Finlayson, Alan. "The Interpretive Approach in Political Science: A Symposium". British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol.6 (2004): 129-164.

Finlayson, Alan. "The Interpretive Approach in Political Science: A Symposium". British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol.6 (2004): 129-164.

This article is a response from multiple scholars to issues of interpretivist methodology raised in 'Interpreting British Governance', published in 2003, by Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes. Alan Finlayson's portions with be labeled purple, Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes's green, Keith Dowding's red, and Colin Hay's pink.

• British academia never fully embraced behaviorism or other positivist methodologies like the USA did, presumably leaving fertile ground for the growth of interpretivism (129).

• Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes claim that all work in political science uses broad concepts and assumptions to explain individual action. Individual reasons for doing things, like voting for particular parties, are explained with reference to broader trends and traditions (131).
• Traditions and broad concepts do not exist separately from the group of individuals that hold these beliefs, but a set of individual beliefs can be aggregated into a tradition of thought. Moreover, this pre-existing set of traditions and beliefs influence and shape individual political beliefs (131).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes are critical of positivist methods of political science, instead asserting that all institutions and actions in politics are given a socially constructed meaning that cannot be conceptualized and examined outside of that social matrix (132).
• In this way, political science is similar to history because an assemblage of facts does not constitute knowledge. Rather, knowledge is only created by the creation of narratives and logics that weave those facts together into claims to knowledge. Moreover, this knowledge cannot be complete and is neither objective nor absolute (132).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes claim that contemporary Britain has four traditions of governance, each with separate understandings of that term and the purpose of British government: Tory, Whig, Liberal, and Socialist (133).
• The Tories see the Thatcher era as transformative, with the Thatcher government destroying non-government institutions with control over individuals, allowing them to create an individualist and entrepreneurial culture. They believe that monarchy, church, local government, and the bureaucracy were important institutions for British life and should be restored to an important role in governance (134).
• Liberals endorse Thatcherite reforms as necessary and a positive step towards the liberation of the individual through the free market. They imagine governance as an interconnected group of individuals and communities, together forming a commonwealth represented the common private interests of citizens (134).
• The Whigs say very little about government, but like to imagine a continuity between new and old in British political life. Ideal government would be the repurposing of traditional British practices for new purposes (134).
• New Labour believes that the essence of effective government is trust, with the preferred basis of public-private relations being mutually beneficial partnerships. They are opposed to market relationships, but also to bureaucratized relationships of command, as advocated by Old Labour (134).
• Understanding how politics works requires understanding how people think, which in turn requires historical and ethnographic modes of research to hear the stories of individuals (134-135).

• Keith Dowding thinks that Drs. Bevir and Rhodes are making a self-evident point look like a stroke of genius (136). Moreover, that realization has not been meaningfully useful because it simply presents multiple perspectives without conducting the analysis and comparison needed to determine why Thatcherism succeeded or what it has accomplished (137).
• Political scientists, even those doing statistical regression, are still doing a form of interpretivism because they are interpreting the meaning and relationships of statistics or survey results (138).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes advocate privileging interviews with policy makers over other forms of research and methodology. This is dangerous because these sources may lie or only tell select elements of the overall narrative. This kind of research needs to be complimented by other techniques, techniques that Drs. Bevir and Rhodes have largely ignored (137-138), 141.
• This can be a useful form of research, but there are many types of questions in politics and sociology that interpretivism cannot answer. For example, why have marriage rates gone down? Interprevitism can provide some hypothetical answers, but there is still a need to use statistics to test these hypotheses (139).
• Dr. Dowding outs himself as a 'realist', meaning he actually and unironically believes that political science uncovers objective truths about politics (140).
• Understanding what people believe to be true is important and helps us understanding why actors behave the way they do, but it is not a substitute for finding out what actually happened and what the actual impact of different factors has been on politics. Why something has happened and why people think it has happened are both important questions, but they are distinct and one cannot replace the other (140).

• Colin Hay says Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes are part of a broader 'ideational turn' within political science among the Anglophone countries, a move that threatens to undermine the postivist epistemological basis of political science as a discipline (142-143).
• Since the Second World War, the most influential methods of political science have been behaviourism and rational choice theory, both of which claim that political and social laws based on objective truth can be generated with the appropriate methodology, just like in the hard sciences (143).
• The rational choice theorists and behaviorists also disagree with each other, as the rational choice theorists assume that all people will rationally pursue self-interest in a given circumstance, whereas behaviorists think that individual behavior has to first be determined through experimental observation (143).
• Interpretivism and other ideational theories threaten the basis of positivist political science because they state that the ideas held by individuals can influence their behavior. This means that there is neither a rational basis for human action nor a biological basis grounded in human nature. As a result, there are no organic laws about politics and political science cannot be studied the same way as the hard sciences (144).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes seem to imply that interpretivism can coexist with other positivist forms of political science. This is simply untrue, as it actively undermines the basis for any positivist theories of politics (143-145).     
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes do not adequately address the explanatory aspects of interpretivism, instead focusing on how different actors in the British political system construct meaning. They do not, however, do any work showing how those different constructed interpretations affect political behavior (144-146).
•  Suggests that 'constructivism' and 'interpretivism' may be two sides of the same coin, with the application of interpretivism in explaining political action and causality being called constructivism (147).
• Social constructivism is the methodological approach that observes that everything is a historically-specific contingency, nothing is predetermined, and nothing is natural or inevitable in politics. Things could always be different and the artificial and constructed nature of the present reality should be recognized (147).
• The response to this view should be to treat 'common knowledge' and orthodoxy with much more suspicion and look for alternative interpretations of the facts that allow for different, sometimes radically different, alternative policies (147-149).

• Alan Finlayson claims Interpretivism falls between hermeneutics, which denies human autonomy, and post-structuralism, which often denies any possibility of reason or truth. Interpretivism acts as a third way in methodology, allowing scholars to recognize different interpretations of events through human agency, but also recognizing the role played by cultural, social, and administrative structures in shaping individual thought and behavior (150).
• Dr. Finlayson has a problem with the idea that structures and actors could mutually shape each other, seeing the claims that structures shape individual thought and actors shape broader traditions of thought as contradictory (151).
• Overall, Drs. Bevir and Rhodes do not put enough attention into looking at how is able to shape and challenge traditions of thought and under what circumstances. Poverty, unemployment, and immigration are identified as problems by the Thatcher government, and thus constituting an important position in the Liberal tradition of thought, but Drs. Bevir and Rhodes do not say how those issues, and not others, entered that tradition of thought or why (151).
• They also fail to critically look at why different events or perspectives are prioritized in different accounts of the Thatcher administration. Drs. Bevir and Rhodes explain what different narratives are being told, but do not do the work of actually analyzing the implications of different people framing those narratives as opposed to others (152).
• Interpretivism is a conservative way of looking at politics, since it explicitly states that politics has been looked at as an organic form that resists categorization. This is in opposition to political science and postivism, which says that politics and society can be categorized and manipulated and observed based on these categories, allowing for societal planning (153).
• Dr. Finlayson says that there is a way to breach this conservatism, by deepening the investigation of ideological traditions in politics, and looking not only at the history of ideas, but also at the ideologies and implications of different ideas and narratives. It still says that politics resists categorization, but understands that ideas are not organic or natural, but are actively constructed by humans to serve political and ideological ends (153-155).
• Overall, a need for interpretivism to question why certain traditions exist and why those traditions value certain narratives over others. It needs to recognize not only that narratives affect and determine the scope of future politics, but also that those narratives are artificial constructs created to serve political ends (154-155).
• Dr. Finlayson disagrees with the focus that other authors have on explanatory theory. Instead of always seeking to use interpretivism to explain why politics has occurred in a certain way, he thinks that the more important responsibility of research is to show the limitations of political thought and possibility implied in different narratives and traditions, and then use analysis of these limitation to imagine new political alternatives (155-156).

• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes explain that they do not advocate only using an interpretivist approach to politics, but instead claim that no understanding of British politics can be complete without using interpretivism. This view will not be objective, but they don't believe objectivity exists in political science anyway, so that's fine (156).
• Although their recent book depends almost entirely on interviews, Drs. Bevir and Rhodes believe that any methodology of research can be combined with interpretivism. Interpretivism is about the analysis of data, not its collection (157).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes do not see a problem with people deliberating lying about their motives in interviews. That is just part of human nature and cannot be avoided. The false narratives that people tell are still important (158).
• The causes of political events cannot be pinpointed or experimentally derived like they can in the hard sciences. Instead, the closest that political science can get is describing the beliefs and ideas that motivated people to act in certain ways (158-159).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes specifically reject Dr. Hay's claim that narratives should be compared to establish 'true' causation. Instead, the only possible thing is to present the narratives; it is impossible to identify things in those narratives that may have caused political actions (158-159).     
• Recognize that traditions are the result of individuals exercising power by creating certain narratives and not others, and that individual ideas are structured in a power dynamic by the intellectual and ideological traditions that exist (160).
• Drs. Bevir and Rhodes do not believe that traditions actually do limit the beliefs that individuals can hold, although they do structure and affect most beliefs. Since individuals are not actually intellectually limited by traditions, there is no need for theory to 'expand the possibilities' of political action (160-161).
• They feel that their work already meet critical standards by showing that multiple narratives exist about the same events, therefore they are artificially constructed (160-161). 
• This obviously does not meet the standards set out by Dr. Finlayson in his critique of their work, since they neither look at why those narratives are different nor explain how those different narratives are limiting or controlling.