The scientification of political theory; a clarification and a qualified defense.

Recent developments in contemporary analytic political theory have called for political theory to situate itself very near political science, and following, to ‘scientify’ itself. This call has at times pronounced itself in explicit terms, and at times is sounded via calls for political theorists to pay close attention to the functioning of political institutions and to political data. Such calls have brought about a lively debate regarding the form of such empirically grounded political theory, and of course its desirability. The goal of the current article is to clarify what this change would entail. Such a clarification aims to situate ‘scientification’ in contemporary analytic political theory (CAPT) where it arguably belongs - in CAPT’s descriptive and prescriptive steps, and to indicate that scientification should not mean that the evaluative or normative aspect of CAPT would be superseded or extinguished, rather, that the empirical and the evaluative/normative parts can complement each other. The second goal of the article is to argue that if properly understood and situated, scientification of CAPT is a positive development as once properly executed, it would assist empirically grounded CAPT to achieve its own stated goals. The article begins by exploring and describing recent calls for the scientification of political theory (such as by K. Dowding) and provides a working definition of research in social science that fits the contested term ‘scientific research’ following the characterizations of KKV and Gerring. Following, it attempts to clarify what such scientification would mean in the context of CAPT; in order to do so, it is suggested to divide the structure of CAPT into three parts: (I) description, (II) evaluation and (III) prescription. We then situate the noted scientification within CAPT, using the suggested division of the structure of CAPT to three parts. Following, the scientification of CAPT would chiefly apply to parts I (description) and III (prescription), as both require adequate understanding of the relevant, explored, political behavior or institution. Section four explores the importance of the scientification of CAPT to the second part of CAPT - evaluation. Here, while the focus is on normative models outside the scope of normal scientific processes, scientification can contribute in at least three major ways; (1) in the clarity of concepts and analysis (inclusive of operationalism of major concepts); (2) in a better understanding of models used in the evaluative step, as such models often share attributes with scientific models, such as proximity and parsimony; and finally (3) scientification is important to the evaluative step as such evaluation ought to be based on an adequate execution of the descriptive part, hence scientification is indispensable for the normative aspects of CAPT.