Charlie Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) and Arjan H. Schakel (Maastricht
University) have edited a special issue for Regional Studies (Volume 43 Issue 3)
called ‘Towards a Regional Political Science: Data and Methods ‘Beyond
Methodological Nationalism’’.
The term ‘methodological
nationalism’ describes the tendency within political science to focus on the
nation-state as the main unit of analysis in studying social and political life,
and to neglect the region as a unit for political analysis. The tendency to
choose the nation-state as a unit of analysis has been widespread across the
social sciences, and has often been an unreflected and uncritical, or
‘naturalised’ choice. However, there is now compelling evidence that sub-state,
or regional scales have become much more important as the locus for social and
political life over the last three to four decades. The importance of the
sub-state region is not fully recognized in political science, despite the
growing empirical evidence of the importance of the regional scale and despite
the growth in what might be called ‘regional’ political scientists.
This
Special Issue is about how to identify ‘territorial effects’ at regional scales,
in particular the data we need to harness to do so. It is also about how we can
best analyze those data: it is not clear that conventional assumptions about how
to do political science analysis are appropriate to regional-scale analysis if
those assumptions themselves are reflections of the naturalisation of a
nation-state unit of analysis.
The papers are available here
