Looking for correlations vs. telling the story : two ways of thinking methodologically about political polarisation

In this chapter, I discuss two different ways of dealing methodologically with phenomena such as political polarisation. I present the dominant "positivist" position, which promotes measurement and correlation. I also present the historical-narrative approach using Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. These approaches have different theoretical commitments. I try to show that the narrative approach is better here, at least from one point of view. It is free of theoretically unfounded formalisms; it allows us to look at polarisation from a broader but somewhat different perspective. As a consequence, it allows us to make polarisation a less mysterious phenomenon.