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DA-RT will cause contempt for the political science profession among political professionals.

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2016 6:22 pm
by Bill Kelleher
There are some excellent comments here on the undesirable unintended consequences of DA-RT. Other unintended consequences of DART are that in favoring numbers, research results are necessarily superficial. Numbers can’t get into the motivations of actors, or interpret the different meanings that policies and events have for people. In this sense, numbers compel triviality.

RE: Security Studies – If there are threats to a political regime brewing in a political system, the positivists can’t see it, because they can’t count it – therefore, the threats aren’t real. Threats exist in the realm of meaning and intentions. But the dominant paradigm for methods in our profession is utterly impotent at observing empathically what’s hidden to their eyes. Positivism’s weakness is itself a threat to political systems. It induces political actors to think somebody is on the lookout.

Studies have shown that the repetition of trivial research results in journals already causes contempt for the political science profession among political professionals. DA-RT will make it worse.

I discuss this in detail in my paper on Clarke and Primo at
https://independent.academia.edu/WilliamJKelleherPhD
(free safe download) Part of this paper was published in the June 2015 issue of Perspectives on Politics.

William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.