Beyond the Ivory Tower: Developing a Participatory Research Paradigm for Political Science

Participation is a core concept of democracy and a longstanding subject of political science research. But how about combining participation and political research in recent times of contestation of politics and academia to strengthen their interconnected role in society? In this paper, a methodological paradigm of participatory political science (PPS) is developed and proposed for discussion. Starting from a theoretical perspective, this paper examines how and whether PPS could foster acceptance, relevance, understanding, and trust drawing on the research process of a participatory research project on children and youth parliaments in Germany, which involves a diverse research team of engaged youth, but also involved adults such as supervisors and local politicians, and a researcher. In distinction to concepts of citizen science, participatory action research and public scholarship, PPS can be defined as a political science approach that investigates political questions in cooperation with members of the public to include their own expertise. It understands political science as a collaborative and democratic space of knowledge generation which offers researchers and society to jointly discuss and decide on goals, methods, interpretation and implementation of knowledge. PPS addresses epistemic limitations of data biases and contextual blind spots by integrating experiential and contextual knowledge into research design and interpretation. Through this, society-academia hierarchies partly can be overcome, different forms of experiential expertise acknowledged, and results transferred to political and public contexts. From an epistemic perspective, “participatory” understands political science as power-related co-productive process that enables different actors and their distinct expertise to equitably contribute to knowledge and scientific authority not exclusively owned by researchers. The paper answers what chances and limitations of PPS occur while focusing on participatory methods of finding research questions, co-creation of research designs, data generation, and ethical quality standards. The paper argues that PPS reduces the distance between an increasingly academia-sceptic society and political science by opening research to public questions. Political science itself can be democratized through public engagement, as it actively connects scientific and everyday questions, thus enhancing credibility, validity, and quality of data. Practical relevance of results strengthens acceptance and trust in political science. Participatory approaches empower participants by listening to their voices but also sharpens researchers’ perceptions of research subjects and is especially useful for including marginalized groups perspectives. However, PPS is more suited to be applied in more empirical parts of political science, and theoretical work would change towards a more recursive and problem-oriented environment. As a methodological approach, PPS requires a set of competencies from the researcher’s side such as moderating and active listening skills, so that researchers function as translators between the participants’ and political science’ worlds and step back to trust the process. PPS is proposed not as dogmatic research ideology but as a new methodological paradigm to better connect political science to its research subjects, foster scientific resilience and validity. By that, broadly grounded knowledge can be generated, become more accessible and understandable for a broader public.