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THE PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT
The New York Times
November 4, 2000
Political Scientists Are in a Revolution
Instead of Watching
By EMILY EAKIN
 he protester used the code name
Mr. Perestroika. His e-mail messages preached popular revolt. "Head for
the Parliament folks! (just as they did in Belgrade)," one read in part.
"When people are pushed to the brink, the leaders go, the regime goes,
the country changes!" read another.
The 17 sympathizers who received Mr. Perestroika's
original message forwarded it to others, and within 10 days the movement had
grown to more than 100 people. By the middle of this week, drafts of several
letters calling for change were circulating on the Web.
So who are these Internet guerrillas who have been
fomenting revolt over the last two weeks? They are American political
scientists, more accustomed to studying revolutions than to waging them. And
their target? The leaders of their professional organization, the American
Political Science Association, and its journal, the American Political
Science Review.
At the heart of this latest uprising is a decades-old
split in the field over the best way to study politics. On one side are
quantitative researchers who favor rigorous mathematical techniques and on
the other are more traditional qualitative researchers who look at history
and culture, using case studies, written documents and firsthand
observations. For shorthand, you can think of the feud as the pronumber
versus the nonnumber folks (terminology that could no doubt spur a protest of
its own). And what's at stake are jobs, power and prestige.
Indeed, after receiving Mr. Perestroika's original
e-mail message, dozens of scholars wrote back saying they had seen colleagues
denied jobs and tenure and have trouble publishing their work because their
research methods did not conform with the quantitative approach championed by
the powerful minority that controls the association and the journal.
"Why does a coterie of faculty dominate and
control A.P.S.A. and the editorial board of A.P.S.R.?" Mr. Perestroika
asked. "I hope this anonymous letter leads to a dismantling of the
Orwellian system that we have in A.P.S.A. and that we will see a true
Perestroika in the discipline."
Mr. Perestroika, who receives messages at an
anonymous e- mail account at Yahoo.com and is rumored to be not one but
several junior professors (or possibly graduate students), is orchestrating
the protest under the cloak of anonymity, presumably out of fear of
reprisals.
Yet the anonymous protest created one on the
record. Yesterday 125 scholars, including prominent people like Theda Skocpol,
James C. Scott and Adolph Reed Jr., submitted a letter summarizing their
grievances and suggesting changes in the association's leadership and the
editor of the review. The letter, drafted by Rogers Smith, a professor of
government at Yale University, argued that in its current state, the
discipline was "in danger of alienating a larger and larger number of
those who should be its active members, and contributing less and less to the
kinds of understanding of politics that it is our responsibility to
advance."
Robert Jervis, the association's president this
year, whose work paradoxically falls in the more traditional nonnumbers camp,
concedes that the association's journal has problems. "Almost everyone
agrees that the review does not reflect the breadth of high-quality work
being done throughout the discipline," he said.
Because the review is the only journal the
political science association subsidizes (members automatically receive a
subscription when they pay their annual dues), it is widely perceived as the
benchmark of quality work in the field. Failure to publish in the journal,
many say, can adversely affect one's prospects for jobs and promotions.
"Even people with tenure have to be careful," said Anthony Marx, a
political scientist at Columbia University whose comparative research on race
and nationalism in the United States, South Africa and Brazil falls into the
qualitative camp. "To get published or advance your career requires
consensus support, which is difficult to gain amidst the increasing division
within the discipline."
Ada Finifter, the review's editor and a pronumber
professor at Michigan State University, denied that there was any bias in the
way articles were selected for publication. For her annual editor's report,
which is to be published next month, she categorized the articles published
in the last four years by subfield and methodology. Her statistics indicate
that 75 percent of the articles were of the quantitative variety.
But she explained, "I get something like 450
new submissions a year," adding that all were evaluated by experts
outside the journal. "We can only publish 47 or 48. This is going to
cause a certain amount of unhappiness. But the people who complain the
loudest are typically those who haven't submitted any articles."
As Mr. Jervis said, "Any journal reflects
what's submitted to it."
Even the critics say that is the case. Stephen
Walt, a political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard,
said he, like many other nonnumber political scientists, doesn't submit his
work to the review because he believes it will be received more
sympathetically in other journals. "If you look at the journal, it is
clear that the bulk of articles come from a narrow part of the field and
reflect a very narrow vision of what scientific research is."
In practice, the two approaches are very different
and can yield conflicting results. To study nuclear deterrence, for example,
the pronumber people might subject national arms budgets to complex
statistical analyses or use rational-choice theory to predict how various
countries might act in an arms race. The nonnumber professors might draw on
government documents and the historical record instead.
To address the discontent, Mr. Perestroika and his
comrades have discussed several solutions, including giving association
members a choice of journals to subscribe to when they pay their dues and
putting the journal online so more articles can be published. They have also
proposed lining up sympathetic candidates to run for positions in the
association at its annual meeting in San Francisco next September.
To the critics, the problem at the association is
as much cronyism as scholarship. Under its current structure, a nominating
committee appointed by the president selects a single slate. Although members
can contest elections and propose alternative slates, they rarely do. (Some
members say the last contested election may have been in the Vietnam War
period.)
Mr. Perestroika is still taking pains to protect
his identity. An e-mailed request for an interview produced a telephone call
the next day from a man who identified himself as Mr. Perestroika. "The
United States is going around the globe democratizing countries, but American
political scientists don't have democracy in their own organization," he
said in the same melodramatic style as the e- mail manifesto. "Slobodan
Milosevic was able to exercise power until a few commoners stormed the
Parliament. It will happen here, too."
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An Open Letter to the APSA Leadership
and Members
As many of you are aware,
the American Political Science Association has recently experienced an
extraordinary outpouring of frustration with the current state of the
American Political Science Review, the APSA, and the profession generally. An
anonymous scholar writing as “Mr. Perestroika” circulated to an extensive
roster of political scientists a passionate memo asking many provocative,
indeed painful, questions. Why do so many leaders of our profession not even
read, much less submit, to the APSR? Why is purchase of the APSR made
mandatory for membership, thus subsidizing a journal many find
unsatisfactory, instead of permitting membership without the journal or with
other journals? Why do the APSA Council and APSR Editorial Board seem to be
chosen essentially by their predecessors? Why does the APSR and why do other
prominent professional fora seem so intensively focused on technical methods,
at the expense of the great, substantive political questions that actually
intrigue many APSA members, as well as broader intellectual audiences?
Though some recipients may
have felt uncomfortable with the anonymous authorship and the highly
polemical tone of this post, nonetheless an astonishing number of scholars,
from all ranks of the profession, felt impelled to announce that they, too,
shared these profound dissatisfactions with the status quo. Many noted that
in 1998 an APSA membership survey reportedly found that, in fact, a very
large proportion of APSA members, to say nothing of scholars who have given
up on APSA, were critical of the current condition of the APSR. A lively
discussion ensued, in which scholars discussed whether the problems arose
from the biases of APSR editors and APSA leaders, from more structural
problems in the reviewing processes, or from problems in American
intellectual and political life more broadly. Inevitably, people differed in
their views. There has been, however, extensive agreement that whatever the
sources of the problems, changes need to be made.
What changes? Many ideas
have been explored in recent email discussions. These have included:
- Permitting APSA members not to
purchase the APSR, but rather to choose alternative journals or none at
all.
- Making the selection of the
APSR Editorial Board, the APSA Council, and basic policy decisions
concerning the journal and the association more open to genuine
democratic decision making by the APSA membership.
- Revising the APSR reviewing
process to seek both to ensure that some methodologies are not
automatically vetoed and that most articles are of interest to a broad
scholarly audience.
- Finding ways to encourage
scholars who have given up on the APSR to submit their work to it once
again.
- Pursuing the suggestions both
for an electronic APSR and a separate “book reviews” journal that the
Association’s Strategic Planning Committee has raised.
- Making the 1998 survey of
attitudes toward the APSR widely available, and, yet more importantly,
developing mechanisms to examine regularly how satisfied political
scientists are with the publications and professional activities they
underwrite via their APSA dues.
It is very
unfortunate that deeply committed political scientists genuinely believe,
whether rightly or wrongly, that they cannot criticize the status quo safely
without the cloak of anonymity. We should have regular channels through which
dissent can be effectively communicated.
We, the undersigned, do not represent any consensus on just why the APSR and
the APSA are in the condition they are now in, nor any consensus on just what
should be done. We are also not an organized or systematically recruited
group. We are simply scholars who, after discussing the Perestroika memo over
the course of a few days, decided to join in this letter. We do so because we
believe strongly that the profession is in danger of alienating a larger and
larger number of those who should be its active members, and contributing
less and less to the kinds of understanding of politics that it is our
responsibility to advance. Hence, we urge the APSA leadership and membership
alike to look seriously at the issues raised above, to speak out on them, and
to take soon the actions that emerge as most widely endorsed in the ensuing
discussions.
Christopher
S. Allen, University of Georgia
Belinda A. Aquino, University of Hawai’i, Manoa
Myron Aronoff, Rutgers University
Robert Art, Brandeis University
Zoltan D. Barany, University of Texas, Austin
Bethany Barratt, University of California-Davis
David M. Barrett, Villanova University
Deborah Baumgold, University of Oregon
Seyla Benhabib, Harvard University
Thomas U. Berger, Johns Hopkins University
Gerald Berk, University of Oregon
Larry Berman, University of California Washington Center
Sheri E. Berman, Princeton University
Michael Bernhard, Penn State University
Richard K. Betts, Columbia University
Jack Bielasiak, Indiana University
Marc Blecher, Oberlin College
Mark Blyth, Johns Hopkins University
John Bokina, University of Texas, Pan American
Joe Bowersox III, Williamette University
Paul R. Brass, University of Washington
Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University
Christopher Brooke, Magdalen College, Oxford University
Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley
Fran Buntman, University of Akron
Susan Burgess, Ohio University
Bert C. Buzan, California State University, Fullerton
Keith J. Bybee, Harvard University
Joseph Carens, University of Toronto
Barbara J. Callaway, Rutgers University
Lief H. Carter, Colorado College
Haesook Chae, Baldwin Wallace College
Geeta Chowdhry, Northern Arizona University
Cornell Clayton, Washington State University
Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins SAIS
Stephen Crowley, Oberlin College
Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Thomas DeLuca, Fordham University
Michael C. Desch, University of Kentucky
Gus diZerega, Whitman College
Raymond Duvall, University of Minnesota
Tim Duvall, St. John’s University
David V. Edwards, University of Texas, Austin
John Ehrenberg, Long Island University
Fred Eidlin, University of Guelph
Richard J. Ellis, Willamette University
Edward C. Epstein, University of Utah
Peter Euben, University of California, Santa Cruz
Daryl R. Fair, College of New Jersey
Richard A. Falk, Princeton University
Tom Farer, University of Denver
Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawai’i
Leela Fernandes, Rutgers University
Joel Fetzer, Central Michigan University
Stephen L. Fisher, Emory & Henry College
James C. Foster, Oregon State University
Samantha Frost, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
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Perestroika/Glasnost and "Taking Back the APSR"
Sven
Steinmo, (University of Colorado, Boulder)
A recent
storm of protest has erupted within the political science community. A group
going by the acronym "Perestroika-Glasnost" has challenged many
APSA institutions and practices. Their initial email "Manifesto"
has exploded over the internet because it has effectively exposed the
frustration so many political scientists have with the APSA and in particular
with the APSR.
Two years ago, I was
nominated to the APSA Council through an email campaign on a "Take back
the APSR" ticket. I decided to get involved because I, like Mr.
Perestroika and an enormous number of political scientists, had become
frustrated with the APSR. I believe that the Review has become dominated with
a very narrow vision of `science' and that this is destructive to the
profession as a whole. What I have discovered over the past couple of years,
however, is that while there is a great deal of agreement about the problem,
there is little agreement about what to do about this problem. Real change
will not come easy.
Contrary to my initial
expectations, I found that the APSA central administration was quite
sympathetic to the critique of the narrowness of the APSR. As an
institutionalist, I should have expected this. The Association is worried
that disaffection with the APSR is undermining APSA as an institution: Many,
many political scientists have left (and are leaving) their professional
association because of anger and frustration with the APSR. Put bluntly, the
Review has become a "selective disincentive" for APSA membership.
My second surprise was to
find that the APSA Council was not made up of a clique white males from elite
East Coast universities. On the contrary, the Council membership represents a
diverse set of political scientists from different parts of the country and
different types of schools. Indeed, I quickly discovered that many Council
members clearly agreed that the APSR needed change.
In response to the
complaints about the Review, APSA President Robert Keohane constituted a
"Strategic Planning Committee" (SPC), with the explicit mandate to
examine the Association' s journals. I was included on this committee. The
SPC met several times in 1999-2000 and struggled with a number of distinct
issues regarding the APSA. Our central task was to examine what to do about
the discontent with the APSR. Even on this committee, I found almost no
supporters for the very narrow APSR that we currently have. Even people who
have published repeatedly in the APSR told me that they did not (and some
even admitted that they "can not") read it.
However, identifying a
problem is a lot easier than agreeing about how to solve this problem. In my
experience, there is very little agreement even amongst the APSR's most
ardent critics about what should be done. The SPC's first suggestion was to
make the APSR editor submit his/her list of editorial board members to the
Council for approval. The idea was to make this person search for a broader
mix of scholars to be on the board. It was easily agreed that this would be a
step in the right direction.
Beyond this obvious step,
consensual solutions were difficult to find. While virtually everyone agreed
that the APSR should reflect the breadth of the discipline, we could not
agree on specific mechanisms that will guarantee this outcome. Possibly, no
single journal can reflect the best work across a discipline as broad as
political science. One should note that we are virtually alone among academic
disciplines to require association members to purchase a single journal. So,
what is to be done? There are four main suggestions that have been forwarded
to date:
1) Get another editor.
This is probably the most common suggestion. But, a new editor has just been
chosen, Lee Sigelman. I would personally have preferred an historical
institutionalist as editor, but by all accounts Sigelman is a methodological
pluralist and aware of the discontent. Still, many people believe that the
problems with the APSR are so far institutionalized that it is unlikely to be
solved by replacing the editor.
2) Force the APSR into the
21 st century and `go electronic' (at least in part) and thereby making more
room for longer and more qualitative kind of work. The SPC made this
suggestion in the Spring 2000. For a lot of reasons, this suggestion aroused
a great deal of criticism. I support this idea but do not feel that it is a
magic bullet.
3) Create a separate book
review journal with more overview essays, etc, that would be of interest to a
wider swath of the profession. This idea is still on the table, but many
people (myself included) are not enthusiastic about the idea because we fear
that such a journal might simply be seen as `second tier'. For example, in
the worst scenario, a second journal could allow the APSR to become even
narrower. In defense of the proposal, however, taking the book reviews out of
the APSR could allow for more space and thereby longer, and more different,
articles.
4) Allow choice: in my
view, APSA members should be given a choice of journals. There are various
versions of this idea. One version allows any number of journals affiliate
with the APSA and thus lets APSA members to get whichever of these journals
as part of their membership. They may, of course, choose the APSR. Another is
to create another APSA officially sanctioned journal (e.g., a review
journal-see 3 above) and allow APSA members to choose both journals for an
additional fee. A third possibility is to allow APSA members opt out of the
Journals all together and thereby reduce their dues. This option is my least
favorite because I believe we should collectively subsidize the academically
publishing market.
A problem with ALL of
these solutions is that well-meaning people passionately disagree with each
of them. I do not know which alternatives (other than 1) will be implemented.
What can
YOU do? If you agree that have consciously and specifically acted change is
needed, please continue to apply pressure on the APSA and the APSR to be
broader and more inclusive of differing intellectual traditions and
methodological preferences. Get - and stay active in the reform movement. In
my view, one of the reasons that the profession has become so narrow is that
we have allowed it to become so. Go to the APSA meetings. Participate
actively in section meetings- like WEPS. Nominate reform-minded colleagues to
the Council and other APSA executive positions. Volunteer to serve on
committees (e.g., award committees) in the association. In general, do not
allow the profession to be taken away from you by apathy. Rational Choice
proponents have done so well politically, because they understand collective
action problems and because they acted strategically. So do the same.
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Discipline out of Touch with Real-World Concerns
Therese S. Gunawardena-Vaughn
I am a graduate student
nearing completion of my Ph.D., and the recent discussion regarding APSA’s
institutional exclusiveness and near-obsession with statistical methods
resonates strongly with me. As an undergraduate, I majored in English and
minored in political science and economics, and chose to enter a political
science graduate program because of a passion for politics and intellectual
inquiry. However, this initial (and somewhat youthful) idealism has gradually
been supplanted by an ever-growing cynicism regarding both the discipline and
my own function as one of its adherents.
Mr. Perestroika’s claims
regarding the hegemonic status accorded statistical methodologies deserve
some comment here. During my tenure as a graduate student, I have encountered
many “political scientists” whose fixation on quantitative tools blinds them
to all else. They remain completely oblivious to the complexities inherent in
social and political phenomena that we, as social scientists, are ostensibly
charged with understanding and explicating. Additionally, I have attended
numerous APSA meetings and listened to so-called “luminaries” in the field
tout their “parsimonious and elegant” models that bear little resemblance to
the world I inhabit. It is gratifying to realize that I was not alone in
thinking that many of these studies were both uninteresting and futile.
Incidentally, although I
have presented individual papers at APSA meetings in the past, an
analytically rigorous panel proposal on transnational social movements that I
submitted to the 2000 meeting was unceremoniously rejected. While I do not
think that my own research is particularly worthy of public approbation, the
other panelists included accomplished scholars such as Saskia Sassen and
Yossi Shain, both of whom have made significant contributions to our
understanding of important contemporary political issues. This offhand
dismissal seems indicative of APSA’s preoccupation with methodology at the
expense of interesting, timely, and politically relevant scholarship.
I am extremely excited
about this revolution from within and lend it my unequivocal support.
However, I will not be formally affiliated with the discipline in the near
future. While I have been exceedingly fortunate to have a supervisor who
shares my intellectual Weltanschauung, I have decided not to pursue a career
in academia for many of the reasons highlighted by Mr. Perestroika. Finally,
I am a woman and a minority (who did not grow up in the United States), and
am amazed at how out of touch many American-trained political scientists are
with “real-world” politics. As those of us who study ethnic conflict are
keenly aware, these real-world politics affect people’s lives in tangible and
sometimes terrible ways.
I commend Mr. Perestroika
and others for having the courage to give voice to opinions that many of us
have long held in silence.
Therese S.
Gunawardena-Vaughn,
University of Texas, Austin
---------------------------------------------
Perestroika: For An Ecumenical Science of Politics
The Perestroika movement is a reaction against scholars who wish to turn the
study of politics into what Thomas Kuhn called a “normal science.” They seek
to impose a consensus on epistemological and methodological questions in
order to hasten scientific progress. This group of scholars comprises mainly
rational choice theorists, formal modelers, and those who do exclusively
quantitative research. I refer to them as advocates of “hard science.”
There is no reason that
deductive theorizing or quantitative research need generate this hegemonic
ambition. The postmodernist hegemony of the left that plagues some literature
and history departments may be just as suffocating as a hard-scientific
hegemony of the right. The problem is the hegemonic project itself, which
might serve any approach. To force conformity among us, some hard scientists
have corrupted decisionmaking on hiring, promotion, curriculum, and
publication. Many seek to indoctrinate graduate students instead of teaching
them to think for themselves.
The Perestroika movement’s
first goal is to defeat this hegemonic project. To do this, we must highlight
the limitations of hard-scientific research. But the movement does not aim to
banish deductive theory or to put a new orthodoxy in its place. Even hard
scientists who embrace intellectual pluralism might join the Perestroika
movement.
Why must we stop the
hegemonic project of hard science? First, because it threatens academic
freedom. Many hard scientists are oblivious to the harm they are doing to
young scholars. A recent job applicant to my university had superimposed an
ill-fitting rational-choice template on her dissertation. Her advisors had
warned her that without it she might not find work, get published, or even
organize a thesis committee of the right people. Other graduate students have
reported similar stories to the Perestroika forum. Ian Shapiro, Theda Skocpol,
and Margaret Keck, among many others, have recently warned graduate students
not to view their work instrumentally, urging them to shun what is
fashionable and to rely on their own judgment. But what has become of our
calling when we must admonish graduate students to write what they think? In
the past, no such advice was necessary, but today’s hard scientists have
convinced many young people that they must sacrifice their intellectual
integrity to enter this profession. The rest of us cannot ignore this
situation. It is our profession, too, and we are responsible.
A second reason that we
must blunt this hegemonic project is that normal science makes for bad
science in the study of politics. Viewing its results, the irrationalities of
this endeavor overshadow the anticipated progress. No objective person could
read Donald Green and Ian Shapiro’s Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory
(Yale 1994) without seeing the dangers that arise when like-minded scholars
avoid external scrutiny and interact only with one another. While these
scholars supported the publication of each other’s research, there was no one
among them to point out that the emperor was, at best, scantily clad. The
so-called New Institutionalism exemplifies the isolation of the hard-science
group. Institutional variables, such as organizational and legal structures,
have always been paramount in research on bureaucracy, party systems,
regimes, and many other empirical subjects. The only way one could declare a
New Institutionalism in political science in the mid-1980s is if one had read
nothing outside the rational choice tradition for a very long time. This is
the blindness that results when, as at the University of Rochester, virtually
every job ad has sought a practitioner of rational choice.
A third reason to stop the
hard-science project is that its scholarship is increasingly irrelevant to
the normative and practical problems of real politics. Moral questions get
little attention from today’s hard scientists. They have pushed classical political
philosophy to the margins of the curriculum. On the practical side, although
hard science ostensibly addresses empirical questions, it inevitably
degenerates into an unempirical exercise. Except in rare situations, the
political action of real, living human beings is not susceptible of rational
choice equilibria or any comparably rigorous theoretical formulations. The
only way to develop hard-scientific theories of politics, then, is to
extirpate the empirical. That is why the currency of hard science is formal
modeling, deductive theory, and macro-level quantitative research that
analyzes “facts” out of context. Instead of studying human beings as they
are, many hard scientists turn their subjects into robots or abstractions,
restricting their thoughts and actions for theoretical convenience. The
resulting theories teach us as much about real politics as a book of chess
openings might teach us about medieval society. When confronted with the lack
of empirical support for their theories, hard scientists denounce those who
don’t understand that the task of social science is to “generalize.” But
generalize about what? Is it our task to understand politics, or to grapple
with the logic of imaginary games?
The disparagement of
empirical research has brought many evils. Hard scientists have sought to
create an artificial division of labor between their self-anointed
theoretical elite and area studies experts, who have long been the richest
source of empirical political theory. (Never mind that hard science
flourishes mainly in that most parochial of areas, American politics—it is
truer to say that these folks study a politics practiced only in their minds,
a nowhere politics, than it is to describe them as Americanists. The robots
don’t speak English; they speak Mathematics.) As hard scientists climb the
ladder of abstraction, practical policy studies get less space in the
curriculum and in top journals. And as empirical issues lose salience, a
narrow technicism becomes the main criterion for judging research. It no
longer matters whether scholarship enhances our comprehension of politics,
but only if it fits into the current methodological or theoretical
straitjacket.
Every approach has its
uses and limitations. The point here is not that deductive theory or narrowly
quantitative work is always inferior to the alternatives. Many political
scientists use hard-scientific methods selectively to produce work free of
the ills described above—in fact, many such scholars have backed the
Perestroika movement. The point is that these approaches are not the panacea
that their more dogmatic adherents claim them to be, and thus the effort to
establish their hegemony is misguided.
Some may question the
coupling of deductive theory and quantitative research under the one rubric
of “hard science.” Quantitative researchers do at least schematically
empirical work, whereas most deductive theorists use empirical data only for
anecdotal illustration. But it was radical quantifiers, those who analyze all
questions with statistics, who first deformed the discipline in the name of
hard science. It was they who popularized the study of politics outside of
its historical and cultural setting, who made methodology into the core of
graduate education while degrading political philosophy and foreign language
study, and who spawned the trend toward method-driven rather than
problem-driven research.
Thanks to the tyranny of
hard science, graduate students today enter political science as if boarding
a spaceship in midflight. They are clueless as to its origins because their
training slights basic normative and epistemological questions. Their
destination lies somewhere in the clouds of “theory.” Following an education
that emphasizes methodology and research design, the students earn their
passports to the clouds in qualifying exams that grill them on multiple
regression, most-different-systems analysis, and the small-n problem. Many of
the exam-takers have yet to master the history, economics, social structure,
and politics of even one “n,” but why bother? They will exit the spaceship
either at quantitative research, where the computer will provide all the n’s
they need, or at deductive theory, where they may generalize without any n’s
at all.
Numbers crunchers created
this approach to political education; rational choice theorists thrive on it.
Despite their differences, they share the daydream of a hard science of
politics. That is why they have formed a ruling coalition in economics
departments and aspire to do so in political science. The Perestroika
movement thus parallels the movement for a “Post-Autistic Economics”
(www.paecon.net), which similarly combats the extreme exponents of
quantitative research and rational choice theory.
If the hegemony of hard
science is what the Perestroika movement opposes, what vision of political
research does it support? Against the flawed conception of normal science, we
espouse the ideal of an ecumenical science. It is based on three principles:
problem-driven research, methodological pluralism, and interdisciplinary
inquiry. While normal science identifies itself by its method, ecumenical
science will unite scholars of diverse methods and approaches around the
study of substantive political problems. The problems include both normative
and practical concerns, which we believe are inseparable. The two words
“political science” have come to grate against one another under the regime
of hard science. The compulsion to forge a grand, elegant scientific canon
has produced theories of little relevance to real politics. For us, it is
politics first, science second. Where science contributes to knowledge of
politics, we embrace it. Where it does not, we have no use for it. We reject
the hard-scientific fetish of theory for theory’s sake. Good political scientists
read history so as to know the limits of theory.
Methodological pluralism
is our objective in all matters of hiring, curriculum, and publication. In an
ecumenical science, approaches and methods will not be religious commitments
but tools whose utility varies with the problem at hand. In our view,
scholars who use the same approach or method to examine every political
question are not thinking. Those who would impose one approach or method on
the discipline are not allowing others to think. While encouraging the
flexible use of scientific methods, we do not accept the hard-scientific view
that good method is the sine qua non of good research. Even a cursory glance
at the best political scholarship belies this notion. Depending on the
research problem, good scholarship might demand rational normative discourse,
a careful reading of history, knowledge of foreign languages, field work, a
judicious examination of primary source materials, and many other elements
besides appropriate methods. Even flexible methodology, then, does not
guarantee positive results—it is but one aspect of good research.
The greatest task of an
ecumenical science of politics is to remove the artificial barriers between
disciplines that have long hindered the study of society. Specialization may
befit the natural sciences, but their objects of study are distinct. The
social sciences and humanities all claim the same object of study: the human
being. We have carved up this whole being and removed the parts to our separate
“disciplines,” each of which pretends to explain actions of the whole person
by drawing inferences from its part alone. But when people engage in
political action, they do not leave their psychology, history, language, or
religion behind. What scholars in other disciplines are learning about human
beings is directly relevant to their politics. Already in the 1920s, José
Ortega y Gasset bemoaned the lack of “encyclopedic moments” when scholars of
society might integrate what they were learning in so many isolated
compartments.
Political science once
stood at the crossroads of history and philosophy and it has been the most
eclectic social science. Restored to that pivotal position, it will be
uniquely well situated to become the ecumenical science whose task it will be
to reintegrate the study of human beings. The result will not be one or a few
grand theories, but we can achieve integration on a more modest scale by
assembling diverse groups of scholars to work on key political problems.
To put our three principles
of problem-driven research, methodological pluralism, and interdisciplinary
inquiry into practice, we must reform graduate education and forge a new
relationship between political science and other fields of scholarship. What
is to be done?
1.
We must
restore political philosophy to a central place in political studies so that
the ends of political life once again become our common focus.
Hard-scientific methodology has displaced political philosophy as the core
requirement in the graduate curriculum. The result has been a narrow
conception of “science” and the proliferation of research whose purpose is to
test-drive some method or approach rather than to increase our knowledge of
politics. (It is no wonder that undergraduate enrollments have plummeted in
step with the hegemony of hard science.) The revitalization of political
philosophy will unite us around a common normative discourse, and methodology
will once again become a means, and not the end, of our work.
2.
We
must expand methodological training beyond the realms of deductive theory and
quantitative research to encompass qualitative research methods.
3.
We
must pursue innovative strategies to reorganize research around the study of
substantive problems. These might include the earmarking of faculty lines for
subjects rather than subfields (the Yale model) or the temporary organization
of faculty clusters around topics of novel interest or importance, such as
gender and politics, immigration and civil rights, or politics and genetics.
We should treat the standard subfields as administrative expedients, not as
barriers to the creative organization of research.
4.
As
one more step towards reinvigorating problem-driven research, we must reverse
the decline of policy studies. It will be disastrous for political science if
policy research continues to migrate to schools of public administration in
the way that practical economic studies have fled economics departments for
the business schools. If one compares the size of economics departments and
business schools in today’s academy, the cost of reducing a social science to
sterile theoretical endeavors is obvious.
5.
We
must revamp our professional associations and journals to emphasize political
substance and catholicism with respect to methods and approaches. As the most
prestigious outlet for political research, the American Political Science
Review needs reform. On professional bodies, we must facilitate the full
participation of women, ethnic minorities, foreign scholars, and the faculty
of liberal arts colleges, all of whom have special contributions to make to
the ecumenism we hope to foster.
6.
We
must renew our commitment to study the politics of different parts of the
world. Cross-cultural comparisons may be the ideal basis for empirical
political theory, but cross-cultural research is not acultural research.
Comparative politics will become impossible if we ape economics in its
repudiation of foreign area studies. We must stop the practice of allowing
statistics courses to substitute for foreign language requirements in our
graduate programs. Above all, we must increase our faculty with expertise on
the non-Western world. We cannot allow research on non-Western areas to ebb
and flow with the level of external funding, lest we revert to the dark ages
when “politics” meant the politics of a few, rich, western nations.
7.
We
must promote interdisciplinary research, not just by singing its praises, but
by educating the next generation of scholars to do it. As urged by the
Gulbenkian Commission (Open the Social Sciences, Stanford 1996), we must
promote graduate training that combines political science not only with the
other social sciences and the humanities, but also with the physical
sciences. We advocate the spread of joint degree programs and the practice of
encouraging our Ph.D. students to earn master’s degrees in other disciplines.
The words department and discipline will be the least sacred entries in the
ecumenical glossary. We advocate an “un-discipline-d” political science.
William
Riker was fond of saying that political science was a sinking ship, and
rational choice theory was the only tugboat that might bring it to port. It
is truer to say that Riker’s disciples have acted as pirates out to hijack
political science to a rather barren island. Their piracy is doomed to
failure. The study of politics will never become a normal science except at
the point of a gun. The many interests involved in political life guarantee
that every concept and every approach will be contested. Let us celebrate
this diversity, not suppress it. It makes our academic community a more
interesting place to live. It produces better scholarship than could any
closed circle of true believers. And it may enable us to play a pivotal
historical role by integrating once more the study of human beings in an
ecumenical science of politics.
Gregory Kaska
Indiana University
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