Making Sense of
Modern Political Analysis

Andrew Davison, Vassar College

978-1-59738-204-5 
128 pages / $19.00 / paper

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Table of Contents
Introduction
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This book helps make sense of different ways of analyzing politics. 
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Its title is in conversation with Professor Robert Dahl’s seminal introduction to political analysis, Modern Political Analysis, first published in 1963. At the time, the professional study of politics was energetically organizing itself around a single method or approach, that of empiricism. Empiricism still directs a great deal of political science research, but in the over sixty years that have passed, political analysis has diversified significantly. In contemporary political science, there are at least five major approaches to the analysis of politics: empiricism, interpretivism, critical theory, discourse analysis, and postcolonial subaltern analysis. 
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Making Sense of Modern Political Analysis introduces students to the key premises and goals of each approach. A single chapter is dedicated to each. Subsequent chapters build upon the discussions in prior ones to illuminate and compare the analytical goals of each approach. The discussions explore criticisms and provide extensive illustrations as guides for practicing each approach in one’s own work. The illustrations are drawn from contemporary political issues and used to compare and contrast the different analytical goals discussed. Each chapter also explains and illustrates the different ways that the five major approaches to political analysis seek to make their research practically useful in the real world of politics.