Interpretivism: Family resemblances and quarrels

All political scientists offer us their interpretations of the world. Interpretive approaches differ from many others in that they offer us interpretations of interpretations; they concentrate on meanings, beliefs, languages, discourses, and signs, as opposed to, say, laws and rules, correlations between social categories, or deductive models. Of course, this distinction between interpretive approaches and others is not an all or nothing affair: sensible interpretivists allow that the study of laws, correlations, and models can play a role in our exploration of practices; and sensible institutionalists, behavioralists, and rational choice theorists allow that their typologies, correlations, and models can do explanatory work only in so far as they can be unpacked in terms of the actual beliefs and desires of actors. Nonetheless, we can distinguish a family of interpretive approaches to political science that stand out in that they focus on meanings and beliefs – a family that includes decentred theory, ethnography, poststructuralism, practical philosophy, and social constructivism, and that overlaps with other approaches such as the constructivist and ideational forms of institutionalism