Introduction This essay poses three questions. Why is biography isolated from epistemological debates in political science? Are biographers confined to the archive and the tools of the historian? How do we explain our story? Biographers confront many issues specific to their particular art form (see for example Pimlott 1994, 169-61 and the chapters by Arklay and Bolton in this volume). But they...

When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order infuence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze the role of measurement infrastructures such as national statisticall institutes, the extent to which intel...

Parallel advances in communication and visualization technologies have enabled the study and visualization of human behavior at a scale and level of detail never before possible. Nowhere are these advances more evident than within the emerging field of computational social science. Using Adamic and Glance’s image of the political blogosphere as an example and social representations theory as a ...

Many theories in political science predict the spatial clustering of similar behaviors among neighboring units of observation. This spatial autocorrelation poses implications for both inference and modeling that are distinct from the more familiar serial dependence in time series analysis. In this paper, I examine how political scientists can diagnose and model the spatial dependence that is pr...

■ Abstract We review the use of macroeconomics in political science over the past 40 years. The field has been dominated by new classical theory, which leaves little room for economic policy and focuses attention on what democratic governments can do wrong in the short term. The resulting literatures on political business cycles and central bank independence are large and sophisticated, but the...

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Many philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists defend the claim that rational choice theory can provide the basis for a unified and comprehensive theory of social behaviour. Rational choice models are theoretically generalized to explain the behaviour studied by nearly all social science disciplines, from political science to psychology and sociology. Specific applications include go...