Chronic Poverty Research Centre

Political science-influenced approaches

Political science uses a number of broad theoretical approaches and methodologies, including: normative theory; institutional approaches; behavioural analysis; rational choice theory; feminist perspectives; Marxist theory; critical theory; discourse theory; qualitative analysis; quantitative methods; comparative approaches; and structure and agency debates. (Summaries of these can be found in David Marsh and Gerry Stoker, Theory and Methods in Political Science (London: Macmillan, 1995)). The broad political economy perspective offers a number of ways to analyse the links between economic and political factors in development. However, many of the traditional debates between these various theoretical schools and differing methodologies do not have an obvious or immediate relationship to the objectives of understanding chronic poverty. This also the case with the several more ‘politicised’ conceptual approaches within the study of poverty and development, such as rights-based development, political capital and social exclusion. Certain aspects of each though can be found in documents produced about chronic poverty, and it is important to the researcher to recognise these underlying assumptions and modes of reasoning. They can cause development projects to fail or succeed.

• Normative theory: describes how something should be, its ideal type and properties. Normative work covers, for example, the mode of theoretical analysis we might use to conceptualise how a democracy should work. Some research on governance in the south has included normative assumptions about western liberal democracy which may not have been relevant, and sought to test a political structure by whether it had recognisable 'good' features, such as an independent judiciary or multi-party elections. The advantages of normative approaches are that a particular institution, political system or set of social relationships can be judged or measured against an ideal type, which may serve to clarify weaknesses. The disadvantages of this approach are that it is ahistorical, inevitably judgmental and can cause offence.
• Institutional approaches: an example of this would be the widely used institutional appraisals which seek to test the efficiencies or otherwise of governmental systems. The weaknesses of institutional appraisal are that fundamental power relationships can be obscured in states which have been 'hollowed out' (Holloway), or where an institutional façade (Richards, 1996) hides other, often patrimonial types of resource allocation.
• Rational choice theory: this asserts that individuals behave in ways which are determined by their own self-interest, based in cost-be
• nefit analysis of how they believe they will benefit from a choice of option open to them. Motivation for particular forms of behaviour is said to be based primarily on assessment of the incentive of material reward. However, the weaknesses of this approach as it relates to chronic poverty analysis is that people make more complex choices based in assessment of other collective identities such as family and community. They also may not choose an option which represents the maximisation of material reward, or might make an inaccurate assessment of what that might be.
• Feminist perspectives: have been particularly important in demonstrating the weaknesses of assuming that individuals are motivated by self-interest and material concerns and have also shown that household-based quantitative research was particularly inaccurate in terms of significant intra-household differences in income and consumption between the genders
• Marxist theory: stresses the role of classes in historical change, whereby capitalist accumulation leads to contradictory interests held by different groups in a society. Stakeholder analysis is a current technique in poverty research which reflects the idea that different groups have competing interests and that unless these can be analysed and negotiated certain groups may harbour reasons to prevent particular outcomes of poverty reduction policy.
• Discourse theory; has established that people's identities are critical to their forms of behaviour and participation in development. Identities are also actively constructed for them by power-holders seeking to recruit political support by appealing to a particular collectivity: a region, ethnicity or historical identity. The subject and beneficiary of 'development' has often been a political construct which an elite has manufactured while the person or group in question experiences change as the passive and sometimes co-opted object of policy. Discourse theory underlies attempts to undertake research as a dialogue rather than as an expression of post-colonial power relationships. Ideas of participation, empowerment and ownership by the subjects of research are partly a response to the writings of discourse theorists. These responses are themselves contested by some as continuations of the earlier paradigm.
• Structure and agency debates: are at the core of much political science analysis although more obviously prominent in Marxian accounts. These remind us that the process of political change and the positioning of the poor are a complex outcome of how different people(s), or agents, relate to and within institutions, or structures. Institutions are formed at particular times by an expressed need of a group of human agents. Over time they can develop 'institutional interests' which prevent them from changing to meet the requirements of a new circumstance. This is an important aspect to bear in mind when, for example, a governmental institution is failing to deliver services or perform its role. This could be because the function it actually serves, (such as providing livelihoods for its employees), prevents it performing its 'proper' governance function, (since there is then, perhaps, insufficient resources left to provide services).
• Political economy: this is an important theoretical tool since it recognises the intimate relationship between economic and political factors in processes of change and development. At an international level political and economic factors shape the boundaries of what is feasible and possible in the context of poverty reduction.

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Political scientists also share many of their tools for political enquiry with social scientists more generally, including ways of designing research projects, the use of hypotheses and argument, literature reviews and content analysis, interviewing and participant observation, survey research, case studies and data analysis through the use of descriptive statistics, cross tabulation and regression analysis. Qualitative analysis; quantitative methods; and comparative approaches are also shared with other social scientists.

As well as these tools and forms of analysis, political scientists also use more complex concepts which describe the subjects of, types, and patterns of historical political change. However, most of these 'big' ideas are contested. Using concepts can, however, allow us to explore historical questions and development trajectories in what the French theorists sometimes call the longue duree, the long phases and patterns of history (Arrighi, 1994). For example, the concepts of 'nationalism', 'socialism', 'democracy' and 'secularism' have contested, but constructed meanings in political theory. However, when applied to processes in India, as in box 1, it becomes clear that they can be used in widely different contexts and from different points of view to describe what a commentator might think has happened.

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