The Power of Implicit Critical Realism: Writing Like a Realist Without Stating It
A guest post by Christopher-David Preclik
Corresponding Author: Christopher-David Preclik, PhD Student in Politics and International Studies (1st year), University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; email: cdp51@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Note: Christopher-David Preclik is a first-year PhD student in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on democracy’s relationship with young people. He has devised the concept of political adultism to give voice to their inferior social and political position.
The Power of Implicit Critical Realism: Writing Like a Realist Without Stating It
Being a critical realist in academia is not easy. Akin to most of the social sciences, contemporary political science is dominated by neopositivist research whose biggest opposition rather comes from various forms of interpretivism than from critical realism (see Bevir and Rhodes 2016, for an overview of interpretive political science; see King and Keohane 2021, for the popularity of neopositivism in political science journals). Neopositivist social researchers often have a vague idea of some alternative approaches to their philosophical framework. Social constructivism counts among them, postmodernism as well, perhaps even historical materialism. My personal experience up to this point is that critical realism rarely features among them. Quite frankly, most researchers have not even heard of critical realism, ontological realism, or critical naturalism. A Kuhnian might dismiss them as normal social scientists uninterested in serious methodological reflection. This might not be wrong per se, yet poses no answer to the phenomenon that many opponents to the neopositivist agenda have not heard of critical realism either. Critical realism has a problem of circulation. By and large, neither students nor researchers know about it.
I recently started my PhD in Politics and International Studies and completed a course on the philosophical underpinnings of political science research. It will not come as a surprise that critical realism only played a circumstantial role at best. This is not so much a criticism of the course as it is a reflection of the marginalization in which critical realists find themselves. Indeed, one of the methodological papers that we had to read was written by a realist without using the word realism in it once (Shapiro 2004). But perhaps, this might also tell an instructive story of how critical realists can go about contributing to the body of knowledge. Perhaps, it is not always necessary or helpful to identify oneself as a critical realist and play the “I am different” card. I am aware that it is appealing and, in many cases, indispensable for a minority group to stress one’s own identity as being different from the majority and other minorities. There is nothing wrong with that and I frequently find myself in that position as well. Yet, I cannot help, but think that in some instances, the opposite might not be detrimental either. In fact, it could be beneficial. What if we can actually do critical realist work without openly committing ourselves to an identity as critical realists in the first place?
This was the strategy that I pursued while writing my first journal article (Preclik 2024). I knew that the journal I was intending to submit my article to had a strong focus on statistical methods, data-driven research, and policy issues. Claiming a critical realist stance and setting myself apart from a neopositivist framework would not have reverberated with the outlook of the journal. Hence, I used Ian Shapiro’s distinction between problem-driven and method-driven scholarship to situate my work in the former’s camp and availed myself of his technique of a problematizing redescription. It is an attempt to demonstrate “that the accepted way of characterizing a piece of political reality fails to capture an important feature of what stands in need of explanation or justification [and to] then offer a recharacterization that speaks to the inadequacies in the prior account” (Shapiro 2004, p. 39). I also showed how problematizing redescriptions may serve different functions by drawing on Daniel Campos’s (2011) differentiation between habitual and creative abduction. While some critical realists prefer the terminology of retroduction and retrodiction, my foremost aim was to illuminate two straightforward versions of abduction as detailed justification of my technique and apply them to my empirical case of the 2021 German federal election. The complexity of critical realism and its terminology may sometimes prevent critical realist research from being applied simply and successfully in journals different from our own underlying philosophical stance.
There is a cost of pursuing applied realist work in the way I did. I might have to face the charge that other critical realists do not regard my piece as thoroughly realist. I do not think that this is the case, but I recognize the tradeoff between trying to make a marginalized philosophical position more palatable to mainstream audiences and satisfying the conceptions that a theory of science consists of. Given the minority position of critical realism, the risk of betraying one’s own camp is always present. Yet, the upside of critical realism from my perspective is that its proponents are more tolerant and open to some kind of realism than its competitors are to some variation of neopositivism or interpretivism. This openness may serve to our advantage and help us foster a pragmatic critical realism whose arguments and findings appeal to a wide range of scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. Critical realism is a middle-ground position in the philosophy of social science. It can often lead to us being squeezed in between neopositivists, pragmatists, and interpretivists and suffering from an attention deficit, but it may also bring us easier into conversation with researchers from other traditions and backgrounds. The fact that many scholars and students do not know about critical realism can work to our strength. It allows us to conduct cutting-edge social-scientific work without demarcating it as critical realist.
I am making the case for the power of an implicit critical realism that adopts realist language and a critical perspective, but does not necessarily underwrite it as critical realist. In my article, this transpires through the problematizing redescription of gerontocratic rule as political adultism. Political adultism is a social structure that discriminates against young and younger people as political agents on grounds of their lesser (life) experience. It comes to an end once becoming considered political adults by the society they belong to. Similar to sexism and racism, it is pervasive and not always observable. The empirical essence of my paper is to show that my novel conception of political adultism can better explain the 2021 election outcome than a conception of gerontocratic rule as such. To achieve this, I pick out an empirical anomaly in the election data and demonstrate why it cannot be explained by the idea of gerontocratic rule on its own. The creative abduction consists in unveiling my theoretical conception of political adultism so as to account for the empirical anomaly. The social structure of political adultism not only underlies gerontocratic rule, but also invites us to critically rethink our relationship with topical policy proposals, such as Vote 16.
The fact that my implicit critical realist approach resonated with a journal whose methodological focus is disparate from mine may provide a template for other critical realists, aspiring to publish their work with a method-oriented social science audience. While my paper was misrepresented as a piece of normative political theory in the editors’ note, it can hardly subtract from the openness of the editors to enable my publication in the first place. Interestingly, this mischaracterization goes a long way towards identifying my contribution as critical realist insofar as critical realism challenges the fact-value distinction and embraces explanatory critique. Writing like a realist without stating it is possible as well as desirable. Doing so can bring the studies, arguments, and findings of critical realists into the orbit of mainstream social scientists who would otherwise pay little attention to such critical work. It further illustrates that there is a different criterion for scientific progress than falsifiability: Novelty. I hope that my article encourages other critical realist-minded scholars to consider the potential of an implicit critical realist approach and opens up to them that novel concepts need not be born in theory-driven philosophy periodicals, but may at times also flourish in a data-driven statistics journal.
References
Bevir, M., and R. A. W. Rhodes. 2016. Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science (1st ed.), London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge.
Campos, D. G. 2011. “On the Distinction between Peirce’s Abduction and Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation,” Synthese, 180 (3), 419-442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9709-3.
King, G., and R. O. Keohane. 2021. “Designing Social Inquiries,” in Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, eds. G. King, R. O. Keohane and S. Verba, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. ix-xiv.
Preclik, C.-D. 2024. “From Gerontocratic Rule to Political Adultism: The Experiential Bias in Germany’s Aging Electoral Democracy and the Limitations of a Vote 16 Policy,” Statistics, Politics and Policy, 15 (2), 137-167. https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2023-0041.
Shapiro, I. 2004. “Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or: What’s Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It,” in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, eds. I. Shapiro, R. M. Smith and T. E. Masoud, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19-41.