A Case for Description

Abstract

Descriptive research - work aimed at answering who, what, when, where, and how questions - is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description - through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form - is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as merely descriptive (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.