ABSTRACT
Post-war, mid-twentieth century developments in political science, mainly of a methodologic flavor, transformed a discipline prone to historical narratives and descriptive tomes into a social science. We learned to count, measure, and generally to identify regularities and give precision to otherwise imprecise observations. But we forgot, for quite a long time, how to ask “Why?” And even in those cases where we did, it was often as an afterthought. The real triumph was the identification of empirical patterns in data, not explanations of them.
