Methods of Normative Political Theory

Debates about ‘method’ in political theory/philosophy have expanded and diversified in recent years. Political philosophy has also felt the pull of the methodological turn in political science, putting the post-Rawlsian consensus under even greater pressure. Well-known examples of such debates on methods in political philosophy include the ideal/non-ideal theory debate (O’Neill, Stemplowska, Valentini), the moralism/realism debate (Williams, Geuss, Sleat & Rossi), the facts/principles debate (Cohen, Miller, Ronzoni), the practice dependence/independence debate (James, Sangiovanni), the measure of adopting political science methods and research output within political theory (Dowding, Floyd, Blau and Perez), the ethnographic approach to political theory (Herzog, Zacka and Longo); and finally debates regarding contextualism (Laegaard, Moodod and Thompson, Carens). All of these debates revolve around methodological concerns in political philosophy: ▪️ What is a justified inference? ▪️ How do you construct a given research? ▪️ What tools of investigation do political theorists use, and how can one use them correctly? ▪️ How do political theorists evaluate research? Methodological questions are also central to many other debates in political philosophy, including debates about feminism, the relations between history of political thought and systematic political philosophy, and the relation between political philosophy and empirical disciplines. This Section has been a central venue for discussion of these and related questions over a number of years, at ECPR conferences in Prague (2016), Oslo (2017), Hamburg (2018), Wroclaw (2019), virtually in both 2020 and 2021, and in Innsbruck (2022). This sequence of successful Sections provided the foundation for the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory, approved by the ECPR Executive Committee in 2022.