ABSTRACT
Political science is an eclectic discipline: the methodology used by political scientists is, of course, also eclectic. It is largely inherited from parent disciplines: political philosophers engage in arguments of a philosophical nature, as other philosophers; those who study the unique characteristics of events and statesmen work on documents with the same skills as historians; specialists of voting behaviour borrow from statistics the instruments with which to analyse evidence and come to conclusions; legal categories and a legal frame of mind is applied to the study of constitutions, institutions and structures; and those who attempt to apply to political life general models of behaviour draw, like economists, most of their techniques from mathematics. The discipline is ubiquitous: it should be, and is to a large extent, a market-place for techniques rather than the source of a coherent and integrated methodology.
