Method, National Minorities and Revisiting the Transition Politics in 1990s Slovakia and Romania

ABSTRACT The study of human behaviour can be analysed with the help of two techniques: one regressive and the other narrative. The regressive technique is more liable to produce faulty analyses of human behaviour than the narrative technique. This article sets itself the task of buttressing the argument for using a narrative technique with the replication of some of the findings in Erin Jenne's Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment . Lessons to be drawn from such a replication suggest that the researcher must be wary of tethering her empirical research to testing or creating theories. A focus herein is upon ethnic politics in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia after 1989. In order to avert the possibility of committing error (in human enquiry), recourse shall be taken to Nicolas Malebranche's philosophy of science.