Why Political Theory Needs Social Science

Chapter 11 is open access and available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Political theory promises guidance about how we ought to organize our political lives. For example, how do we fairly share resources in contexts of scarcity? What are the proper limits to democratic authority? Who should bear the costs of tackling climate change? These topics - the subject matter of normative inquiry in political theory - are commonly also the focus of social scientific research that explains and describes the political world. This raises challenging questions about the place of empirical evidence in political theory. Should theories of distributive justice reflect popular beliefs about fairness? Does evidence about what happens in real world deliberations disrupt deliberative democratic theory? If political theorists should take empirical evidence seriously, what kinds of data should they be most interested in? How deeply does this evidence enter into normative inquiry, and what are the challenges involved in bringing it to bear? This volume brings together scholars working at the intersection of political theory and social science to address these questions. It combines detailed discussion of examples of interdisciplinary research with a wider reflection on the normative significance of empirical evidence. In Part One, contributors explore the role of different forms of social scientific inquiry, including ethnography, qualitative interviewing, and survey research. Part Two shows how work on specific topics in contemporary political theory either has been or should be informed by empirical evidence. By presenting diverse models of data-sensitive political theory, the authors aim to generate new insights into why, and how, empirical evidence matters to normative thinking about politics.