Methods of Environmentalism

The discipline of political science has come quite a long way since Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the classic work in the study of politics, which asked and answered questions about our nature as political animals. Whereas Aristotle’s methods in that book were primarily observational and logical, academics working in the study of politics today have rigorously developed and tested analytical and empirical methods at their disposal to “define, describe, explain and evaluate [political] phenomena.” However, beyond a descriptive account of why political phenomena play out the way they do, one might wonder what exactly an empirically-minded political science has to contribute to ventures of a more pragmatic type, especially when we’re presented with normative problems.

If the political problems that help give rise to environmental crises are primarily problems of action — that is, questions that require a particular answer that prescribes action in a given situation — then it seems like answering questions about how groups respond (or might respond) to a given political action should be useful, at the very least. That, maybe uncontroversially, might be what political science can be said to do. The graphs and tables displayed in journal articles and book chapters offer metrics (think changes in GDP, voter approval ratings, and the like) that give us supposedly objective means of looking at how various political events are caused. If all we wanted the study of politics to do was tell us what percentage of states a candidate needed to win in order to win the presidency, or tell us how Congressional spending rates have changed over time, then descriptive and analytical methods might be able to tell us the whole story.

Unfortunately, describing the way our government works isn’t the only project political studies have facing them; we might remember that the primary concern of Aristotle’s Politics was to identify the best type of state and how citizens in an ideal state might behave. As critical as the positive study of how humans interacted with one another was, his ultimate task was normative; the primary object of inquiry was to provide us with an idea of how the state and its citizens should act. Nearly everything that concerned the ancient study of politics centered around notions of the good — a far cry from the subject matter of today’s political science.

Maybe an obsession with power politics is why we’ve yet to find a political solution to the environmental problems we face on the local, national and global level. Is the study of the good too far removed from what we call political science? Commentators have criticized the methodologies political scientists use for a number of reasons.

In a 2012 New York Times article Jacqueline Stevens, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, writes (rather harshly) that “Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp” and that her discipline has picked up the nasty habit of “mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.”

New York University’s Bertell Ollman, is somewhat less critical of the discipline’s methods, but more so of it’s motives – “… with a few honorable exceptions— [Political Science] presents a view of society that either misses, or dismisses, or at best trivializes the fact that the political game is rigged.” While not wholly dismissive of departments’ attachment to Karl Popper’s scientific method, Ollman derides the discipline for perpetuating an impossibly one-sided dialogue centered around the desires of those in power.

And finally, an anonymous contributor to The Economist, Ripton, Vermont’s “MD,” while commentating on the efficacy of attempts to model the outcomes of presidential elections, points out that the kind of retroactive tweakings frequently made to predictive political theories don’t typically help validate the scientific methods employed in crafting forecasting models. If political scientists continue to ask for research dollars to develop models and other predictive tools that might help reaffirm its methods as “scientific,” then the ideal should be to strive for real scientific rigor.

Unfortunately, scientific rigor is only one of a number of tools that we’ll need to advance goals related to climate change, conservation and other environmental problems. Another large substantial of the equation concerns ironing out what precisely we think the best way of living on this planet is; what I’m suggesting is that while models might help us in making decisions by providing us with an idea of how political moves may be responded to, they can’t tell us much about how the masses should respond, and what they should demand of government. Environmental problems ask us for right action that considers more than just power interests — they ask that political power be exercised justly.