Storming the Palace in Political Science (The Perestroika Movement)

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THE PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT

The Chronicle of Higher Education

September 21, 2001

Storming the Palace in Political Science

Scholars join revolt against the domination of mathematical approaches to the discipline

By D.W. MILLER

San Francisco

The revolution was scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. in Continental Parlor 2, but some people came early.

By 10:15, the population of the small, windowless conference room at the San Francisco Hilton had swelled to 250 or so. Clutching cocktails and sporting plastic name tags, the dissident political scientists barely had room to move. Some donned plain red protest buttons distributed at the door, making it easier to tell the committed from the merely curious. Surely few came just for the booze. (Cash bar.)

The protest movement, "dubbed Perestroika" by its anonymous founder last fall, had its coming out over Labor Day weekend here at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Close to 300 turned out for the reception on the first night, and a similarly high number filled the room at a panel discussion-cum-strategy session the following afternoon, while dozens more strained to hear from the hallway outside.

After months of Internet chatter about a crisis in political science, the movement's leaders found in San Francisco an answer to the question: If we had a revolution, would anyone come? But they may not be any closer to agreement on how to right their discipline.

By the time Michael C. Desch, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, opened the reception with a toast to "Mr. Perestroika," it was already clear that the pseudonymous polemicist had tapped a well of resentment in the profession. Like its founder, the movement's younger scholars seem to fear the consequences of speaking publicly. So it was left to a half-dozen tenured professors to approach the podium and contend, to hoots and applause, that political science now values rigorous mathematical methods over substance and relevance.

"I've felt since the late 1980s that the discipline was in trouble," said John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. There is a "hegemonic threat out there" from rational-choice scholars, who draw conclusions about political behavior from game theory and empirical data, and "large-N" people, a reference to the large samples necessary for statistical modeling.

"This is about the mathematicization of political science," he said. "I'm in favor of filling the zoo with all kinds of animals. But I'm concerned about them running us out of the business or making us marginal."

Those who insist on judging the merit of scholarship on that basis, the critics say, have come to dominate leading journals, influence how graduate students are trained, and determine who is hired and promoted within political-science departments. As a result, they say, work in political theory and in fields that rely on less-quantitative methods, such as international relations and the comparative study of different countries, is being pushed to the margins.

"I'm not very proud of being a political scientist, and I'm not very proud of political science ... because we are not as useful as we could be," said Rogers M. Smith, a political theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, to cheers and laughter. He called on his audience to create a "critical gadfly profession" that will be "dangerous and troublesome and no longer trivial in the world."

"People who do rational choice select problems because they are susceptible to quantitative measurement," said Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, also of Chicago's political-science department. "The basic political point is that we're against hegemony, against a monopoly of knowledge."

"A wish to have precise answers drives you to narrow methodology," she added. "A wish to have broader answers drives you to multiple methodologies."

For example, she says, scholars keen to explore the factors influencing legislative redistricting might find data sets relevant to partisanship but not to race. A rational choicer would ignore the latter, while a researcher willing to use "softer methodology," she said, "would go and interview people in legislatures, go and talk to editors of city magazines, go and talk to Martin Luther King's son, talk to the community."

Despite wearing the red badge of complaint, untenured scholars were wary of speaking to a reporter about the discipline's problems. "I come from a department that's been remade over in this way, and I'm concerned about retribution," a young political scientist at a public university in Pennsylvania said, asking that his name not be used.

"We do see this kind of hegemony of methodology," said his friend, a visiting professor at an Illinois public college, eye ing a reporter's notebook nervously. "The discipline is changed now, and I think it's too late to stop the hegemony."

Last fall, when the anonymous Mr. Perestroika first distributed his complaints on the Internet, the movement's main target was the association itself. Hundreds of tenured scholars signed a letter protesting the lack of competitive elections for the association's offices and publication criteria that seemed to favor mathematical methods.

If the dissidents' agenda was truly so straightforward, they would already have reason to rejoice. For one thing, they have the ear of the political-science establishment.

During the association's meeting, for example, the new editor of its flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, outlined his plans to make it more hospitable to mathematics-free articles. Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, who is regarded by Perestroikans as sympathetic, was elected to serve as president a year from now.

And during the open discussion at the Perestroika reception, Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard professor and the incoming association president, stepped forward to endorse the complaint that political science has become less relevant to those outside the discipline. "I know it's dangerous for a movement to be co-opted, and it's useful for a movement to have a Winter Palace to storm," he said. "And for the moment I'm the little guard in front of the palace."

It might even be said that the Perestroikans have already burst through the gates. Lee Sigelman, a professor at George Washington University and the new editor of the Review, has assembled an academically diverse editorial board and announced at the meeting that he would drop a longstanding requirement that the journal's peer reviewers unanimously agree on the merit of an article. That, he said, might help break an impasse over the definition of rigor for scholarship based on qualitative methods.

In addition, since the association received the letter of complaint in November, it has:

Announced that it will start a new journal, called Perspectives on Politics, to publish articles that integrate different subfields and apply research to matters of public policy.
Promised to reconsider the manner in which candidates for offices are selected by incumbent officers to run unopposed.
Decided to make subscriptions to the flagship journal refundable, effectively allowing dissatisfied readers to vote with their wallets.
Nominated and elected James Scott, a scholar of Asian politics at Yale University and a leading Perestroikan, to join the association's council.

By the time the dissidents gathered for drinks in San Francisco, however, they no longer expected reform of the association to be a panacea. "My fear is that quantitative people will still dominate the job market," said Gregory J. Kasza, an associate professor of comparative politics at Indiana University at Bloomington. "Restructuring hiring practices will be much harder than changing the association."

That's because the group holds little sway over individual departments, where political scientists design curricula for the next generation of undergraduates, train graduate students, and hire and promote -- or decline to hire and promote -- scholars.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Kasza recalled a job applicant to his department a few years ago who had written an excellent dissertation based on ethnographic interviewing in Russia, grafted awkwardly onto a rational-choice framework. When pressed, the woman admitted she had been swayed by her graduate advisers, who told her she would never get a dissertation committee or a job without a rational-choice component.

In the departmental trenches, the proponents of methodological diversity have been, by their own admission, ill-prepared. Chicago's Mr. Mearsheimer said he believes that pluralists have been losing the debate over the criteria for judging scholarship and hiring scholars because they don't know enough about rational choice and mathematical modeling to evaluate research that uses those methods. At a panel the day after the Perestroika reception, he offered a five-point plan for fighting back.

Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, earned applause at the reception for his "radical notion": Departments ought to require all students to learn nonquantitative research methods, such as ethnographic interviewing, he said, and hire a faculty member just to teach them. But he also noted that his comrades' best weapon was high-quality work. "You can't fight something with nothing. You can't plead for tolerance without having something good to put forward."

But the tenor of the debate in San Francisco also left some rank-and-file scholars uneasy. "My colleagues at UCLA have a beautiful vision of the world: rational choice," said Brian Walker, an assistant professor of political philosophy who spoke from the floor during the reception. "It's internally consistent, coherent. I see in Perestroika a movement for a new kind of careerism. Don't we need a substantive vision of what we want?" Contacted after the association's meeting had ended, Mr. Walker called the conference a "missed opportunity."

Fault lines undermined even the movement's most clearly stated goal: to fight for tolerance and pluralism among methodologies. "There's a bifurcation of factions," Mr. Kasza said at the reception. "One view is, we're for pluralism, so we can't criticize rational choice. The second view is, 'Storm the Bastille!' The ultimate goal is pluralism, tolerance for all sorts of approaches. But we need to cut the 800-pound gorilla down to size."

Repeated references to "rat choicers" during the public events, however, led one graduate student to declare herself "alienated" from the discussion. "As someone who uses rational choice and will for the rest of my career, I worry that someday they will be in charge," said the woman, who feared her support for Perestroika might harm her job search. But more people like her would endorse it, she added, if not for its "us-versus-them mentality."

For now, no one can say what the movement's next step should be. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Perestroika vowed to fight homogeneity and "cronyism" in the discipline. But he, or she, or they -- the author insists on ambiguity -- did not offer to steer the movement's agenda. At the meeting, some argued that Perestroika should advance with a "vanguard" of committed activists, a phrase that evokes Lenin plotting in exile. Others said that the free-wheeling e-mail list is more democratic. Motions to elect officers were ignored, but Perestroikans may form loose committees to press specific causes.

That emphasis on tactics is reflected in the Perestroika e-mail list. One scholar has proposed that Perestroikans rank leading departments according to their scholarly diversity. Another urged his colleagues to gather data proving that tenure-review committees often hold nonmathematical scholars to higher standards than their mathematical counterparts -- say, two books versus a half-dozen journal articles.

In other words, fight math with math.

'NEXT PHASE OF OUR STRUGGLE'

Despite some success in making the American Political Science Association and its flagship journal more responsive to their complaints, members of the "Perestroika" dissident movement have realized that the most crucial battles on behalf of "methodological pluralism" will be fought outside the association. At the political-science meeting in early September, the University of Chicago's John J. Mearsheimer offered his colleagues a five-point plan for "the next phase of our struggle."

It's the methodology, stupid. "We should focus directly and exclusively" on the common belief "that first-rate scholarship in the social sciences does not require mathematics," he said, and not get sidetracked over internal differences in political views and academic specialties.
Get down in the trenches. "The future of the discipline will largely be determined by who is hired and promoted in the major social-science departments."
Fight for more pie. Perestroikans should insist on a fair shake from the National Science Foundation, whose grants for political-science research go mostly to math-oriented "methodological parochialists."
Know your adversary. "It is imperative that Perestroikans have a sound understanding of formal modeling and statistical reasoning," both to impart methodological sophistication to students and to counter the "hexing power of mathematics" with knowledge of its limitations.
'Vive la différence.' Don't replace one form of parochialism with another; rational choice and statistical modeling belong inside the tent, too.

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A16