch of philosophy under ethics.  It proposes principles on how the political world should work, rather than describe it.  Ethically, it also analyzes by evaluating the actions of political beings, be they actors or institutions.  

Normative analysis and normative philosophy are seldom accepted as thesis topics in our department because of the INSIGHT requirement.  In terms of rigor and insight, normative research has less rigor (mind you, less not none).  And it has a very high expectation in terms of insight.  

There is less rigor because there is less surveys or interviews to do.  More attention is instead given to analysis of the data.  Political scientists who are more into rigor disparage those who write on normative analysis by calling them armchair researchers because sometimes all you need are literature and classic texts.  The literature can be sources of current events, the classic texts as sources of practical philosophy to be used in the analysis.

What makes it fail is the convolutedness and abstractness.  What can make it pass is organization.  Because to write on normative political analysis is to do political philosophy.  And here the matching activity is to discuss abstract concepts.  Not just talk about them, but to dissect them to the very core in order to arrive at the very essence  of what you are analyzing.  Each part you dissect, will them have it's own discussion and explanation.  And you should be able to help the reader see all these ideas with your words.  

Pietrzyk-Reeves (2017) gives us a 2 important guidelines.  1.  Is on what to study, and 2. on how to study.  The answer to the first is easy enough: real world politics.  You need to study current political issues.  The second is that you need to be able to use specific political postulates or principles to evaluate the issue or the event or the act    The article also adds the concept of the need for validity.  You have to cross validate you findings by doing one of two things or both.  One is going back to the people who are the subject of analysis and having them confirm your findings.  The other is going to experts on the topic, interviewing them and seeing if your analysis matches.  Or you can simply confirm your analysis by asking.

Empirical Analysis

Our discussion on empirical analysis is based on Isaac (2015).

Isaac, 2015

The currently acceptable form of doing science.  Rational choice analysts  would say that the only empirical research is one that does quantitative analysis.   We will not include Rational Choice as a reading because you will not be using it.  There are not enough experts in the country who can pass down that knowledge in terms of applied political science.  And I wouldn't claim such an expertise myself.  

Empirical analysis can be said as having a balance of both rigor and insight.  Rational choice has more rigor, though they'd claim they have a high level of both.  Eventually writers such as Weber and Strauss argued that science is not simply about the numbers.  And qualitative analysts who followed eventually consolidated methods that make it rigorous.

The rigor is not simply about going to the field and doing surveys or interviews.  The rigor is about calibrating the instrument and making the experiment as valid and accurate as possible.  Isaac provides us the following varieties of what makes empricial research: Evidence, Plausibility, Tests, Wide Area or Scope.

Evidence is raw data.  It's statements, statistics, pictures, drawings, any material that can support your argument.  And they all come from the field.  These are the things that make a paper original, the use of unpublished materials.  Evidences that you took or gathered first-hand.

Plausibility relates to insight.  The argument that you are trying to convey in your writing, and would eventually present at a conference or through the media should be logically possible or feasible both in the mind of the reader or audience, and also in reality.

Tests begin at the planning stage.  You establish qualifications for your locus of study, for the participants or respondents.  You have to double check, why talk to these people?  Take for example the difference between elections and voting.  If you are trying to do an analysis of why do people vote, do you interview professors, or do you interview voters?  Do you interview candidates or do you interview those who will be voting?  

Then there's the set of questions that you ask.  We will deal with these on the next unit.  But questionnaires and surveys both are termed as instruments.  Just the same as we call weighing scales, test tubes, beakers, and cylinders as instruments.  Among those, test tubes do not have numerical markings.  But we use them to contain things, and to separately identify chemicals.  Instruments help us measure, they help us identify characteristics, they help us identify components.  We can't just place any question in an interview questionnaire or in a survey.  These questions must accurately bring about the scientific result of what you are trying to find out.

Hence, instruments need to be pre-tested.  You go to a different set of people, one who are not your participant or respondents, but can substitute, around 2-3 for quali, and 10 for quanti will do.  You ask administer the instrument and observe if the questions do elicit the right answer.  Because sometimes, what we ask is not the way a person actually understand.  Sometimes, we can be vague, sometimes we use the wrong terms, sometimes we use an incorrect line of asking.  Once done, you revise until you are finally ready to go to the field.

Going to the field without doing this is the true waste of time, energy, money, and a lot of paper if the instrument is innacurate.

Wide range of scope allows the thesis to be more generalizable.  A thesis should not be, Isko Moreno is an effective local government officials.  But rather, you should move up to a general category of what Isko Moreno is.  He can be a proletarian politician, he could be a former actor politician.  This now helps to generalize the statement.  You now dissect the concept of being a preletarian politican.  Of being a proletariat, of being a politician, which are qualities of the case - Isko.  You do not study Isko per se.  You study the political of what is Isko.

To all this, I also would like to hark back to validation.  Which is an essential practice through all the modes of analyses.  If you did quali, you might need numbers to validate the claims.  If you did quanti, you might need words and explanations to validate the numbers.

Most importantly, specific qualitative methods require validation by you going back to the participant after you did the analysis.  Again, you bring back the analysis, and it will be they who will say that yes, the terms categories you made does describe their political world.  This is usually done in phenomenology, because you are merely analyzing a person's experience.  The experience are not yours.  You need the participant's validation.

Constructivist Analysis

This mode of analysis is fun, but very contestable.  A trait which makes it less acceptable by the department.  Construction is about consolidating ideas and encapsulating them.  It's about interpretation of texts and statements which may or may not have differences in meaning depending on the audience.

It's a cross between political philosophy and empirical analysis.  In construction, one construes meaning.  The subjects can be speeches, music, books, film.  And the interpretation of one person can be different from another.  The only way for a constructive analysis can be acceptable is if one is able to present rigor aside from insight.


Based on this discussion, I want you to be able to review your proposals, and from this start brainstorming on which among these fits your topic.