Why Political Theory Needs Social Science

Chapter 11 is open access and available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Political theory promises guidance about how we ought to organize our political lives. For example, how do we fairly share resources in contexts of scarcity? What are the proper limits to democratic authority? Who should bear the costs of tackling climate change? These topics - the subject matter of normative inquiry in political theory - are commonly also the focus of social scientific research that explains and describes the political world. This raises challenging questions about the place of empirical evidence in political theory. Should theories of distributive justice reflect popular beliefs about fairness? Does evidence about what happens in real world deliberations disrupt deliberative democratic theory? If political theorists should take empirical evidence seriously, what kinds of data should they be most interested in? How deeply does this evidence enter into normative inquiry, and what are the challenges involved in bringing it to bear? This volume brings together scholars working at the intersection of political theory and social science to address these questions. It combines detailed discussion of examples of interdisciplinary research with a wider reflection on the normative significance of empirical evidence. In Part One, contributors explore the role of different forms of social scientific inquiry, including ethnography, qualitative interviewing, and survey research. Part Two shows how work on specific topics in contemporary political theory either has been or should be informed by empirical evidence. By presenting diverse models of data-sensitive political theory, the authors aim to generate new insights into why, and how, empirical evidence matters to normative thinking about politics.

Alice Baderin is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Reading. Her current research addresses questions about risk, inequality, and social justice. She has a long-standing interest in the relationship between political theory and social science, informed by her previous experience working in public opinion research. Prior to joining the University of Reading, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. She holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford.
David Miller is Professor of Political Theory and a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Before joining Nuffield in 1979, he taught at the Universities of Lancaster and East Anglia. He has worked on a number of topics in political philosophy, including social justice, nationality, and immigration, using evidence from the social sciences to illuminate them. In 2002 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2020 the European Consortium for Political Research gave him its biennial Lifetime Achievement Award.

- Introduction - Part One - 1: Hélène Landemore: Inductive Political Theory - 2: Humeira Iqtidar: Texts Do Not Talk Back: Ethnography and Political Theory' - 3: Jonathan Wolff and Avner de Shalit: Dynamic Public Reflective Equilibrium - 4: David Miller: Experiments as a Resource for Political Philosophy - 5: Alice Baderin: Two Models of Opinion-Sensitive Political Philosophy - 6: Jonathan Floyd: Normative Behaviourism: From Observation to Justification - Part Two - 7: Alfred Moore: Realising and Revising Deliberative Democracy - 8: Gina Gustavsson: Is Liberal Nationalism Empirically Plausible? - 9: Guy Aitchison: Using Interviews in the Political Philosophy of Resistance - 10: Sarah Fisher and Jeffrey Howard: Free Speech Facts - 11: Huub Brouwer and Ingrid Robeyns: The Empirical Premises of Economic Limitarianism' - 12: Mollie Gerver, Dominik Duell, Miranda Simon, and Patrick Lown: Do Arguments about Immigration Ethics Change Minds?