Description
Book SynopsisTo venture into explanation of political action we need some map of our basic options: what kinds of explanations are out there? Even advanced students and scholars can find the landscape difficult to chart. We confront a bewildering maze of partial typologies, contrasting uses of terms, and debate over what counts as explanation. This book makes an argument about the most useful first cut into explanations of action. It illustrates the map with reference to political examples and a wide range of political science literature, but the scheme applies even more broadly across the social sciences and history.Common terms form the sectors of the map: structural, institutional, ideational, and psychological logics. This book''s novelties lie in arguments about how to best define these terms. It narrows them into distinct mechanisms, arriving at basic segments of causal logic into which all explanations of action can be broken down. It also makes them compatible, however, such that we could i
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. Boundaries and Divisions in Explanation of Action ; 2. Structural Explanation ; 3. Institutional Explanation ; 4. Ideational Explanation ; 5. Psychological Explanation ; Conclusion
