A Political Theory Primer [antikvár]

Introduction V.O. Key, in his introduction to elementary statistics, wrote: "Most political scientists, accustomed as we are to other modes of analysis, bristle at the sight of even the most common statistical symbol.'" This reaction no longer characterizes our discipline since nearly all serious researchers appreciate or have grown accustomed to the principles of hypothesis testing, regression analysis, simultaneous equations estimation, and multivariate scaling, and the terminology and notation of R-squares, F tests, Durban-Watson statistics, and maximum likelihood estimators are commonplace in our journals. However, Key's characterization rings true if we substitute the words "the notation and concepts of formal political theory" for "statistical symbol," because few political scientists are comfortable with ideas such as Nash equilibrium, extensive form, stationary strategy, separable utility, multidimensional issue space, or repeated game. This fact is unfortunate, because these concepts and their attendant mathematical notation, properly used, augment our reasoning with tools that allow us to detect inconsistencies and ambiguities in our thinking. Unfortunately, the language of mathematics and, thus, the language of political theory, is too often inaccessible to those who have entered the discipline not to understand mathematics but instead to understand and perhaps influence politics. However, those who are interested in understanding the inner logic of politics cannot forever ignore the opportunities for augmenting their thinking with formal constructs. Such constructs constitute too powerful an instrument of logical reasoning, and politics is too important a subject to leave its study to the often imprecise and logically flawed world of intuition, "wisdom," and verbal analysis—to a domain in 'V. O. Key, A Primer in Statistics for Political Scientists, New York: Crowell Co. 1954,