Methodology, Technology, and the Study of African Elites

Extract

Even a casual survey of the literature on African politics reveals that it has only occasionally been influenced by contemporary social science methodology and technology. Alvin Magid is certainly correct in asserting that “Africanist political scientists…have tended to ignore or treat lightly various methodological problems which confront the social sciences in general and their own discipline in particular” (1969, p. 1). This is not, of course, a new charge. In 1955, for instance, Roy Macridis asserted that the vast majority of so-called comparative studies were noncomparative, descriptive, parochial, and static. He argued, “The general dissatisfaction experienced by students of comparative politics with the nature of their discipline and more particularly with its methodological orientation, indicates the need for a more thorough conceptualization for the purpose of comparative analysis and the development of theories at the various levels of generalization for the purpose of organizing and studying empirical data” (1955, p. 23). Indeed, similar changes have been made at one time or another in almost every discipline from anthropology to zoology. So what I have to say should give all of us a sense of dejavu.

It would be a mistake to assume that only at the level of methodology are students of African politics failing to take advantage of contemporary developments in the social sciences. Indeed, our literature becomes a bad joke juxtaposed with a statement such as the one Bernard Gelbaum and James March have recently made: “Within the past two decades, mathematics has become indispensable to the student of human behavior.