Opening Black Boxes: Jon Elster’s Methodological Contributions to Social Sciences

Abstract

This article aims to present what we regard as the Jon Elster’s main contribution to methodological concern in social science. Despite the vastness and complexity of his work, this is an introductory paper. Elster’s main concept is social mechanisms, which allows social sciences to produce theories with greater capacity of explanation. Before we get to methodological synthesis on Elster, we will explore some fundamental ideas that help us to understand the author’s stance. Thus, we approach methodological individualism, rational choice theory, causal explanations, then we will dedicate some pages to the social mechanisms concept, presenting definitions, examples, a typology, his main contributions for social sciences and some limitations of his work. We conclude that the social mechanisms concept seems rich and usable in the field of social sciences research. Despite of its high level of sophistication, the main concept has some limitations, as we can see in the final section.

Keywords

• jon elster. social mechanisms. methodology. social sciences.