Marseille 2007
| Abstract #439 - Political Science and AIDS Impact Research: How the Discipline Should Meet the Challenge | ||||
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Session: 16.1: Methodology Matters (Parallel) on Monday @ 14.00-16.00 in 5 Chaired by Graham Hart, Dominique Costagliola Authors: Presenting Author: Dr Per Strand - University of Cape Town, South Africa |
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| Additional Authors: Prof Robert Mattes, Prof Alan Whiteside, | ||||
| Aim: The overall ambition with our paper is to alert empirical and comparative Political Scienceand Social Science more broadlyto the need to include the impact of HIV/AIDS in analyses of good governance and democratic consolidation in Africa. In such analyses, the pandemic represents a new independent variable that is becoming increasingly important as the pandemic matures into its third phase of aggregate social effects from AIDS-related morbidity and mortality. If we fail to meet this challenge, our standard set of structural and institutional variables will become increasingly ineffective in explaining macro level variations in political and social developments. This would reduce both the academic quality and the political relevance of our analyses. | ||||
| Method / Issue: We elaborate our general point in four main sections of the paper. We begin by showing how some recent authoritative Political Science analyses of democratic governance in sub-Saharan Africa fail to mainstream HIV/AIDS into the analytical framework. We also present and discuss the results from an Internet search for HIV/AIDS and AIDS in several of the dominant journals of the discipline. The second section discusses epidemiological and epistemological reasons for why the discipline so far has failed to understand the importance of factoring in HIV/AIDS. In a third section we provide a number of examples of how the pandemic can be modeled into our explanations as an independent, a moderating or an intervening variableall depending on what theories we are working with. We show how such modeling can be done at the micro, meso and the macro level of analysis. In a fourth and concluding section we argue more normatively why a certain brand of Political Science is of particular importance in this regard. While more discursive narratives are important in order to describe the many facets and representations of the pandemic in civic and political society, we argue that results generated through empirical Political Science in a more positivist tradition will have greater leverage in terms of convincing policy-makers to keep HIV/AIDS on the global political agenda. | ||||
| Results / Comments: A second ambition with the paper is to assist those colleagues who wish to take on this challenge to avoid making analytical and methodological mistakes due to the complexities inherent to HIV/AIDS epidemiology and the often poor quality of epidemiological data across Africa. | ||||
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