The other day, somewhere between being a pediatric professor, thinking about medical education, and contemplating the many mysteries of human behaviour, I found myself troubled by a question of enormous scientific importance:
What exactly is so scientific about political science and social sciences? 😉
Perhaps medicine has spoiled me.
When somebody calls something “science,” my medical brain instinctively starts asking inconvenient questions.
What is your hypothesis? Where is your control group? What are the confounders? Can I reproduce your findings? And, most importantly, what is the level of evidence?
This works reasonably well when studying a drug.
Politics, however?
Imagine submitting an election as a clinical trial…!
Intervention: charismatic politician.
Controls: unavailable.
Blinding: absolutely impossible.
Confounders: unemployment, inflation, caste, class, religion, ideology, war, weather, scandals, social media, historical grievances, celebrity endorsements, WhatsApp forwards and whatever somebody says at 10:47 p.m. the night before polling.
Primary outcome: Who won?
Authors’ conclusion: Further research is required.
As a medical educationist, I would probably send the manuscript back asking for major revisions…!!
And sociology isn’t much kinder to the experimentalist…!
The fundamental particles of sociology are human beings, and human beings possess one deeply unscientific characteristic:
They know they are being studied (most of the times).
An electron does not read the latest paper about electron behaviour and announce:
“I find this model reductionist and shall behave differently henceforth.”
Humans can.
Tell people that consumers behave according to Pattern X and consumers may change. Tell politicians that voters respond to Strategy Y and every politician adopts Strategy Y. Voters notice. Journalists notice that voters have noticed. Politicians notice that journalists have noticed that voters have noticed.
Your beautifully significant p value has now entered intensive care…!!
Then comes my favourite problem:
Reproducibility.
Suppose political scientists conclude that Policy X caused Party A to win an election.
Wonderful.
Now reproduce it.
Same country. Same candidates. Same voters. Same economy. Same scandals. Same international environment. Same weather. Same television debates etc..
Except this time, remove Policy X.
Unfortunately, history does not have a “repeat experiment” button.
You cannot reload India 2014 from a previous save point.
At this stage, the clinician in me becomes suspicious.
But then the medical educationist in me whispers something uncomfortable:
“Professor, your own field isn’t quite that tidy either.”
Touché.
Medicine knows this problem rather well.
Patients are not identical laboratory mice. Children certainly aren’t. The same intervention does not produce precisely the same outcome in every child. Genetics differs. Nutrition differs. environments differ. Families differ. Adherence differs etc..
And medical education is even closer to the social sciences. Try proving that a teaching method “caused” better doctors twenty years later while controlling for intelligence, motivation, teachers, institutions, clinical exposure, culture and approximately half of human existence.
Good luck with the randomized controlled trial….!!
So perhaps demanding that every legitimate science resemble experimental physics is itself unscientific.
Astronomers cannot reproduce a supernova on request. Geologists cannot rerun the Himalayas. Epidemiologists cannot recreate a pandemic simply because Reviewer Two requested replication.
Science is not merely about repeating phenomena.
It is about method: systematic observation, measurement, hypothesis testing, transparent analysis, reproducible methods and, crucially, allowing evidence to prove us wrong.
By that definition, political scientists and sociologists certainly “can do science.”
But this creates another delightful problem.
If scientifically studying something makes the subject itself scientific, then religion must also be science. 😂
We can measure religious attendance, belief, demographics, behaviour and associations with health or voting.
Yet nobody would suggest that running a regression analysis on prayer converts theology into biochemistry…😉
And therein lies the distinction.
Politics isn’t science. Society isn’t science. Religion isn’t science.
But all three “can” contain phenomena that are investigated scientifically….!
Perhaps, then, my discomfort is really with the prestige carried by the word science.
Science sounds wonderfully authoritative.
But the farther we travel from molecules toward human beings, institutions and societies, the more conditional our conclusions become.
Medicine taught me something valuable here: evidence does not abolish uncertainty; good science tells us how uncertain we should be.
Perhaps that is the standard we should demand from every discipline bearing the name.
So I have made peace with Political Science and Social Science.
“Mostly”….
I will allow them the word science—with the same professional instinct with which I read the limitations section of a medical paper.
Political Science*
*Results may vary according to country, century, culture, economy, institutions, ideology, religion, charismatic leaders, irrational voters, social media, historical accidents and events nobody included in the original protocol.
Confidence interval: rather wide.
Further research, naturally, is required. 😉
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