AI and Political Theory: Exploring Argument Mining for Normative Research—A Political Theorist's Perspective (Or: on Identifying Patterns and Structures).

This exploratory study examines the intersection of political theory methodology and argument mining, proposing an accessible framework for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into normative political research. While analytical political theory traditionally focuses on normative arguments and their logical coherence, the methodological turn in the field has highlighted the value of systematically analyzing argumentative data to inform and refine theoretical claims. This paper demonstrates how argument mining—an AI-driven method for extracting and analyzing argumentative structures from text—can help political theorists improve awareness of their own techniques and argumentative mechanisms without compromising, and even reinforcing normative rigor. The paper outlines key applications of argument mining for political theory, including the identification of justificatory/argumentative patterns, the evaluation of argumentative consistency, and the extraction of normative themes from selected text corpora. To illustrate the framework’s utility, the study analyzes 25 highly-cited and well known political theory articles of the analytical genre using argument mining techniques, with a control group of articles subjected to traditional interpretive analysis. The study takes care to address the challenges of analyzing dense and abstract political theory texts, highlighting the importance of robust preprocessing and the need for human validation to ensure the accuracy and relevance of AI-generated results. This work explores how existing AI argument mining tools can be applied to political theory, acknowledging their limitations while offering potential insights into the grammar of contemporary political theory. By advancing the systematic analysis of political theory texts, it contributes to the growing methodological toolkit available to political theorists and underscores the value of AI methodological capabilities in refining the study of normative arguments.