At my school, it depended heavily on what your focus was. We had three professors, each focusing on their own area of specialization: American politics, international politics, and theory.
The American politics professor had an academic pedigree and insisted that Political Science could and should be a hard science backed up by facts and numbers. In his papers you need statistics, studies, and graphs. He focused very much on the methodology of your research and how well you could back up your claims with solid evidence.
The theoretical professor appreciated hard facts but it was much more important to him that you had a well-reasoned argument, and as _delirium said, would much rather read a 10-page paper full of epistemological debate than one twice that filled with detailed Bayesian analysis.
The international politics professor didn't care because he had tenure.