Overtilled and Undertilled Fields in American Politics

Arnold, R. Douglas

doi:10.2307/2149316

Cited by 66 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Should we as a discipline be putting so much intellectual energy into those types of questions at the cost of not applying ourselves to other, equally important problems? To borrow a phrase that Douglas Arnold (1982) coined a quarter century ago, the big science approach may lead to “overtilling.”…”

Section: The Impoverished Empirical Description Of the Presidencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Alternative Futures: Comment on Terry Moe's “The Revolution in Presidential Studies”

Cohen

2009

Pres Stud Q

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In “The Revolution in Presidential Studies,” Terry Moe suggests that bounded rationality and computational and agent‐based modeling should become the core for future research on the presidency. I suggest other, perhaps complementary, directions for future research: (1) a greater integration of theories on the institutional presidency with those on the public presidency; (2) a broader and more comparative approach to studying political executives instead of the current parochial focus on the American presidency; and (3) a large‐scale, cooperative data collection effort that parallels such efforts in other subfields, which has reinvigorated those subfields, attracted students, and allowed for more ambitious research questions and designs.

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Section: The Impoverished Empirical Description Of the Presidencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Alternative Futures: Comment on Terry Moe's “The Revolution in Presidential Studies”

Cohen

2009

Pres Stud Q

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“…Political scientist Douglas Arnold once called the interest group subfield "theory rich and data poor," noting that scholars who studied interest groups, unlike those who studied electoral behavior, had not benefited from large-scale, institutionally financed data collection (Arnold 1982). By comparison with electoral studies, that statement may well still be true, but in absolute terms the data available to interest group scholars have grown exponentially in the 4 decades since Arnold wrote those words, and the pace of data acquisition has been especially fast during the most recent decade.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the special issue on data sources for interest group research

Leech

2020

Int Groups Adv

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Technological advances, increasing amounts of online governmental records, and transparency efforts by nonprofit organizations have led to a new abundance of data sources for studying the political activities of interest groups. In this special issue, fourteen sets of authors review these data sources and offer advice on how best to make use of them. The data sources discussed include reports filed as required by

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“…9 The first part of this analysis lays out the theoretical groundwork by specifying alternative conceptualizations of the membership renewal process. 6 Despite frequent assertions in the literature that the study of organizational membership is theory-rich and data-poor (e.g., Arnold 1982;Shaiko 1986), it is argued here that the available models require further development. Once the proper theoretical underpinnings have been laid, the focus shifts to the empirical world.…”

Section: O Rganizationalmentioning

confidence: 85%