What Is Democracy and How Do We Study It?

There are many different ways to do political science research. This book takes a core question that motivates research in political science – what is democracy? – and presents, in a single volume, original research demonstrating a variety of approaches to studying it. The approaches and related methods covered by the chapters of this book include normative political theory, positivist quantitative analysis, behaviouralism, critical theory, post-structuralism, historical institutionalism, process tracing, case studies, and literature reviews. As the diversity of these approaches suggest, readers are confronted with different assumptions that researchers make when entering the research process. Readers can compare and contrast the many different ways that a single question can be studied and the different nature of the outcomes that are possible. This book will be enlightening for students of democracy as well as those interested in research design and methodological approaches.