ABSTRACT
Social scientific approaches usually perceive the historical method only as a preparatory method providing evidence for the subsequent “secondary methods” such as causal narratives, process tracing, and pattern matching (Lange 2013: 43–55). From that perspective, the former deliver a descriptive “data base,” while the latter focus on drawing inferences and, ideally, extracting and explaining alleged causal relationships (Lange 2013: 42). According to this view, “researchers employ historical narrative for descriptive purposes, that is, to document what happened and what the characteristics of a phenomenon were” (Lange 2013: 56). This chapter supports the argument that historical methods can contribute more to political studies than series of past events or attempts to describe past persons and institutions. They can take an important stance in interpretivist approaches to political science because interpretation has always constituted a key element of the historical discipline, where the inquirer needs to accord meaning to actions and occurrences on a strongly individual and contextualized basis. Before the rise of the behavioralist approach in the first half of the twentieth century, the human sciences, and especially history, already provided a constitutive epistemological ground for the study of politics (Bevir and Rhodes 2002: 132; Oren 2006).
