There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called ‘laws’. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences.

中文翻译：

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思考政治学（及其他）中的法律

政治学中有几篇论文通常被明确称为“法律”。其他论文通常被认为是法律，但通常没有明确标记为法律。还有一些说法得到了很好的支持并且可以说很有趣，而没有人会试图将它们称为法律。这种情况引发了哲学问题：哪些命题应该被称为法律，哪些不应该？我们应该如何决定呢？在本文中，我们制定并激发了一种思考政治学法律的策略，该策略整合了两个核心概念：时空稳定性和社会机制。提议的策略是一套指导方针，政治学家可以用来反思和争论他们学科内的具体案例，而不是一个明确的划分标准。我们捍卫和推动这一策略并将其应用于两个案例（一个与国家镇压有关，一个与议会选举有关）。在我们制定并推动了我们的政治科学战略之后，我们表明我们的建议与社会科学的其他学科相关。我们解释了我们的观点如何融入批判现实主义，并将它们嵌入到一般科学哲学和社会科学哲学中关于规律的辩论中。