Abstract
The research process of authoring a review paper constitutes a uniquely important context for interrogating tacit premises and presuppositions, especially when the review aspires to synthesize a methodologically diverse field of research. This article presents a reflexive recounting of a research experience with mixed methods team-based review paper authorship, showing how the function of a review paper may be differently conceptualized by scholars situated in methodological traditions that place their emphasis on drawing-together knowledge about the social world versus those situated in methodological traditions whose primary aim is to unpack accepted categories. The analysis thus offers insights into dimensions of methodological difference as they operate in practice, while underscoring the significance of reflexivity in the review paper context for purposes of advancing meaningfully inclusive maps of an intellectual community’s self-understanding(s).
Keywords
Introduction
Review papers are notably distinct as a genre of social science knowledge-making, insofar as they do not directly examine behavior, language, or institutions in the social domain, but rather seek to make intelligible what others have had to say about such matters. In recent years publishers of annual reviews have expanded their offerings of freestanding review papers not only in the biomedical, life, and physical sciences but also in the social sciences (Annual Reviews, 2023). For students and early career researchers, general directions on the “what,” “how” and “why” of literature reviewing can be found in accessibly written guides dedicated to this topic (Aveyard, 2019; Fink, 2019; Galvan & Galvan, 2017; Hart, 2018; Imel, 2011). Some introductory methods texts also contain sections on the literature review (Booth et al., 2016; Creswell & Creswell, 2017). Yet, as qualitative methods specialists have observed, complex methodological challenges are raised when the field under review includes studies that do not conform to conventional experimental style and/or that do not adhere to neo-positivist tenets (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2002; Thomas et al., 2017).
There is thus substantial analytical leverage to be gained from bringing to light the “tacit ways of knowing” (Polanyi, 1966) specific to this research context. Indeed, if we recognize that judgments of what “the literature” is and what constitutes a “contribution” thereto are neither automatic nor without politics (Schatz, 2017, p. 135), then it is evident that review papers constitute a uniquely important domain for interrogating our tacit premises and presuppositions. A more explicit consideration of both positivist-inspired and non-positivist paradigms of review paper authorship, I contend, contributes to laying the groundwork for reflexive methodological ecumenicism as a normative commitment within qualitative research (Denzin, 2010; Schram, 2004). To advance ongoing reflexive scholarly interchange along these lines, this article asks two related sets of questions. First, what are the tacit ways of knowing that guide review paper authorship and in what ways do they inform how review authors (and their readers) make sense of a topic of scholarship? Second, what broader implications might methodological choices made in writing a review paper have for how a scholarly community comes to understand diversity within its ranks and for how it envisions promising future directions for research?
To address these questions, I offer a reflexive recounting of my own experience with collaborative review paper authorship. In reflecting on this research experience, which concluded some years ago, my narrative highlights the research team members’ differing theoretical and methodological perspectives and focuses on how these forms of positionality informed our tacit understandings about the type of knowledge that our review paper aimed to generate. Specifically, my reflection on this research process produces the surprising insight that authors of review papers in the social sciences may need to grapple not only with epistemological questions, such as what criteria to use in evaluating various contributions to a given body of scholarship, but also with the fundamentally ontological question of whether the field under review is better represented as an objective empirical phenomena or rather as a social construction advanced by its scholarly contributors. In elucidating these paradigmatically different approaches to mapping existing knowledge, the concrete social science research experience presented in this article should be of interest to all qualitative researchers who consider themselves readers or writers of review papers.
The Judicialization of Politics as the Subject of a Social Science Review Paper
The research process that forms the basis for this reflection was a team-based project to author a social science review paper examining how comparative political science scholarship has studied the phenomenon labeled “the judicialization of politics.” Broadly speaking, this term references “the reliance on courts and judicial means for addressing core moral predicaments, public policy questions, and political controversies” (Hirschl, 2008, p. 119). Judicialization has been labeled as one of the most significant phenomena of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century politics; significantly, however, social science researchers have deployed a range of strategies for conceptualizing and measuring judicialization. The term has been used in academic writing to refer to types of phenomena – ranging from judicial activism and rights jurisprudence to debates over the politicization of the judiciary – that are arguably distinct (Thévenot, 1986). Within the discipline of political science, these judicialization dynamics have been studied from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.
As a scholar working within political science, these features of judicialization scholarship rendered it a seemingly promising topic on which to undertake the writing of a review paper. My research had examined the politics of law primarily from a constructivist-interpretivist perspective, and I therefore approached review paper authorship with an awareness that my approach lay outside the methodological mainstream of current scholarly research on judicialization. At the same time, I was encouraged by the ecumenical editorial stance presented by the political science annual review compendia (Polsby, 1998). Accordingly, when I was invited to collaborate with two colleagues on a review of scholarship addressing the “judicialization of politics,” I hoped that our differing research backgrounds within the discipline of political science – grounded in the traditions of constructivist sociolegal scholarship, institutionalist political science, and political economy modeling respectively – would be an asset insofar as this diversity among investigators would allow for a richer review.
What I did not fully anticipate was that, although my co-authors and I shared a generally similar understanding of which existing studies we wished to map, our distinct epistemic positionalities would lead us to approach the review paper’s mapping project in strikingly different ways. Over the course of our collaboration, it became clear that my co-authors were both drawn to approach the mapping of existing scholarly knowledge as a preliminary to hypothesis testing of a sort they associated with a commitment to social “science.” By contrast, my own approach gravitated towards approaching both our own mapping project and that of prior judicialization researchers as socially constructed. Thus, although all three of us conceptualized the review paper as a “mapping” project, our collaborative effort towards an integrated text foundered as the implications of these competing understandings came into view through the iterative process of formulating our ideas and responding to each other’s formulations.
Methods
In offering a narrative account of this research experience with social science review paper authorship, I draw on drafts exchanged among co-authors and notes from our exchanges as we made sense of our own and each other’s constructions of our material in the moment. As qualitative methodologists have shown, bringing a reflexive approach to the deskwork aspects of team-based research facilitates greater awareness of investigators’ respective epistemic positions and fosters understanding of how these positions impact meaning-making (Dean, 2017; Kacen & Chaitin, 2006; Wells et al., 2020). My narrative account of this research experience also leverages retrospective reflection to make sense of collaborative review paper authorship. As qualitative methodologists recognize, the benefit of hindsight can deepen understanding of what is influencing our knowledge production and how this influence takes place (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003, p. 419).
In developing a narrative account of this team-based research experience, my ability to be reflexive and articulate the nature of the tensions between our divergent mapping approaches was enhanced by insights from critical mapping scholarship’s constructivist exploration of the science of cartography (Edney, 2019; Latour, 1990). This body of scholarship has sought to unpack cartographic knowledge claims, offering a rich vocabulary for articulating the stakes of mapping as a scientific project (Kitchin et al., 2011). To take one example, a constructivist-informed historical study of imperial cartography elucidates how the monochrome shading of these maps constructed a rationalization of space that erased from view the changing and locally differentiated qualities of rule within imperial geographic zones (Benton, 2010). Broadly, such studies suggest a useful distinction between mapping approaches that operate to draw together existing knowledge and mapping approaches that operate to destabilize and unpack accepted categories. Reading my experience through this analytical lens, I reflect on how these alternative approaches to mapping existing scholarly knowledge may operate in the review paper context.
Furthermore, taking inspiration from qualitative methods collaborations that juxtapose investigators’ contrasting interpretations of a common text (Dean, 2017; Wells et al., 2020), my account explicitly places these constructions into conversation with each other in a concluding imagined dialogue. Rather than depicting a single, intentionally designed dialogic exchange, however, the dialogue in my account consists of a creative narration of differing methodological perspectives (Holt, 2003; Pachirat, 2018), distilled from views expressed in interactions over the course of our collaboration. In deploying these multiple forms of reflexivity, I aim to reconstitute as accurately as possible the varied readings that emerged during our collaborative project.
In what follows, I recount the review paper writing process that my two co-authors and I undertook as it unfolded chronologically over a period of 15 months. I begin by sketching the contours of the initial maps that we produced as we grappled with how to survey the existing terrain of research on “the global judicialization of politics” (Section I). I then briefly elaborate the distinct narratives into which our initial surveys were subsequently enlisted as we attempted to develop a more synthetic presentation and grappled with differing ideas about the theoretical drive of the project (Sections II and III). Taking a step back, my reflection then foregrounds the core tensions that emerged during our collaboration by presenting an imagined conversation across methodologies Section IV.
Surveying the Existing (Scholarly) Field
In the collaboration to produce a review paper on judicialization on which my co-authors and I embarked, we initially approached our task of surveying the literature as one of ensuring full coverage of the expansive body of scholarly addressing “the judicialization of politics.” To this end, my co-authors and I shared a largely unspoken intuition that our review would benefit from leveraging our diverse research backgrounds. As previously mentioned, these ranged from self-identified interpretivist, to qualitative institutionalist, to political economy game theorist. Each of us had drawn on elements of judicialization scholarship in our prior published work, either individually or with other co-authors. And although these prior co-authorships had not incorporated such a wide range of research backgrounds, the diversity of perspectives that we brought to collaborating on a review paper seemed to be a valuable resource insofar as it would facilitate a more comprehensive mapping of the field. Yet the question of what it meant to map a scholarly field, and the stakes of doing so, was not something we discussed at the outset. Instead, we embarked upon the task of mapping judicialization scholarship largely intuitively, turning to an implicit mixed-methods design that, with the benefit of hindsight, might be seen as approximating “investigator triangulation” (Flick, 2017). In essence, we each turned to the categories and frameworks that corresponded with our prior scholarship and used these as the basis for our respective initial contributions.
Identifying Valid Constructs and Measures
One such initial contribution to the project, drafted primarily by our game theorist co-author, took the form of two critical reviews that aimed to evaluate the quality of existing judicialization scholarship using the criteria of conceptual and measurement validity. Presented as sections on “Conceptualization” and “Measurement” respectively, this discussion not only categorized but also took stock of the existing scholarly literature in an effort to evaluate whether existing definitional and empirical applications of the term “judicialization” should be retained or discarded. For example, focusing largely on formal models of judicial behavior, the “Conceptualization” discussion examined the various formalized definitions that researchers working in this tradition had thus far developed not only for “judicialization” but also for cognate topics (ex. “judicial activism,” “judicial independence,” “judicial review,” and “constitutionalization”). After arguing that – from the standpoint of conceptual validity – the term judicialization should be reserved for phenomena for which existing modeling concepts did not already exist, the section then offered a proposal for a conceptually non-duplicative definition, drawn from the author’s own work.
Aggregating Instrumental and Structural Explanations of Judicial Power
A second initial contribution to the project appeared in the form of a section on “Causality” authored by our qualitative institutionalist co-author. This survey of the judicialization field was calibrated to focus not on abstract definitions but rather on more policy-relevant empirical case studies. Working within an institutionalist framework of analysis, it sought to classify various causal mechanisms developed in studies of judicialization, distinguishing those arising from within the judiciary from those arising in other institutional contexts. Rather than proposing a completely new conceptual approach, as the “Conceptualization” section had done, the critical edge of the “Causality” section operated along more synthetic lines: its review of the existing scholarship identified not only causal mechanisms rooted in instrumental rationality but also those incorporating cultural models of social change, and then went on to argue that future research should incorporate both types of explanations. In this implicitly postpositivist analysis, the direction for future research and scholarship was understood to involve developing an expanded aggregate repertoire of possible policy mechanisms whose parameters of impact might then be teased out through qualitative studies, such as the author’s own research, which examined judicial institutions cross-nationally.
Typologies of Approaches to Studying Power: Impact and Assessment
Yet another component in our project appeared in the form of a section on “Impact” that I authored and that illustrates the influence of my own constructivist-interpretivist perspective. This survey of existing scholarship began by presenting both formal models of judicialized inter-branch dynamics and more historically-oriented comparative institutionalist research on judicialization as similarly informed by a notion of “impact” premised upon a zero-sum understanding of power divided among institutions, such that judicialization involves a relative advantage for the judiciary over other branches of government. The discussion then offered an alternative conceptualization of “juridified political discourse,” informed by a post-structuralist theorization of power relationships in society as expressed through language and everyday practice, presenting this as a new direction that might be fruitfully explored. In line with the critical reviews offered by my co-authors, this review not only surveyed the terrain but also sought to identify a conceptual contribution. Nevertheless, the analytic mode offered no formal quality assessment; rather than promoting either conceptual parsimony or conceptual synthesis, it instead sought to widen judicialization scholarship so as to include new theoretical paradigms.
Imposing Intellectual Order on the Material
These preliminary surveys confirmed our shared intuition that the term judicialization has become widely used by political scientists asking a variety of research questions about relatively disparate phenomena. Moreover, because we had included in our surveys a number of cognate trajectories of inquiry (such as studies on “constitutionalization,” “the rights revolution,” and “juridification”), the wide scope of our review captured even greater variation in terms of the research questions discussed and the topics these studies identified as their specific terrain. What was clear to all of us after this initial round of mapping the field, however, was that our respective contributions had adopted notably distinct systems of categorization that would somehow need to be brought into relation with each other. If a literature review generally “should impose some intellectual order on the material” (Knopf, 2006, p. 129), then our review paper would need to develop a more consistent authorial voice to carry across our respective contributions. This would be a necessary first step towards fulfilling the editorial mandate that review paper authors should aim not only to capture current understandings of a topic but should also, offer a vision of the way forward for research and scholarship on each given topic (Durham, 1999).
Encouraging us to pursue the project, despite these challenges, was the fact that, while we had explored different lines of inquiry, some points of commonality had emerged from our diverse assemblages of evidence. Most notably, we shared the view that a particular set of mid-1990s publications on “the global expansion of judicial power” (see Tate & Vallinder, 1995; Vallinder, 1994) had been central in spurring the development of this new field of inquiry. We also agreed that this early work affirmed a particularly broad research program, which did not necessarily encourage conceptual integration in the field. In these ways, the initial process of researcher triangulation did seem to confirm the intuition inspiring our collaboration, namely that “the judicialization of politics” supplied a common problematic around which arguments built on very different approaches had developed.
What emerged through our discussions, however, was that my co-authors gravitated towards the view that the ongoing absence of conceptual integration in the field should be approached as a problem that our review paper should seek to remedy. For my part, while acknowledging that some studies were clearer about their concepts than others, I was inclined to take the view that the judicialization literature’s absence of conceptual integration should be understood as potentially beneficial as it created an intellectual big tent for the proliferation of different perspectives. Given the differing underlying theoretical drives that this exchange foregrounded – premises that remained largely tacit at the project’s outset – it is not surprising that tensions started to emerge as we sought to integrate our material and struggled to find common ground concerning which orientation would supply the review paper’s primary narrative. Without reaching consensus on this question, we eventually found ourselves proceeding along two separate narrative tracks.
The first of these was animated by an ambition to harness our collection of mapping exercises for purposes of what my co-authors referred to simply as theory-building and which I came to understand meant the construction of causal models by enlisting existing studies as conceptual building-blocks. An initial step in this direction was taken by our qualitative institutionalist co-author, who integrated our earlier drafted surveys into a new section titled “Faces of Judicialization.” This new integrative text presented phenomena discussed in the existing literature (ex. “judicial activism,” “judicial independence,” “judicial review,” and “constitutionalization”) as variants of a broader phenomenon, “the global judicialization of politics.” To this list was added another judicialization variant, “legislative autolimitation,” which drew on materials grouped together by our game theorist co-author and replicated existing terminology used in political-economy models of judicial-legislative dynamics. Two additional variants – “busy courts” and “law as a cultural referent” – were extracted from our former “Measurement” and “Impact” sections respectively. To this listing was eventually added one additional variant, “Type II judicialization,” which replicated a term existing in the literature and designated judicialization processes within the realm of public administration (Vallinder’s 1994 typology distinguishes “Type II judicialization” within public administration from “Type I judicialization” centered on the judiciary). Overall, after several group discussions, a total of eight variants of “the global expansion of judicial power” came to be represented in this “Faces of Judicialization” typology.
As a narrative device, the “Faces” typology avoided taking an explicit stance on whether these variants represented ontologically independent phenomena or simply manifested various strands of scholarly exchange. The “Faces of Judicialization” section likewise provided no explicit justification for placing eight disparate concepts/measures/terms alongside each other, i.e., collapsing them into a common semiotic plane. In retrospect, the move to draw things together into “Faces of Judicialization” had the rhetorical effect of shifting the focus away from the various evolving debates in which these scholarly texts situate themselves (and in which we ourselves had previously situated them), giving the abstracted subclasses a cleaner and simpler appearance.
Building on this “Faces of Judicialization” section, a further step towards more synthetic presentation was taken by our game theorist co-author, who drafted a section that explored the impact these different judicialization variants may have upon various “components” of liberal-democratic politics. This discussion of judicialization’s political implications was not concerned with distinguishing among the normative political theories that informed the scholarly texts it covered; rather, mapping focused on assessing which judicialization variants had generated scholarly consensus over their respective liberal-democratic impact and which had not. Along these lines, the analysis suggested that studies conceptualizing judicialization in terms of “judicial review,” and tending to focus on the strategic calculations of elites in emerging democracies, demonstrated relatively more consensus about the potential of “the global expansion of judicial power” to promote liberal-democratic politics, especially when compared with studies of established democracies that modeled judicialization as the exercise of “judicial activism” and where its impact on liberal rights and democracy remained a subject of controversy. The former grouping consisted entirely of rational-choice political economy studies, although this was left unstated in the review discussion.
Revealing of the implicit mapping mode at work here, this exploration of impact incorporated into its discussion not only positivist-informed studies but also a number of non-positivist studies. For example, several studies that had been grouped into the variant labeled “law as a cultural referent” conceptualized the judicialization of politics in terms of the adoption and appropriation of law-like discourses and practices by social movements in Latin America (this form of judicialization is discussed, for example, in Sieder et al., 2005). These highly contextualized studies of legal culture were enlisted by our game theorist co-author into the task of sketching out generalized relationships with various components of liberal-democratic politics. Through this positivizing reading, they became a source of information about the characteristics of one independent variable in a larger model. This suggestive positivizing translation appears to have been motivated by a desire to marshal as many existing empirical studies as possible in support of generating a more comprehensive grasp of “the global expansion of judicial power.” The text of the section did include a caveat that the authors of the relevant studies of Latin American legal culture had not intended for their work to generate generalizable propositions.
For purposes of formulating testable propositions, it made perfect sense to analytically link existing judicialization scholarship to a researcher-constructed dependent variable, a technique that methodologists have described as concept formation by means of reconstruction (Schaffer, 2016). Moreover, because they were taken to be observed variants of “the global expansion of judicial power,” the eight “Faces of Judicialization” offered conceptual building blocks for the task of developing causal models about this phenomenon. In its methodological underpinnings, this mapping mode has echoes of the integrationist project of early cartographers who aimed to draw together cartesian and non-cartesian representations of space into a single global cartography from which calculations could then be derived (Latour, 1990). Epistemologically and ontologically diverse sources were enrolled into a cartography of aggregation and integration, much in the same way that my co-authors enrolled disparate concepts, measures, and terms drawn from existing studies into a project to sketch a causal model-building future for research and scholarship on the judicialization of politics.
Unpacking Scientific Knowledge Categories
A separate response to our initial mapping exercises, one which I took the lead in drafting, proceeded along a different track. This analysis took as its starting point the set of canonical studies initially developed in the mid-1990s under the relatively obscure auspices of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Comparative Judicial Studies (RCCJS). As my co-authors and I had noticed, the RCCJS’s ubiquitously cited Global Expansion of Judicial Power (Tate & Vallinder, 1995) had become a touchstone for subsequent judicialization scholarship on the part of social scientists. In reexamining this text, I was therefore intrigued to see that RCCJS conveners Neil Tate and Torbjörn Vallinder bolstered their core claim “that the expansion of judicial power does appear to be a phenomenon that is real” (Tate & Vallinder, 1995, p. 516) through what amounts to a review of prior judicialization scholarship conducted by legal scholars.
Undertaking a close reading of Tate and Vallinder’s mapping of the “global expansion of judicial power,” I discovered that its concerns are a hybrid of questions articulated in several, largely separate, contemporaneous scholarly debates. One of these was a familiar debate within American Public Law in the 1980’s and 1990’s on judicial review and the so-called counter-majoritarian difficulty. However, Tate and Vallinder’s survey also touched on debates likely less familiar to an American-trained audience, such as writings of European constitutionalists and normative sociologists which examine phenomena variously described by their authors as “judicialization” (in studies of the United Kingdom), “judiciarisation,” “juridicisation,” and “juridictionnalisation” (in studies of France), or “Verrechtlichung” and “Vergesetzlichung” (in studies of Germany). For the most part, these earlier European studies did not attempt to develop generalizable theories of political behavior, but rather were concerned with other aims such as establishing the normative competence of a constitutional court or developing a sociological understanding of the shift towards bureaucratic regulation. What the RCCJS mapping accomplishes textually is to represent this existing scholarly output at a sufficiently simplified scale to facilitate its integration under the umbrella category of judicialization. Extracting concepts and measures from various scholarly works and placing them on the same classification plane, the RCCJS’s survey of the terrain assembles two subclasses, labeling them “judicialization from without” and “judicialization from within” (Vallinder, 1994, p. 94). In a similar manner but two decades later, eight forms of judicialization are identified in the “Faces of Judicialization” section within our own text. What I came to understand was that while these two mapping efforts differ on how broadly existing studies are classified, in both cases the text reassembles discursive forms found in earlier studies, representing them as distinct subclasses of a real phenomenon, a “global expansion of judicial power” whose implications for liberal democracy were to be investigated. While judicialization studies today integrate the comparative politics interest in democratization in formerly non-democratic regimes, earlier scholarship was primarily interested in how the judiciary impacted the power of the “democratic” legislative and executive branches.
For me, this retracing of the earlier knowledge project’s epistemological and ontological translations fed into an attempt to generate greater contextualization for the project’s impetus, so as to better understand its meaning. My intuition was that the academic institutional context in the first half of the 1990s might have shaped the conceptualization of the RCCJS’s project, and so I made some initial empirical inquiries to try to reconstruct an oral history of their project. To my pleasant surprise, these email inquiries elicited responses from several RCCJS participants, and from their accounts emerged the outlines of a story about a collective desire for greater disciplinary recognition. This story might be told along the following lines:
In the early 1990s, political science as a discipline was turning its attention to phenomena outside the U.S. and the discipline was taking hold internationally, but scholarship on law and courts was late in giving recognition to comparativist research. In this academic-institutional context, a conceptually capacious framing of the judicialization project made sense because it allowed the project to enroll the widest possible range of comparative judicial studies, conceptually, methodologically, and in terms of subject matter.
In undertaking this contextualization of Tate and Vallinder’s Global Expansion of Judicial Power, my analysis approached a canonical text not as a source of information about underlying reality but rather as a construction of that reality, one that was itself socially constructed. Such an approach is well-recognized within interpretive research, including in the field of Comparative Politics, where the discursive logics and effects of even more well-known canonical texts have been insightfully linked to the advancement of epistemic and political projects (Wedeen, 2009). Such an analysis invites reflections about how the process of surveying the state of the field – a common feature of all social scientific texts – itself produces, reproduces, and transforms the scholarly and political fields that these mappings simultaneously claim to represent. When applied to the collection of texts produced by scientific discussions concerning “the judicialization of politics,” this insight thus raises an important ontological question: Was there any worldwide expansion of judicial power in a meaningful sense, or was this claim an artifact of RCCJS participants’ search for disciplinary recognition?
Here is where the collaboration foundered. This latter possibility was not something that my co-authors were interested in addressing in our mapping of judicialization. Indeed, as the next section outlines, for them my constructivist-interpretivist cartography appeared ancillary to the review paper project: from their shared methodological perspective, it was not recognizable as an “argument” that set forth a vision for future research and scholarship.
Analysis: Conversation Across Research Traditions
The mixed-methods collaboration discussed above ended not with synthesis but rather with dissolution, a process which unfolded over several months as we endeavored to integrate our competing visions into a coherent review paper, i.e., within the conventions of the genre as we understood them. It is not my intention here to detail these actual exchanges among former co-authors. Instead, I follow the example of other interpretive methods scholars in turning to the writing device of an imagined composite dialogue to analyze the various underlying inclinations that were lifted to the surface over the course of our research collaboration (Holt, 2003; Pachirat, 2018). This dialogue is imagined in the sense that it includes no direct quotes. It attempts to foreground themes of discussion from actual exchanges that took place over several months. The goal in doing so is not to generate ultimate, unequivocally verified knowledge, but rather to place different mapping modes in conversation with one another as part of ongoing dialogue and praxis, a form of fruitful dialogue which aspires to bring existing paradigms of inquiry into a more ecumenical posture (Guba, 1990).
With this goal in mind, I offer the following imagined dialogue between positivist-informed (PP) and constructivist-interpretivist (CI) mapmakers. I choose to construct the dialogue in this way, with positivist and postpositivist mapmakers on the one side with and constructivist-interpretivist mapmaker on the other, because I believe this captures the contours of exchanges between co-authors. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that positivism and interpretivism “are not banners of monolithic, rival camps” (Schaffer, 2016), and that some scholars may move back and forth between positivist-informed and interpretivist orientations or may seek ways to forge a path between them.
Constructivist-Interpretivist (CI): One surprising but interesting finding of our mapping exercise was that it was precisely the lack of conceptual integration that has built and sustained this field. Regardless of the utility and validity of “judicialization” for testing causal hypotheses, its study has encouraged the coexistence of provocative conversations informed by different methodological and theoretical frameworks.
Positivist and Postpositivist (PP): We agree that a big tent approach may have helpfully laid the groundwork for the field’s initial recognition, but at this point it has outlived its usefulness. Building science requires conceptual integration. This means defining crisper and more valid constructs and developing propositions for how they are related. This type of work is necessary so that policymakers may know enough about how political mechanisms operate to recommend a socially optimal configuration that promotes liberal democracy. We’re moving towards this with our latest round of drafting, particularly the sections that distinguish the respective content and impact on liberal-democratic politics of each of judicialization’s multiple faces.
CI: Calling them “faces” had a different meaning for me. I saw the section as mapping out faces of scholarship engaged in different conversations. I’m not sure that I would agree with a claim that the categories are synonymous with phenomena in the “real world.” I am more persuaded by those who point to the limitations of positivist taxonomies for mapping social phenomena. If any category of judicialization is more observable today, then this is in part due to the fact that researchers are asking about it. Moreover, the institutional history of the judicialization project calls into question whether there was any global phenomenon or whether this was simply an artifact of a specific academic context shaping knowledge. As for the assertion that these faces are non-overlapping, the different conversations in which scholars have engaged over a number of decades cannot be neatly slotted into taxonomic types but are rather more emergent and shifting, with some categories over time attracting different levels of interest to label the same observed phenomena.
PP: What you are saying is that the whole field is anarchic, such that we can’t say anything about it. The use of ideal types is a recognized method in social inquiry. There’s no problem with creating abstractions for purposes of model-building. This is a way of bringing order to the world. Along these lines, fieldwork case studies are often read as sources of observed phenomena, providing insights for generalized constructs that distill these phenomena into their essence. We may have positivized some judicialization studies, but that was done in the service of suggestively charting a vision for future research and scholarship.
CI: Mapping that positivizes contributions deploying interpretive methodologies, so as to translate their findings into a construct for modeling in relation to other constructs, effectively prevents us from seeing this work on its own terms. To the extent that this work revealed different local meanings, this also prevents these contributions from providing input into ongoing social dialogue and praxis. Why should all accounts of the world be reduced to an abstracted construct, and why should all scholarship be boiled down to a mechanism that is sharply distinguished from other mechanisms? Moreover, it is one thing to criticize a lack of conceptual clarity, but quite another to criticize scholarship operating outside the positivist paradigm for failing to direct its inquiry in a manner that the positivist paradigm presupposes, such as providing clear constructs. This is a tautological criticism.
PP: But aren’t you criticizing us in exactly this way? You are imposing your own paradigm to criticize our research, which operates in a different paradigm.
CI: There is a distinction between on the one hand criticizing a mapping of the field that essentializes other work (or criticizes it as not lending itself to essentialization) based on a methodological stance, and on the other hand requiring that all scholarship should be conducted in the same way. I’m not saying that nomothetic methods have no intellectual value; to the contrary, it is the absorption of elements of a multi-method field of inquiry into a mono-method mapping that is the problem. Such mapping projects carry the risk of imposition and misrecognition. To avoid this, perhaps in the conclusion to our mapping paper we could highlight the multiple trajectories of contemporary judicialization scholarship.
PP: We see this paper as contributing to science-building, and the real story here is about the disadvantages created by the current absence of clarity in judicialization scholarship. A conclusion that merely describes various traditions of scholarship is not enough -- it does not even identify a gap in existing knowledge, as a traditional literature review would do.
CI: We’ve been working on this project for quite a while at this point. In my view, offering a genealogy of the field – especially in combination with the mapping of the field’s trajectories that we have jointly produced – is itself an original contribution and one that enables scholars to contextualize and makes sense of their field’s current heterogeneity.
PP: A review paper needs to offer a path forward. It was always our understanding that the project would at least make progress towards achieving conceptual integration, and we do not wish to be pushed into doing something different.
CI: This was not my understanding of what it meant to chart a path forward. At the outset, I think we all underestimated the risk that incommensurability might surface, even in a project that does not engage in primary empirical research. Unfortunately, this research collaboration now seems to have run its course.
Conclusion
Most scholars undertaking the authorship of a review paper would agree with the general claim, set forth in one introductory guide to writing literature reviews, that “reviews are essentially maps of a topic” and that “mapping ideas is about setting out, on paper, the geography of research and thinking that has been done on a topic” (Hart, 2018, pp. 143–144). Exploring the practical meaning of this claim, my first-hand account of review paper authorship demonstrates that behind the seemingly straightforward project of mapping existing scholarly knowledge lurk complex methodological issues. As my account shows, different researchers coming from different perspectives are prone to map out a topic in divergent ways. Moreover, as my co-authors and I discovered, it is not always possible to integrate divergent perspectives into a common theoretical drive so as to produce a review paper with narrative coherence. Indeed, what is revealing about our research experience is that this “polyphony” of positionalities (Wells et al., 2020) was brought to light not through an initial discussion of methodologies but rather through our discussions of the textual mappings we found ourselves producing. Taken retrospectively, the trajectory of our collaborative project may thus offer insights into points of methodological difference as they operate in practice.
Specifically, the process of exchange and debate that transpired over the course of this particular research collaboration offers a number of insights concerning not only differing methodological stances but also the politics that lurk behind a particular genre of knowledge making – the review paper – that some might mistakenly consider to be both objective and apolitical. I conclude by synthesizing my main findings concerning the different positionalities and epistemic landmarks that operated in this research project. I then reflect on their significance for advancing a meaningfully inclusive map of the relevant domain of scholarship that a review paper aims to represent.
First, one finding that emerges from this reflection on a prior research experience is that how we think about the function of the scholarly review paper has implications for how we understand the nature of the phenomenon under review, and vice versa. As our collaboration revealed, the mapping undertaken in a review paper is approached differently from differing methodological traditions. As discussed above, my co-authors gravitated towards an ontologically realist methodology, whereby mapping the field was a preliminary to improving testable general models. Consonant with the science of cartography, this drawing-things-together mapping approach presumes an indexical correspondence between reality and scientific practice, insofar as the social phenomenon under consideration, i.e. “the judicialization of politics,” is understood to manifest itself in underlying patterned political relationships that social science researchers had already made some progress towards identifying. By contrast, my own understanding of both our own research and that of other judicialization researchers came to be articulated through an ontologically constructivist perspective similar to that of critical mapping scholarship, emphasizing the semiotic qualities of researchers’ representations. This led me to adopt a disaggregating approach to mapping which emphasized the socially constructed nature of “the judicialization of politics” and, by extension, the “global expansion of judicial power.” From this perspective, mapping the field provided an opportunity to unpack and explore the impact of scientific knowledge categories. For their part, my co-authors were skeptical that this analysis amounted to an argument that could supply the theoretical drive for a publishable review paper or that it deserved the nomenclature of social “scientific” research.
A second insight emerging from reflection on this research process is that the choice of modality for a review paper – drawing-things-together versus unpacking – may shape the trajectory of future developments in the field of social science knowledge that the paper purports to review. Regardless of which methodology informs its theoretical drive, assembling a coherent review paper involves grappling with what it means to chart a path forward for research and scholarship. After months of exchanges, when faced with incorporating our initial surveys of the field into a single text, my two co-authors articulated – in an increasingly explicit manner – a shared belief that theory-building requires conceptual synthesis. This perspective seemed to be associated with a set of understandings about the nature of social science research as a “scientific” endeavor and its role in informing high-level social policymaking. Yet these understandings were so taken-for-granted they had not been explicitly shared in the early stages of our collaboration. As they were made increasingly explicit in our exchanges, I responded by more fully articulating my own views about the link between top-down conceptual integration and the exclusion of certain voices from the field. Rather than aligning my work with scientific progress, I leaned toward a stance favoring the rejection of scientific norms of objectivity. Following the conclusion of our collaboration, I learned that a somewhat similar stance on scientific norms of objectivity, and of why a corrective program is needed, has been elaborated by feminist philosophers of science (Harding, 1992).
Moreover, these findings point to the potential risks of applying positivist-informed approaches to the authorship of review papers without a full consideration of their methodological and political implications. In a methodologically diverse field of research, these potential risks are twofold. On the one hand, knowledge of a given field’s methodological diversity risks being lost or diminished when non-positivist research studies are given a positivizing reading for purposes of enrolling them into a review’s synthesis. On the other hand, knowledge of a given field’s methodological diversity likewise risks being lost when researchers choose not to include any relevant non-positivist research studies in a paper that purports to represent the state-of-the-science on a designated topic. When undertaking a review paper, researchers would be well advised to critically reflect on their methodological choices and to consider the implications of these choices for whether and how a field’s existing diversity will find expression. Only in this way can we thoughtfully construct a meaningfully inclusive map and a fully accurate representation of an intellectual community’s self-understanding(s).
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Dvora Yanow, Nick Cheesman, Natasha Behl, Liam McHugh-Russell, and Edward Schatz for their insightful comments and for helpful conversations. I also express my appreciation to Sam Hohneke for research assistance as well as for his translation of legal scholarship written in German.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
