Political methodology is a subfield of Political Science that studies the quantitative methods used to study politics. It combines statistics, mathematics, empirical techniques, and formal theory. Political methodology is often used for positive research, in contrast to normative research.
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or methodology:
“Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.”
—Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994)