How pluralist is the study of politics? A quantitative assessment of the literature on democratisation in Post-Communist Europe 2000-2015

It is frequently claimed that political science has become more methodologically plural since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a disciplinary mainstream rooted in the hegemony of quantitative methods and formal modelling was confronted with an organised revolt of scholars seeking better representation of qualitative and interpretive approaches. Now, qualitative approaches find more space in top journals, interdisciplinarity is en vogue and mixed-methods are frequently labelled as best practice. Some however still stress the cosmetic nature of these changes. This position contends that while methods are indeed more diverse, the research most rewarded with citation counts, grant money and prestigious positions is still anchored in positivist philosophical beliefs. Interpretivist research, focusing on meaning-making activities, is still claimed to languish at the margins of the discipline. Furthermore, it is claimed that the hegemony of positivist research has negative consequences for political science’s collective capacity for knowledge-building. Despite the theoretical sophistication of these critiques, there has been little systematic investigation of their empirical merits. For this purpose, we assess the prevalence over time, as well as the respective strengths and weaknesses, of varying theoretical and methodological approaches within a specific academic debate: the body of literature on democratization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, a key empirical puzzle in the early 21st century that also provides an important and diverse pool of research to support a large-N comparative approach. Our empirical strategy rests on the coding of a random sample of 500 papers published in the top 20 general political science journals and the top 5 area studies journals over the period 2000-2015. Specifically, we recorded the theoretical frameworks, methodologies and thematic foci of each paper and then tested the consequences of these choices on academic reach (citation count and journal ranking) and prognostic capacity (coded ‘high’ for papers concluding with greater pessimism/ skepticism about the extent of democratisation in the light of radical democratic backsliding in CEE that has been widely acknowledged since the end of our period of observation). Our quantitative analyses reveal that positivist criteria still largely determine whether research will be published in high-ranking journals and, even more tellingly, how much other scholars cite a paper regardless of the journal in which it is published. More fundamentally, the relative under-representation of non-positivist standpoints has an adverse impact on the knowledge-building capacity of the discipline as a whole. Qualitative papers and those focusing on civil society, which we find are generally less cited, are also more likely to display pessimistic conclusions—this also stands for papers published in area studies journals, the least prestigious in our sample. While rewarded with less academic recognition at the time, these accounts have generally aged better. Positivist papers generally displayed less caution about the pace of democratisation in the region, yet received far greater recognition within the discipline.