New directions for exploring political culture

Political culture research is characterized by numerous competing and complementing theoretical and methodological approaches. Examples include next to many others, research on public opinion or social imaginary. Research on these topics is often characterized by diverging quantitative or qualitative methodological approaches. While for instance research on public opinion is mostly characterized by an elaborated toolbox for quantitative measurement, research on social imaginary is predominantly characterized by qualitative narratives. This is often perceived to be related to the epistemological distinction between nomological and idiographic research. This talk suggests a further methodological concept to approach for the latter. The talk suggests an approach for exploring social imaginary by stitching together two methodological paradigms that on the first sight seems to belong to opposing epistemological domains: agent-based social simulation models and interpretive methodologies from qualitative social research. The former is often perceived as belonging to the domain of nomological knowledge whereas the latter is seen as belonging to the idiographic domain. The core of the talk will give a brief sketch of the "working" of this methodology: ethnographic data and data analysis informs a conceptual model, the thick conditional, which is transferred to an agent-based model. By tracing simulation results back to the ethnographic data, the simulation generates counterfactual narratives which in turn are hermeneutically interpreted, using the method of sequence analysis. This enables an exploration of plausible futures within the domain of investigation. So far however, this methodology has only been applied for exploring criminal culture: what modes of action are plausibly possible within the context of specifically organized criminal networks? Objective of this talk is stimulating a discussion about potential fields of application in the domain of political culture (e.g. forms of resistance and protest, or political participation to mention some examples) and in turn the more general question of what political culture, or more precisely: social imaginary consists of.