Normative Against Empirical: Classifying a Question

The idea

The exam gives a question or claim and asks whether it is normative or empirical, the outline's methods item, and the anchor's two sections define the split. Normative political science, also called political philosophy, asks about the meaning, purposes and goals of politics, what a good citizen is, what governments should serve; its answers come from reason and logic, not evidence alone, through three approaches: consequences, rules, or virtue. Empirical political science tests hypotheses on evidence, asking how the political world actually works and how politicians actually behave. It rests on facts, what can be counted, measured and verified, and yields generalizations, statements typically true though not for every case, probabilistic rather than deterministic, which describe, explain and predict.