This is part of a little series of posts that this blog is very fond of and which is dedicated to clear concepts. In a way, it is also my little act of homage to Giovanni Sartori (pictured above), who was one of the brightest lights I was lucky to encounter (and meet personally twice) on my early academic path. A first post was about what a concept really is, a second post was about good concepts, and a third about bad concepts. This fourth post is again about “bad” concepts and how they usually lead to faulty understandings of the world that surrounds us. In its present form, this is a (slightly modified) excerpt from my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). A fifth post will follow with concrete examples of real cat-dogs from the academic world.
Back in the early 1980s, in one of America’s great universities, Giovanni Sartori, an Italian professor of theoretical comparative politics and great logician, taught a class on research methodology. Already by his time, research in political science had begun to disregard qualitative methods and embrace quantitative ones instead, despite that same professor’s warning that words and concepts always trump numbers alone—but let us not drift from the original story.
One day, Sartori went to teach his students how to do comparative research and his effort was to show that comparability is established only after asking the question: Comparable with respect to which characteristic or characteristics of the units under analysis? Failure to ask this question, he asserted, results in errors of classification, which, almost unfailingly, cause research shipwrecks.
To impress the dangers of faulty comparison upon his students, the professor related the amusing story of Mr. Doe that I will now try to relay as accurately as I first heard it.
Mr. Doe prepares for his dissertation thesis and is at present thinking hard about a research hypothesis that will satisfy his adviser’s demand for originality, the academic market’s requirement for distinctiveness, and, of course, his own ambitions for an academic job. He decides to study the cat-dog on the hypothesis that all cat-dogs emit the distinct sound bow-wow.
The advisor gives his go-ahead and a foundation offers him an over-generous research grant for worldwide comparative research. After one year of research, Mr. Doe returns to the advisor and admits that his hypothesis is disconfirmed for lack of universal applicability: Several cat-dogs, he explains, do emit the sound bow-wow but many do not. But here’s my new hypothesis, he adds in earnest: All cat-dogs emit the sound wah-wah. With a new, no less generous grant at hand, the student goes back to the field for one more year but, once again, his hypothesis is not sustained: Many cat-dogs emit the noise wah-wah but many do not. Led by despair, Mr. Doe decides to visit the oracle in Delphi, who, perhaps out of sympathy for his frustrations, gives him an unusually straightforward answer. My friend, said the oracle, I will speak the simple truth to you: The cat-dog does not exist. What only exist are dogs and cats!
The conclusion is that, unless dogs are safely separated from cats, our understanding of politics will continue being bedevilled by the imprudent and quite pointless search for cat-dogs.
