Empirical political theory: a blue-print.

Recent developments in contemporary analytic political theory have called for political theory to situate itself very near political science, and following, to create something like ‘empirical political theory’. This call has at times pronounced itself in explicit terms, and at times is sounded via calls for political theorists to pay close attention to the functioning of political institutions and to political data. Such calls have brought about a lively debate regarding the form of such empirically grounded political theory, and of course its desirability. The goal of the current article is to clarify what this change would entail. Such a clarification aims to situate the empirical turn in contemporary analytic political theory (CAPT) where it arguably belongs - in CAPT’s descriptive and prescriptive steps, and to indicate that such a change should not mean that the evaluative or normative aspect of CAPT would be superseded or extinguished, rather, that the empirical and the evaluative/normative parts can complement each other. The second goal of the article is to argue that if properly understood and situated, this empirical turn of CAPT is a positive development as once properly executed, it would assist empirically grounded CAPT to achieve its own stated goals. The article begins by exploring and describing recent calls for the empirical turn of political theory (such as by K. Dowding, J. Floyd, A. Blau). Following, it attempts to clarify what such an empirical turn would mean in the context of CAPT; in order to do so, it is suggested to divide the structure of empirical CAPT into three parts: (I) description and patterning, (II) evaluation and (III) prescription. Following, the empirical turn of CAPT would chiefly apply to parts I (description and patterning) and III (prescription), as both require adequate understanding of the relevant, explored, political behavior or institution. The final section explores the importance of the empirical turn of CAPT to the evaluative aspect of CAPT. Here, while the focus is on normative models outside the scope of normal scientific processes, empirically grounded political theory can contribute to the evaluative aspect of CAPT in at least three ways; (1) in the clarity of concepts and analysis (inclusive of operationalism of major concepts); (2) in a better understanding of models used in the evaluative step, using attributes such as proximity and parsimony; and finally (3) via an adequate execution of the descriptive and patterned part of empirical CAPT, on which evaluation is dependent.