Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Government Relations Research in Political Science

The rethinking of public policy in response to a rapidly changing world and economic development predetermined the relevance of studying the GR-activities of companies in the 21st century. Due to the fact that business-government relations have an interdisciplinary nature, political scientists need an appropriate methodological toolkit for their thorough study. Most of GR research are narrowly focused, and, as a result, are ineffective, since analyzing GR activities within the framework of one methodological paradigm leaves the consideration of GR as a system and its embeddedness in the political structure “behind the scenes”. In this regard, the results obtained do not provide either researchers or policymakers with comprehensive information on effective policy-making. The purpose of this article is to try to find a systemic methodology, enabling political scientists to display, describe and analyze GR-activities with the end of putting the findings into practice in order to improve the efficiency of these activities. The author examines the main paradigms and metatheories used by political scientists and argues for synthesizing theoretical and methodological approaches into a unified methodological system for GR research. The author comes to the conclusion that changes in research approaches to political GR research and in the thinking of researchers could potentially help improve the quality and effectiveness of preparing and implementing public and corporate decisions.