List, Christian and Spiekermann, Kai (2013) Methodological individualism and holism in political science: a reconciliation. American Political Science Review, 107 (4). pp. 629-643. ISSN 0003-0554
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Abstract
Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or non-reductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behaviour, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) non-reductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring non-reductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Official URL: | http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJourna... |
| Additional Information: | © 2013 American Political Science Association |
| Library of Congress subject classification: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General) |
| Sets: | Departments > Government Departments > Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method Research centres and groups > Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2013 09:13 |
| URL: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/53455/ |
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