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Unreal,
man
Political scientists have turned guerrillas in an attempt to shake off the
stranglehold of the dogmatic, unworldly theory that dominates their
discipline. Kurt Jacobsen reports
Tuesday April 3,
2001
The Guardian
Throughout history, revolutions have caught the ruling elite unawares -
even, it seems, when they are professors of political science. No one
expected an argument about the use of mathematical modelling and
"rational choice theory" in politics and economics research
journals to blow up into an academic uprising which has spread from France
to the rest of continental Europe, Britain and north America.
In the process it has
highlighted the self-perpetuating elite that runs the most influential
academic body in the subject, the American Political Science Association.
This counts among its luminaries Henry Kissinger and president George
Bush's foreign affairs adviser, Condoleeza Rice. The revolt has spawned
scores of email guerrillas, inspired by "Mr Perestroika", who
protested against the stranglehold of the rational choice theorists on
academic journals - and hence on hopes of tenure and promotion. But most
operate anonymously for fear of jeopardising their hopes of promotion and
tenure.
Rational choice theory
- the hottest thing in the social sciences - derives from neoclassical
economics, which political scientists cannot help but notice grabs lots of
Nobel Prizes.
The theory deploys a
set of simplifying assumptions about human behaviour that boils down our
complicated lives and societies to prioritised "rational" choices
that we presumably make in order to maximise our "utility" in any
given situation.
Rational choice, and
mathematical models that accompany it, undeniably have merits when used
with a bit of humility, especially in studies of collective action. But its
critics argue the results are often trivial or else fail to display even a
nodding acquaintance with reality.
Last June, in France, a
"post-autistic economics" movement erupted in protest against the
excesses of formal economics discourses. Over 800 university economics
students and 150 professors signed a petition demanding reform of the
curriculum to incorporate a "plurality of approaches adapted to the
complexity of the object studied". Mathematics had become an end in itself,
resulting in an "autistic science with no relation to real life".
In fierce
counter-attacks the leading figures in the discipline perceived, or tried
to portray, this revolt as doltish opposition to statistical techniques.
The French government appointed a commission to examine the issue.
The movement quickly
spread to Spain and across much of continental Europe, and is making
inroads in the UK. French insurrectionists Gilles Raveaud and Ioana
Marinescu appeared at King's College, Cambridge University at a workshop
chaired by Professor Tony Lawson, whose book Economics and Reality is a
favourite among these dissidents.
"The
mathmaticisation of economics is happening everywhere, and students are
voting with their feet and going elsewhere," says Lawson. The movement's
aim was "greater pluralism".
Rational choice
practitioners quickly became notorious for forming potent coteries that
expanded their influence within departments in Britain.
"The governing
principle in most sensible political science departments is that rational
choice theorists should be on tap but not on top," says the chair of a
top UK politics department, who prefers diplomatic anonymity. "They
should exist, be permitted to flourish, but never be permitted dominance.
Once dominant they are incapable of appointing other than their own: the
more vulgar they are the more this is true."
In the United States
the movement ignited in political science, which has been eagerly aping
economics in its fondness for mathematical modelling. The American Political
Science Association had been taken over by rational choice exponents and
its journal, which is often a vital publishing outlet for aspiring
academics, reflected their views.
The top echelon of the
association may write about democratic politics - but they don't practise
it, according to the dissidents who are now linking the dominance of
rational choice in political science to the absence of internal democracy
in their association.
Under a cosy
arrangement an annually chosen president appoints his (80 times
"his" versus only twice "her") ruling council who pick
the next president who picks the next ruling council, and so on in a
self-perpetuating process.
"In an era that
values transparency, this looks like a glaring instance of a closed
process," observes Lloyd Rudolph, professor of politics at Chicago
University.
Keep in mind, if
national security advisers are anything to go by, that the APSA gave us
Henry Kissinger, who remarked that the Chilean people had no right to elect
a socialist leader, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who cheered democracy so long
as the unlettered masses obeyed their betters and now Condoleeza Rice, who
is of much the same bent.
The membership stayed
in line, although many alienated political scientists quietly dropped out,
until a clarion call came last November in a mass email. "Mr
Perestroika" - probably a junior faculty member - lashed out against
"poor game-theorists who cannot for the life of me compete with a
third-grade economics student" yet are allowed to crush "diversity
of methodologies and areas of the world that APSA 'purports' to
represent". Mr Perestroika became the scarlet pimpernel of the reform
movement.
Within a month of the
emailing, a movement of several hundred insurgent professors crystallised,
led by a committee of eminent scholars whom the association dared not
ignore. By January 222 tenured faculty mem bers had signed a milder
perestroika petition for reform, crafted by Yale's Roger Smith. This
included 24 with named chairs - ranging from Yale political ethnographer
James C Scott to Chicago University security specialist John Mearsheimer to
Penn's semiotician Anne Norton.
The revolt transcends
familiar categories of conservative, liberal and leftist.
"It's a wicked
coalition," says Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, distinguished service
professor at Chicago University, with a wry smile. "It is about
getting pluralism back into political science. Why does the Association of
Political Science Review seem so intensely focused on technical methods at
the expense of the great substantive political questions?"
In a written response
to the perestroika manifesto, APSA representative Ada Finifter revealed her
belief that only personal ambition was at stake. She could not imagine why
signatory dissenters were griping since they are twice as successful as
anyone else at publishing in the review. She appeared oblivious to the
ominous ambiguity of claiming that all is well so long as scholars provide
"high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research problem"
- as if the definition of thoseappropriate methods were not a major issue.
A conciliatory APSA
recently announced the selection of a Perestroika-backed candidate as
president, Theda Skocpol of Harvard University. Even this move is viewed
with some suspicion. Might the APSA leaders calculate that Skocpol, despite
being renowned as no pushover, might be most easily co-opted into the
business-as-usual "East coast Brahmin" network and preserve the
old undemocratic mechanisms? (In a body where everyone has read their Machiavelli,
it is harder to be successfully Machiavellian.)
Most dissidents are
willing to wait and see if Skocpol will carry out reforms that, as Mr
Perestroika put it, dismantle "the Orwellian system that we have in the
APSA and that we will see a true perestroika in the discipline".
It speaks volumes that
many junior scholars are worried about revealing their identities in a
profession that purports to prize vigorous and open exchange. Yet APSA
deputy director Robert Hauck expressed great surprise that they needed to
shield themselves from reprisals.
Perestroikans certainly
do not oppose formal methods or mathematical models, Susanne Rudolph
stresses, but rather their consecration as holy devices, squeezing out and denigrating
cultural, historical and psychological understanding. Like Finifter, she
agrees that the objective is to support "high-quality work using
methods appropriate to the research problem", but like fellow
Perestroikan Margaret Keck, and the Cambridge realist workshop, she
believes that the "problem should dictate the method", not the
other way around.
The ultimate aim is to
improve democracy at large as well as within the organisation.
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