POL 304 CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Politics

Politics (from Greek: Politiká, meaning "affairs of the cities") is the process of making decisions
that apply to members of a group.
It refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance—organized control over a human
community, particularly a state.
In modern nation states, people have formed political parties to represent their ideas. They agree
to take the same position on many issues, and agree to support the same changes to law and the
same leaders.
Politics is a multifaceted word. It has a set of fairly specific meanings that are descriptive and
nonjudgmental (such as "the art or science of government" and "political principles"), but often
does carry a connotation of dishonest malpractice. The negative connotation of politics, as seen
in the phrase "play politics", for example, has been in use since at least 1853, when abolitionist
Wendell Phillips declared: "We do not play politics; anti-slavery is no half-jest with us."
An election is usually a competition between different parties. Some examples of political
parties are the All Progressive Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria,
African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the Labour and Conservative in Great Britain
and the National Congress and Bharatiyya Janata Party (BJP) in India and Democratic and
Republican parties in the U.S.
A variety of methods are deployed in politics, which include promoting one's own political views
among people, negotiation with other political subjects, making laws, and exercising force,
including warfare against adversaries. Politics is exercised on a wide range of social levels, from
clans and tribes of traditional societies, through modern local governments, companies and
institutions up to sovereign states, to the international level.It is very often said that politics is
about power.
A political system is a framework which defines acceptable political methods within a given
society. History of political thought can be traced back to early antiquity, with seminal works
such as Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics and the works of Confucius.
Etymology
The word comes from the same Greek word from which the title of Aristotle's book Politics
(Polis) also derives; polis means "affairs of the cities". The book title was rendered in Early
Modern English in the mid-15th century as "Polettiques"; it became "politics" in Modern
English. The singular politic first attested in English 1430 and comes from Middle French
politique, in turn from Latin politicus, which is the Latinization of the Greek πολιτικός
(politikos), meaning amongst others "of, for, or relating to citizens", "civil", "civic", "belonging
to the state",[16] in turn from πολίτης (polites), "citizen"[17] and that from πόλις (polis), "city".

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Classifications
Formal Politics refers to the operation of a constitutional system of government and publicly
defined institutions and procedures. Political parties, public policy or discussions about war and
foreign affairs would fall under the category of Formal Politics.Many people view formal politics
as something outside of themselves, but that can still affect their daily lives.
Semi-formal Politics is Politics in government associations such as neighborhood associations, or
student governments where student government political party politics is often important.
Informal Politics is understood as forming alliances, exercising power and protecting and
advancing particular ideas or goals. Generally, this includes anything affecting one's daily life,
such as the way an office or household is managed, or how one person or group exercises
influence over another. Informal Politics is typically understood as everyday politics, hence the
idea that "politics is everywhere".
The state
The origin of the state is to be found in the development of the art of warfare. Historically
speaking, all political communities of the modern type owe their existence to successful warfare.
Kings, emperors and other types of monarchs in many countries including China and Japan, were
considered divine. Of the institutions that ruled states, that of kingship stood at the forefront until
the American Revolution put an end to the "divine right of kings". Nevertheless, the monarchy is
among the longest-lasting political institutions, dating as early as 2100 BC in Sumeria to the 21st
century AD British Monarchy. Kingship becomes an institution through the institution of
Hereditary monarchy.
The king often, even in absolute monarchies, ruled his kingdom with the aid of an elite group of
advisors, a council without which he could not maintain power. As these advisors and others
outside the monarchy negotiated for power, constitutional monarchies emerged, which may be
considered the germ of constitutional government.
The greatest of the king's subordinates, the earls and dukes in England and Scotland, the dukes
and counts in the Continent, always sat as a right on the council. A conqueror wages war upon
the vanquished for vengeance or for plunder but an established kingdom exacts tribute. One of
the functions of the council is to keep the coffers of the king full. Another is the satisfaction of
military service and the establishment of lordships by the king to satisfy the task of collecting
taxes and soldiers.
Forms of political organization
There are many forms of political organization, including states, non-government organizations
(NGOs) and international organizations such as the United Nations. States are perhaps the
predominant institutional form of political governance, where a state is understood as an
institution and a government is understood as the regime in power.

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According to Aristotle, states are classified into monarchies, aristocracies, timocracies,
democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies. Due to changes across the history of politics, this
classification has been abandoned.
All states are varieties of a single organizational form, the sovereign state. All the great powers
of the modern world rule on the principle of sovereignty. Sovereign power may be vested on an
individual as in an autocratic government or it may be vested on a group as in a constitutional
government. Constitutions are written documents that specify and limit the powers of the
different branches of government. Although a constitution is a written document, there is also an
unwritten constitution. The unwritten constitution is continually being written by the legislative
branch of government; this is just one of those cases in which the nature of the circumstances
determines the form of government that is most appropriate. England did set the fashion of
written constitutions during the Civil War but after the Restoration abandoned them to be taken
up later by the American Colonies after their emancipation and then France after the Revolution
and the rest of Europe including the European colonies.
There are many forms of government. One form is a strong central government as in France and
China. Another form is local government, such as the ancient divisions in England that are
comparatively weaker but less bureaucratic. These two forms helped to shape the practice of
federal government, first in Switzerland, then in the United States in 1776, in Canada in 1867
and in Germany in 1871 and in 1901, Australia. Federal states introduced the new principle of
agreement or contract. Compared to a federation, a confederation has a more dispersed system of
judicial power. In the American Civil War, the contention of the Confederate States that a State
could secede from the Union was untenable because of the power enjoyed by the Federal
government in the executive, legislative and judiciary branches.
According to professor A. V. Dicey in An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the
Constitution, the essential features of a federal constitution are: a) A written supreme constitution
in order to prevent disputes between the jurisdictions of the Federal and State authorities; b) A
distribution of power between the Federal and State governments and c) A Supreme Court vested
with the power to interpret the Constitution and enforce the law of the land remaining
independent of both the executive and legislative branches.
International politics
Global politics include different practices of political globalization in relation to questions of
social power: from global patterns of governance to issues of globalizing conflict. The 20th
century witnessed the outcome of two world wars and not only the rise and fall of the Third
Reich but also the rise and relative fall of communism. The development of the atomic bomb
gave the United States a more rapid end to its conflict in Japan in World War II. Later, the
hydrogen bomb became the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
Global politics also concerns the rise of global and international organizations. The United
Nations has served as a forum for peace in a world threatened by nuclear war, "The invention of
nuclear and space weapons has made war unacceptable as an instrument for achieving political
ends." Although an all-out final nuclear holocaust is radically undesirable for man, "nuclear
blackmail" comes into question not only on the issue of world peace but also on the issue of
national sovereignty. On a Sunday in 1962, the world stood still at the brink of nuclear war

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during the October Cuban Missile Crisis from the implementation of U.S. vs Soviet Union
nuclear blackmail policy.
According to political science professor Paul James, international politics is affected by values:
norms of human rights, ideas of human development, and beliefs such as cosmopolitanism about
how we should relate to each:
Cosmopolitanism can be defined as an international politics that, firstly, projects a sociality of
common political engagement among all human beings across the globe, and, secondly, suggests
that this sociality should be either ethically or organizationally privileged over other forms of
sociality.
Political corruption
William Pitt the Elder, speaking before the British House of Lords, 9 January 1770, observed:
"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it."This was echoed more
famously by John Dalberg-Acton over a century later: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely."
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate
private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political
opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal
acts by private persons or corporations not directly involved with the government. An illegal act
by an officeholder constitutes political corruption only if the act is directly related to their
official duties and/or power.
Forms of corruption vary, but include corruption, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage,
graft, and embezzlement. While corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug
trafficking, money laundering, and trafficking, it is not restricted to these activities.[citation
needed] The activities that constitute illegal corruption differ depending on the country or
jurisdiction. For instance, certain political funding practices that are legal in one place may be
illegal in another. In some cases, government officials have broad or poorly defined powers,
which make it difficult to distinguish between legal and illegal actions.[citation needed]
Worldwide, bribery alone is estimated to involve over 1 trillion US dollars annually. A state of
unrestrained political corruption is known as a kleptocracy, literally meaning "rule by thieves".
Political parties
A political party is a political organization that typically seeks to attain and maintain political
power within government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns, educational outreach
or protest actions. Parties often espouse an expressed ideology or vision bolstered by a written
platformwith specific goals, forming a coalition among disparate interests.
Politics as an academic discipline
Political science, the study of politics, examines the acquisition and application of power.
Political scientist Harold Lasswell defined politics as "who gets what, when, and how". Related
areas of study include political philosophy, which seeks a rationale for politics and an ethic of
public behaviour, as well as examining the preconditions for the formation of political

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communities; political economy, which attempts to develop understandings of the relationships
between politics and the economy and the governance of the two; and public administration,
which examines the practices of governance.[citation needed] The philosopher Charles Blattberg,
who has defined politics as "responding to conflict with dialogue," offers an account which
distinguishes political philosophies from political ideologies.
The first academic chair devoted to politics in the United States was the chair of history and
political science at Columbia University, first occupied by Prussian émigré Francis Lieber in
1857.
What is Contemporary Political Analysis?
Contemporary political analysis refers to new methods and approaches in political science that
seek to explain why certain political events occur, how they occur, when they occur and how
such events can be controlled. Contemporary political analysis is the major task undertaken by
Political Scientists. In this module, you will be introduced to what political analysis is;
approaches to political analysis and distinctions in approaches. In the first unit, you will be told
what an approach to political inquiry is all about. This unit will also provide us with the criteria
for distinguishing between various approaches in contemporary political analysis. The second
unit will focus on the divide in political science- between the normative, legal and philosophical
approaches and contemporary approaches in political inquiry. The third unit looks at the
distinctive features of a scientific enterprise. In the fourth unit, we would attempt a general
understanding of the concept of politics. Here, we would argue that the concept of politics does
not have a universal definition. However, scholars have viewed it in three perspectives:
government; power, authority and conflict; and the authoritative allocation of values. The focus
of unit five is on understanding the concept of politics. The general theme of this module is that
that political science can never be an exact science as physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, it
adopts the scientific approach in the study of political phenomena.
Blondel (1976:13) identifies the development of contemporary political analysis as a history of
the ‘three main battlefields’, each dominating political analysis at different times. One
‘battlefield’ has been represented by the distinction between normative and distinctive political
science- that is, the study of what ought to be versus the study of what actually occurs. Second,
Blondel identifies the ‘battlefield’ between law and reality, the problem of structures, in which
a legal approach is taken towards the study of politics. Examples of this approach would be
analyses which focuses upon constitutional law, public law and administrative law, when the
problem rotates around the question of implementations of rules plays in political life’ (Ibid:
21). The problem here is that political behaviour is influenced by a range of structures and
procedures (for example, the family, membership of the political party) which lie beyond the
remit of legal rules. Blondel’s third ‘battlefield’ is that between the unique and the general in
which we have witnessed a move towards the quantification of political analysis and the
development of behaviouralism (which was first developed in the USA). It is this approach
which makes the difference between political studies and political science, and which we refer to
as contemporary political analysis. Hence, contemporary political analysis can be defined as
new processes, approaches and strategies that guide the political scientists in studying political
phenomena. Contemporary political analysis requires adopting new tools, methods, and concepts
in dissecting political phenomenon in other to explain why an event occurred, how it occurred,
when it occurred and how a political analyst can predict and control political events. Analysis is

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a word that has a variety of meanings; since this is the concern of this course, I would advise
you to pause a bit and consider its varieties. To chemists, analysis means breaking things down
into their constituents parts; to biologists, sorting things into categories; to mathematicians,
deriving conclusions from premises, to social scientists, identifying the causes of various kinds
of human behaviour; to moral philosophers, showing which actions are good ones. A common
thread that runs through all these definitions is the attempt to answer one kind of question or
another: what is the nature of this substance? What species of animals do we have here? What is
the solution to this problem? Why did she refuse to vote in the election? Thus, to analyse
something means to ask a question; give an answer, and then give the reasons for the answer. In
looking at political analysis that political scientists have engaged in: we have labelled them
scientific, normative, descriptive and logical.
Contemporary Political Analysis provides students with a continuation of the principles of social
science research design and empirical analysis that they were exposed to in their first year
courses. The course begins with a review of the role of research design, method and
methodology in the social sciences that draws on examples from both qualitative and quantitative
political science and international relations. This discussion is complemented with an
introduction to applied data analytics using a statistical software package. The skills, ways of
thinking and techniques learned in this course will provide the necessary foundation for the more
advanced application of social science research methodology used in the public and private
sectors as well as the honours and graduate levels of study.
Political Analysis
Political analysis refers to processes, methods and approaches in political science that seek to
explain why certain political events occur, how they occur, when they occur and how such
events can be controlled. Contemporary political analysis is the major task undertaken by
Political Scientists. According to Osaghae (1988) political analysis has three main goals:  To
know what is important in politics, i.e. those things that influence or determine the outcome of
events.  To know what is valuable, i.e. the difference every political outcome makes to our
desires, both individually and collectively; and  To know what is real or true by systematically
subjecting our guesses, impressions, popular belief, even rumours, to verification. Political
analysis covers some of the important philosophical questions underlying the epistemological,
ontological and methodological choices that all political scientists must make, and relate these to
current research and debates in the discipline. There are different types of political analysis. In
the sections below, you will be introduced to these different types in contemporary political
analysis.
1. Normative Analysis When we talk of normative analysis in political science, our focus is on
the type of political analysis that asks questions of value and seeks to identify what is good or
better with a view to recommending what we ought to value. It will ask, for instance, whether,
when, and why we ought to value freedom, or democracy or equality and why should we obey
the state. Many of the ‘founding fathers’ of political science, ranging from Plato through Thomas
Hobbes to a more recent major work of political philosophy, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice
(see Rawls, 1971), have all sought to set out what constitutes the ‘good life’, the kind of society
and polity within which it would be desirable for us to live.
2. Empirical Analysis The second type of analysis common to politics is empirical. Empirical
analysis seeks to identify observable phenomena in the real world with a view to establishing
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what is, rather than what ought to be. Empirical analysis, of course, is the basis of the natural
sciences, and many so-called positivist political analysts seek to bring to bear what they see as
the impartial and value free methods of the natural sciences to the study of political phenomena.
A key element of the empirical approach to the study of political institutions and processes is the
comparative method. When political scientists seek to develop testable generalisations by
examining political phenomena across different political systems or historically within the same
political system, they are carrying out comparative analysis. Comparative political analysis is
also an aid in understanding and identifying those characteristics which may be universal to the
political process, regardless of time or place. The quality of empirical analysis depends on its
explanatory and predictive force. For instance, because empirical analysis involves making
predictions, its quality will be determined by how true the predictions prove to be. To this extent,
“empirical analysis falls short of what we want from it if it leads to expectations about the future
that are falsified by events” (Dahl, 1976).
3. Semantic Analysis The third type of analysis commonly used in politics is that of semantics.
This is also called conceptual analysis. As its name suggests, this form of analysis is concerned
with clarifying the meaning of concepts. This is an important function in political studies. So
many of the concepts used in politics like power, influence, democracy, freedom, development,
even politics itself, have no commonly accepted definitions and, indeed, have been described as
‘essentially contested concepts’ (Gallie, 1956). In effect, defining what we mean by these terms
therefore is a crucial starting point in any political analysis. According to Osaghae (1988), there
are two ways of carrying out semantic analysis. First, a term or concept can be defined by
appealing to an authority whose definition is widely accepted, or by relying on definitions
offered in Standard English or technical dictionaries. This is called nominal definition. Second,
in the case of concepts like democracy, freedom, or equality which are often coloured by
ideological considerations, we can devise certain "objective" indices according to which they can
be defined, and insist that they mean exactly what we want them to mean. This is called
“operationalisation” of concepts.
4. Policy Analysis Policy analysis involves the search for policies or course of action which will
take us from the present state to that which we desire. In other words, policies are solutions
which we think will bring desired and satisfactory results. Certainly, in any unsatisfactory
situation, there would be more than one possible solution. Each of these options has the potential
to help us achieve our desired goal. But the option or options we will choose would depend on
many considerations: how we define the goal or problem, the relative costs and benefits of each
option, the practicability of each option and so on. All policies involve decision making by
public officials that authorise or give direction and content to public policy actions. Decision-
making involves the choice of an alternative from a series of competing alternatives. Some
decisions which affect public policy actions are fundamental while others are largely routine and
are made by officials in the day-to-day application of public policy.
Theoretical Approaches in Political Analysis
Theoretical approaches in political analysis. In the section above, you have been told that an
approach to a discipline is the particular orientation that one adopts when addressing the subject.
It is a predisposition to adopt a conceptual framework and to explore certain hypotheses in order
to generate theory (Bill and Hardware Jnr, 1982).

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An approach may be implicit or explicit, but it must be identifiable because it determines the
questions, perspectives, and procedures or methods that a researcher will use in his or her study.
An approach provides a guide in selecting facts and organizing them in a meaningful way.
Scholars have tended to bring approaches and methods of study from other fields to their
research in political science. The discipline is therefore multidisciplinary. As well, different
generations of scholars have developed approaches based on their unique interests, values, and
methodologies. Approaches to the study of politics have therefore changed overtime, with
notions about which ones were best, shifting according to what was needed, or sometimes
fashionable, to study specific topics or problems.
However, they mostly focus now on vital questions such as who exercises power and influence
in political decision making and how politicians seek and maintain power. In contemporary
political science, you will discover that there is no universally accepted approach. Instead, what
you will find out is that there are a number of alternative approaches each with its own claimed
advantages. No approach is right or wrong.
Quite interestingly, most approaches to the study of politics have been borrowed by political
scientists from other disciplines. Systems and structural functional analysis are largely the
products of sociology and anthropology. Game theory was developed by economists and
mathematics. Psychologists are responsible for learning theory, which is an aspect of political
culture. In essence, the portrait of political science is one of a highly pluralistic discipline that
comprises several approaches, which are assessed based on the evaluative criteria already
mentioned in this unit.
Underlying all approaches to the study of politics, however, is the principle that political
scientists should be analytical and comparative and should avoid basing generalisations on causal
observation (Jackson and Jackson, 2000:31). They have argued that whether the research is
based on experiments, statistics, or configurative case studies, it ought to be ordered by the desire
to be explicit about the rules employed to describe and analyse politics. Jackson and Jackson also
argue that many modern approaches to the study of political science are based on the belief that
studies of politics must employ a general theory of the polity; that is, they must identify all the
critical structures and processes of society, explain their interrelationships with politics, and
predict a wide range of governmental outcomes. Such a theory, it is argued, would allow scholars
to obtain scientific-law-like generalisations about politics.
Two analogies summarise the core of this debate on the status of general theory in political
science. One is that politics is like the shifting formlessness of clouds; the other is that it is based
on precise mechanical causation like a watch. But for Gabriel Almond and Stephen Genco, in
their “Clouds, Clocks and the Study of Politics”, the conclusion is that “the current quandary in
political science can, to a large extent, by the fact, by themselves, clock model assumptions are
inappropriate in dealing with the substance of political phenomena”. Almond and Genco
maintain that politics is not totally predictable because, since human behaviour is involved, there
can be no direct cause-and-effect relationship among the variables. They contend that political
reality “has distinctive properties which make it unamendable to the forms of explanations used
in the natural sciences. Therefore, the science of politics should not be seen as a set of methods
with a predetermined theory, but rather, as Almond and Genco noted, as a “commitment to
explore and attempt to understand a given segment of empirical reality” (Almond and Genco,
1977).
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Tools for Contemporary Political Analysis
Several tools are proposed as instrument with which political analysis could be carried out.
Approaches
An approach to political inquiry refers to a general strategy for studying political phenomena
(Isaak, 1985:185). In other words, approaches are attempts to develop strategies for directing
research activities of political scientists. They represent a set of assumptions that structure the
research of any political scientists. Approaches provide political scientists with underlying
assumption and organising concepts or set of concepts that orients research and coordinate
empirical data from several sources. A list of all the observations, one makes in a day will be
useless, unless the observations are selected and organised according to a set of assumptions or
an approach. In essence, approaches articulate the basic assumptions that shape political science
research. They are tools that are useful in opening the political scientists mind to new concepts,
hypothesis and theories. Many historians of science have emphasised the role of approaches in
scientific discovery. They have noted that great “change is brought about, not by new
observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were taking
place inside the minds of the scientists themselves” (Butterfield, 1957). This psychological
change is usually manifested by a change in approaches. An example of physics can be a change
from Newton to Einstein. An overt approach is not necessary for the discovery of new concepts
and relationships, at least for the political scientists. As earlier mentioned, an approach may
involve the attempt to locate an organising concept or set of concepts that can orient research and
coordinate empirical data from several sources. For example, when political scientists research
democracy, they are interested in universal concepts like free elections, human rights, the rule of
law, the well being of the citizens etc. All these concepts would enable them orient their
research. An approach according to Isaak (1985) is designed to include a wide range of political
phenomena as possible within a single set of concepts. It is the responsibility of the political
scientists to determine how much revision is required if it is to include an even wider range of
sources. Or it may be realised that it applies only to a limited range. This activity involves both
conceptual analysis and empirical research as the conceptual scheme is refined and expanded or
reduced in scope. In this process, the political scientists will be able to organise the study and
may have hypotheses suggested to him/her. The ultimate success in this regard, in the final
analysis would be the generation of an empirical theory. In political analysis, you will discover
that some of the approaches to be examined are highly developed more than others. Some are
broad conceptual schemes, while others are narrower models revolving around a single central
concept. Some are sets of empirical generalisations, while others are formal models. However,
you must be aware that the various approaches only represents the idea of cutting into politics at
a number of points to examine different slices of political life. Thus, no approach is right or
wrong: but some may be more useful than others may. However, because political scientists do
not have a finely honed knife available, there is an overlap in the approaches, as they may be a
thin line of demarcation when we empirically want to differentiate between one approach from
another. Nevertheless, they are differences to be drawn that are meaningful to the political
analyst. In this course, several major evaluative criteria will be employed as approaches are
examined. Among them: how appropriate the approach is for political analysis; how effectively it
organises knowledge; how fruitful it is in suggesting new insights and hypotheses. The last

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criterion is the one we are mostly interested in, for it speaks directly about the role of approaches
to the process of discovery.
Models
Generally, a model is defined as a theoretical construct that represents political processes by a set
of variables and a set of logical and/or quantitative relationships between them. Models are
simplified frameworks designed to illustrate complex processes, often but not always using
mathematical techniques. Models are abstraction of a real-life system used to facilitate
understanding and to aid in decision making. In political analysis, models refer to a
representation of some phenomenon of the real world made in order to facilitate an
understanding of its workings. A model is a simplified and generalised version of real political
events, from which the incidental detail, or ‘noise’, has been removed. Whilst nobody doubts that
models have a useful heuristic role in science, there has been intense debate over whether a good
explanation of some phenomenon needs a model, or whether an organised structure of laws from
which it can be deduced suffices for scientific explanation. The debate was inaugurated by
Durkheim in his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906), which attacked the ‘shallow’
pictorial imaginings of British physicists, contrasting them with the pure deductive structures of
proper science. Good models often represent simplifications and idealisations and even while
fertile and useful can be approximations to more complex real phenomena. In the most general
sense, a model is anything used in any way to represent anything else. Conceptual models, may
only be drawn on paper, described in words, or imagined in the mind. They are used to help us
know and understand the subject matter they represent.
Paradigms
The historian of science Thomas Kuhn gave paradigm its contemporary meaning when he
adopted the word to refer to the set of practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular
period of time. Kuhn himself came to prefer the terms exemplar and normal science, which have
more precise philosophical meanings. However in his book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as:
 What is to be observed and scrutinized.
 The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this
subject
 How these questions are to be structured.
 How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted alternatively, the Oxford
English Dictionary defines paradigm as “a pattern or model, an exemplar.” Thus an additional
component of Kuhn's definition of paradigm is:
 How is an experiment to be conducted, and what equipment is available to conduct the
experiment. Thus, within normal science, the paradigm is the set of exemplary experiments that
are likely to be copied or emulated. In this scientific context, the prevailing paradigm often
represents a more specific way of viewing reality, or limitations on acceptable programs for
future research, than the more general scientific method. A currently accepted paradigm would
be the standard model of physics. The scientific method would allow for orthodox scientific

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investigations into phenomena which might contradict or disprove the standard model. One
important aspect of Kuhn's paradigms is that the paradigms are incommensurable, meaning two
paradigms cannot be reconciled with each other because they cannot be subjected to the same
common standard of comparison. That is, no meaningful comparison between them is possible
without fundamental modification of the concepts that are an intrinsic part of the paradigms
being compared. This way of looking at the concept of "paradigm" creates a paradox of sorts,
since competing paradigms are in fact constantly being measured against each other.
(Nonetheless, competing paradigms are not fully intelligible solely within the context of their
own conceptual frameworks). For this reason, paradigm as a concept in the philosophy of science
might more meaningfully be defined as a self-reliant explanatory model or conceptual
framework. This definition makes it clear that the real barrier to comparison is not necessarily
the absence of common units of measurement, but an absence of mutually compatible or
mutually intelligible concepts. Under this system, a new paradigm which replaces an old
paradigm is not necessarily better, because the criteria of judgment are controlled by the
paradigm itself, and by the conceptual framework which defines the paradigm and gives it its
explanatory value.
Conceptual Frameworks
Conceptual frameworks also known as theoretical frameworks are a type of intermediate theory
that attempt to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature
review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks can act like maps
that give coherence to empirical inquiry. Because conceptual frameworks are potentially so close
to empirical inquiry, they take different forms depending upon the research question or problem.

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