Lijphart, Lakatos, and Consociationalism

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. Cambridge University Press and Trustees of Princeton University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics. WHEN political scientists seek validation for their research prac tices, many now cite Imre Lakatos, the late Jewish/Hungarian/ British mathematician/epistemologist. Although Lakatos had an ex plicit animus against social science, his epistemology, methodological strategies, and terminology have proved enormously attractive to its practitioners, especially political scientists.1 Particularly notable is the regular invocation of Lakatos's notion of competing "research pro grams"?streams of studies, experiments, and projects based on sets of rules telling scientists what questions to ask ("the positive heuristic") and what questions not to ask ("the negative heuristic").2 Lakatos's theory of how science can progress includes both a posi tivist analysis of how evidence and inference can be used to build better theory and a consideration of the self-interested and quintessentially political mobilization of resources and colleagues. The tension between these two partners in science?evidence and politics?is never com pletely resolved in Lakatos. In his influential essay, presented in 1965 and first published in 1970, Lakatos propounded a view of science as influ invoke Lakatos as something of an epistemol?gica! authority for their approach. 89 enced by processes of inference, evidence, and theory testing, combined with the political skills of entrepreneurial scientists whose grantsman ship, intellect, reputations, and rhetorical talents could sustain "degen erative" research programs or fail to advance "progressive" ones.3 As Alan Musgrave has explained, "early" Lakatos explained the success or failure of research programs as based on the degree of corroboration achieved for important claims and the extent to which "new empirical content" was produced by theories refined by testing. According to