List, Christian and Spiekermann, Kai (2013) Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation. American Political Science Review, 107 (4). pp. 629-643.
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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 nonreductionists), 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 behavior, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory.
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| Item Type: | Published Article or Volume | |||||||||
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| Keywords: | Methodological individualism, holism, philosophy of social science, explanation, social ontology, causation in the social sciences, reductionism, non-reductionism, political science | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Reductionism/Holism Specific Sciences > Sociology |
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| Depositing User: | Christian List | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 26 Feb 2015 18:26 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 26 Feb 2015 18:26 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 11343 | |||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | American Political Science Review | |||||||||
| Official URL: | http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstra... | |||||||||
| DOI or Unique Handle: | 10.1017/S0003055413000373 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Explanation General Issues > Reductionism/Holism Specific Sciences > Sociology |
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| Date: | November 2013 | |||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 629-643 | |||||||||
| Volume: | 107 | |||||||||
| Number: | 4 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11343 |
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