Insights: Methods and Data Beyond Methodological Nationalism
Insights: Methods and Data Beyond Methodological Nationalism
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DOI：
10.1080/00343404.2013.746444
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发表时间：
2013-03-01
期刊：
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Schakel, Arjan H.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Jeffery, Charlie;Schakel, Arjan H.
第一个观点是，为研究国家规模的政治而发展的思想不应该不加批判地被用于研究区域规模的政治。Schakel和Jeffery对二阶选举概念的史学剖析就是一个明显的例子。这一剖析不仅揭示了“民族化”的假设，这种假设弥漫在这一概念中，并在地区选举研究中引入了偏见，而且还揭示了许多使用这一概念的人的智力疲劳，但他们没有比1980年推广这一概念的第一篇文章（REIF和施密特，1980）看得更远。Schakel和Jeffery发现，在他们分析的2933个案例中，只有18%的案例显示出明显的二阶特征，这强调了这一点。换句话说，把公认的智慧“摘下来”，并将其应用于并非设计目的的目的，可能会产生有缺陷的研究。Vanlangenakker等人在他们对多层次政治生涯的贡献中也提出了类似的观点。他们研究的三个案例都没有证实一种普遍的期望，这种期望主要来自美国对政治职业的研究，但也存在于欧洲的分析中，即国家选举办公室的职业优先于地区选举办公室的职业。在比利时和西班牙的情况下，相反的情况似乎更准确，即国家到地区的职业流动更常见，或者在苏格兰的情况下，地区和国家职业似乎是不同的选择，彼此之间不存在任何零和关系;国家和地区规模的政治不一定彼此有因果关系;它们可以有自己的、不相关的逻辑，但它们可能是密切相关的。这是Bäck等人的发现。他们联合收割机来自全州政治联盟建设理论的区域层面联盟形成的“现成”方法，沿着围绕旨在揭示区域规模政治特定因素的变量的一系列“量身定制”补充假设。这种复杂的方法来研究设计的回报，揭示了在区域范围内的国家议会联盟的自主决策所施加的限制，而且区域联盟创新的范围，以预示国家联盟，扭转，在某些情况下，因果箭头。
A first insight is that ideas developed for the study of state-scale politics should not be adopted uncritically for the study of regional scale politics. Schakel and Jeffery’s historiographical dissection of the concept of second-order elections is an obvious example. That dissection reveals not only the ‘nationalized’assumptions which pervade that concept and import bias into the study of regional elections, but also the intellectual lassitude of many of those who use the concept but have failed to look much further than the first article that popularized it back in 1980 (REIF and SCHMITT, 1980). Schakel and Jeffery’s finding that only 18% of the 2933 cases they analyse reveal obvious secondorder characteristics underlines the point. In other words, taking received wisdom ‘off the peg’and applying it for purposes for which it was not designed risks producing flawed research. Vanlangenakker et al. make a similar point in their contribution on multilevel political careers. None of the three cases they look at provides confirmation of the commonplace expectation, drawn largely from US studies of political careers, but present also in European analyses, that careers in national elected office are prioritized over careers in regional elected office. Either the opposite appears to be more accurate in the cases of Belgium and Spain–that national-to-regional career moves are more common–or, in the case of Scotland, that regional and national careers appear to be distinct choices that do not stand in any kind of zero-sum relationship with one another; state-and regional-scale politics do not necessarily have a causal relationship with one another; they can have their own, unrelated logics.They may though be deeply interrelated. This is the finding of Bäck et al. who combine ‘off-the-peg’approaches to coalition formation at the regional level derived from theories of coalition-building in statewide politics, along with a range of ‘made-to-measure’supplementary hypotheses around variables designed to reveal factors specific to regional-scale politics. This sophisticated approach to research design pays off by revealing both the constraints imposed on autonomous decision-making at the regional scale by coalition alignments in national parliaments, but also the scope for regional coalition innovations to prefigure national alignments, reversing, in some cases, the causal arrow.