Letter from the President

As a teacher of methods, I tend to emphasize what our methodologies cannot do in our efforts to learn things in political science. We must take methodological weaknesses as a given—there is no perfect or ideal approach to any question, because all of our methodological tools are sustained by assumptions that tend to be difficult to demonstrate or “prove” in practice. We must also acknowledge that we, as social scientists, are nonneutral observers of the world. We make choices about our data (Should I code this unit as a 1 or a 0? Did her “no” really mean “yes”?) that inevitably shape what we can know and how we know it.