1. Old ladies and political science

2. Spilled ink and political science

3. HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT POLITICS? What are the main sources of knowledge in US politics? Tradition and culture, authority, commonsense (inductive and deductive guessing) & personal observation What’s wrong with knowing politics this way? – What is overgeneralization or concept stretching? Why do we do it? – Why is it so hard to teach old dogs new tricks? – Why do people selectively review and incorporate evidence when they know they shouldn’t? – Why is disinformation is so prevalent? Some data to come… How informed are we about politics and then a couple of examples about what happens when we don’t know much about politics… What is the main source of America’s debt crisis? Which party in control makes rich Americans richer and poor Americans poorer?

4. Pew 2007

5. Pew - 2007

8. HOW DO WE STUDY POLITICS SCIENTIFICALLY? What are the main types of scientific inquiry? (aka behavioralism… you don’t need to memorize this term (-=) – Describe, categorize, explain (the causes) – What about using science to prescribe and be normative? American PSC vs. everyone else – What is formal political science and rational choice? What makes modern PSC scientific? – It is empirical, testable & falsifiable, generalizable (i.e., we search for regularities), replicable, and hopefully cumulative Why use the scientific method? – The method of testing theories and hypotheses by applying certain rules of analysis to the observation and interpretation of reality under strictly delineated circumstances. Do this, and you can replicate and build knowledge

9. CAN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE REALLY BE SCIENTIFIC? Why do “post-modernists” laugh at the whole idea of “scientific” inquiry? What do we miss out when try to be scientific? Just ask the cultural anthropologists Karl Popper’s objections to positivism as an approach…. Are we doing things backwards when we should be falsifying Can social scientists be completely objective? Is human behavior too complicated to study? Over time, what have social scientists actually learned by being scientific? A lot actually… including big ideas that have impacted global war and financial crises