ABSTRACT
Categorization of ideas, people, institutions, and nations continues unabated as an intellectual force in political science. Categories of analysis run the gamut from mutually exclusive groupings to more complex constructions such as distinctions between people based in ideological positions. Groupings by race and gender are most often treated as static traits located toward the beginning of the causal chain, yet even these apparently high face-validity categories have broken down. The political dynamism accompanying globalization, democratization, and international migration suggests a reconfiguration of both analytic starting points and interpretive strategies for political science. In the study of political behavior in the U.S., scholars need to consider categories of analysis much more carefully, specifying and disentangling why and how the categories are created, what purpose the distinctions serve, why the “default” category is defined as it is, and how categories intersect with one another. Substantively, this kind of analysis is linked with a normative concern with inequality.
