Political psychology is a relatively young empirical enterprise. As dated by research involving quantitative techniques such as sample surveys and laboratory experiments, political psychology does not begin to approach the long histories of chemistry, physics, and astronomy. And even considering the application of typically qualitative analytic methods such as case studies and historical document analysis, our enterprise is in its relative youth (see, e.g., Hermann 1986).

Partly as a result of our youth and partly as a reflection of it, we have not experienced the dramatic paradigm shifts that other sciences have (see, e.g., Kuhn 1970). Whereas other disciplines have seen the rise and fall of major organizing theoretical perspectives, we have shown no signs yet of rejecting old overarching perspectives in favor of new ones. There have also been no dramatic shifts during the history of political psychology in terms of the methods we employ to evaluate our hypotheses empirically. This is not to say that methods are uniformly employed by investigators across the subfield; clearly, this is not the case. But the current state of affairs seems to be one of tolerance of a multiplicity of methods, rather than a universal sense that some methods have proven not to be useful while others are.

Yet a close look at the history of studies in some areas of political psychology suggests that there might be some useful lessons to be learned about the value of certain methods over others.