Abstract
An interpretive approach to political science provides accounts of actions and practices that are interpretations of interpretations. We develop this argument using the idea of ‘situated agency’. There are many common criticisms of such an approach. This article focuses on eight: that an interpretive approach is mere common sense; that it focuses on beliefs or discourses, not actions or practices; that it ignores concepts of social structure; that it seeks to understand actions and practices, not to explain them; that it is concerned exclusively with qualitative techniques of data generation; that it must accept actors' own accounts of their beliefs; that it is insensitive to the ways in which power constitutes beliefs; and that it is incapable of producing policy-relevant knowledge. We show that the criticisms rest on both misconceptions about an interpretive approach and misplaced beliefs in the false idols of hard data and rigorous methods.
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Notes
A longer version of this paper first appeared in the Australian Journal of Political Science. Earlier versions were presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 1–3 September 2004; and the Australasian Political Studies Association, University of Adelaide, 29 September–1 October 2004.
Although this paper concentrates on political science, interpretive approaches are widespread across the human sciences. Useful collections include Rabinow and Sullivan (1979), Rabinow and Sullivan (1987) and Scott and Keates (2001). Much of the movement charted by these collections derives from the philosophical repudiation of positivism in the 1960s and 1970s. See Bernstein (1976) and Fay (1975).
See Foucault (1972, 1980). For varied assessments of the continuing impact of structuralism upon poststructuralism see Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982), Gutting (1989) and Harland (1988).
When we follow the logic of disaggregating concepts like voting or policy network, we end up with micro-level stories of individual actions based on one person's set of beliefs. Although such stories are interesting as cases, there are times when we want to tell more general stories, for example about governance. To do so, we need aggregate concepts like tradition and dilemma.
That said, we could make sense of someone's beliefs only by postulating them as a web that exhibits some kind of consistency and rationality. For discussion of various principles of charity according to which we do thus ascribe some kind of conceptual priority to rational beliefs see Bevir (1999: 158–171), Davidson (1984b) and McGinn (1977).
We would draw attention, more generally, to the difficulties that confront any dualism of ‘scheme’ and ‘content’, or ‘paradigm’ and ‘experience’, given the implausibility of an uninterpreted reality (see Davidson, 1984a). Such difficulties affect even those who emphasise meanings only to conceive of them as schemes, paradigms, or frames, including, for example, Rein and Schon (1995).
There is an extensive literature that explicitly applies an interpretive approach to policy analysis. Examples include Healy (1986), Hummel (1991), Jennings (1987), Van Eeten et al (1996), Weick (1995) and Yanow (1999).
For details of our own preferred epistemology see Bevir (1999: 78–126).
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Bevir, M., Rhodes, R. defending interpretation. Eur Polit Sci 5, 69–83 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210059
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210059