|
www.paecon.net
THE
PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT
The New York Times
November 4, 2000
Political
Scientists Are in a Revolution Instead of Watching
By EMILY EAKIN
The 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."
|