Cat-dogs

February 4, 2020May 7, 2021

Cat-dogs

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. Continue reading “Cat-dogs”

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020

Mozart

How would life have been without Mozart? Here’s an answer:

January 12, 2020April 26, 2020

Bad concepts

This is the third in a series of posts about concepts and the (good and bad) ways in which we use them to conceptualize real-world politics. The first post was about concepts in general and how they work. The second post was about “good” concepts while this third post is about “bad” concepts.

WHEN A CONCEPT IS BAD?

Unlike good concepts, which feature a simple term, unambiguous meaning, and clearly identifiable referents, a concept is said to be bad when (1) it is based on a confusing term, (2) its meaning-to-word is ambiguous, which results in definitional disasters, and (3) its meaning-to-referents is vague, which makes operationalization, and eventually the classification of the units to be analyzed, impossible. Bad concepts lead to a bad understanding of the world.

Several good examples of bad concepts are in Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (a research area that is close to my own research interests and about which I claim some knowledge myself). The book is full of terms meant to signify a host of “ideologies,” which merge and combine with each other only to produce more confusion. The main definitions (as presented at the book’s end in glossary form) are below. This terminological maze is the result of two major errors: |A| poor conceptualization, which creates definitional disasters, and |B| false synonymies, which derail concept operationalization and frustrate the classification of empirical cases. Let me clarify. Continue reading “Bad concepts”

January 11, 2020September 4, 2020

When a concept is good?

This is a second post on concepts and how to use them in both our everyday lives and in academic analysis. The first post was about concepts in general, the present one is about “good” concepts. A third post follows about “bad” concepts, and a fourth one about more bad concepts in the form of “cat-dogs.” All posts owe to the work of the great Giovanni Sartori on concepts and methodology in social and political sciences.

How do we conceptualize, AND what is a ‘good’ concept?

To conceptualize is far from easy. It requires three moves at once: (a) decide on a simple term with (b) unambiguous meaning that (c) points clearly to specific comparable referent units. We have a good concept when it expresses clear meaning and helps to seize the object.

A concept is good when it expresses clear meaning and helps to seize the object. Only good concepts may establish boundaries that separate the object that we want explained from other objects that may look similar but are not the same.

January 10, 2020January 12, 2020

About concepts

This is the first in a series of posts about concepts and the (good and bad) ways we conceptualize the real world of politics. The second post explains when a concept is “good” while the third post is about “bad” concepts. These posts are inspired by the work and follow the tradition of the late great theorist Giovanni Sartori.

What is a concept?

To the extent that we try to understand the world out there, a concept is the basic unit of our thinking.

As shown in the graph (featured image above), concepts have a triangular structure.

Continue reading “About concepts”

December 4, 2019February 13, 2020

Populism trivia – 2

Slavoj Žižek

Did you know that there is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the work of Slovenian Slavoj Žižek? It is called, perhaps a little immodestly, International Journal of Žižek Studies. Many of its articles are about “populism.”

Continue reading “Populism trivia – 2”

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019

Pete Buttigieg

A BID FOR POLITICAL SANITY

The first time I heard about Pete Buttigieg was when he submitted his candidacy for the 2020 US presidential race in April 2019. Who was this guy?

Continue reading “Pete Buttigieg”

December 2, 2019December 3, 2019

The decline of socialist parties across Europe

This is part of an ongoing research project of mine (also related to PACE H2020 project) on party system transformations and patterns of electoral competition in Europe since 1990.

Quick takeaways

There are 3+1 major remarks to be made: (1) With the exceptions of UK and, to a smaller extent, Portugal, socialist party decline has been universal across Europe. But (2) it is worth noting that under the general rubric “socialist parties” we find a large variety of leftist parties including social democrats, former communists, left populists, militant socialists, let alone UK’s Labour Party which should be studied separately at least for the period during which a two-party system existed in that country. Finally (3) the major riddle seems to be about the decline of France’s erstwhile powerful Socialist Party (PS). As a consequence of remarks 1-3, then, (4) the comparative treatment of the entirety of cases is highly problematic and, if attempted at all, must be handled with extreme care.

November 21, 2019June 4, 2021

Do great social science scholars have exemplary lives?

I just read a post by Branco Milanovic, a prominent economist, in his (very good) globalinequality blog. In it, he makes an interesting point about the lives of famous economists. Those, he says, live orderly and boring lives, spent mostly within the cloistered walls of academia, with no real sense of the actual world out there. But, if their the great economists’ lives are not exemplary, how could they produce meaningful things, and suggest workable solutions, for our contemporary world? Milanovic asks: Don’t we need exemplary lives for greatness in the social sciences?

To be honest, I don’t know much about the great economists’ personal lives, but I know something about the lives of the great political scientists who advanced the field of comparative politics in recent decades – and I was lucky enough to have personally met, and learned from, quite a few of them. Continue reading “Do great social science scholars have exemplary lives?”