What counts as political primarily finds linguistic expression. Textual traces of political conflict and cooperation litter our archives as negotiation records, historical narratives, popular exhortations to action, journalistic and historical accounts, etc. Even the sample survey is perhaps better conceived as a collection of conversations than applications of an objective measure. Yet, despite their abundance, political scientists place surprisingly little emphasis on modeling and analyzing textual data. Those who embrace the ideographic tradition of political scholarship certainly study the textual artifacts of politics, but we may gain much by modeling them as well.
Models help advance the growth of knowledge.
When modelers disagree over theory, they can represent their disagreements as alternative model specifications. Systematically comparing the performance of models under competing specifications, they thereby sharpen the focus of their controversies. They see straight away the greater utility of the superior formulation. They thus arrive earlier at rational consensus, resolving their controversies. So, if model building and analyzing promote the advancement of empirical theory and if much of politics is textually expressed, it follows that any science of politics should develop and apply techniques for modeling texts.