THE PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT

ON THIS PAGE Political Scientists Are in a Revolution Instead of Watching

Emily Eakin
The New York Times

An Open Letter to the APSA Leadership and Members Perestroika/Glasnost and Taking Back the APSR Sven Steinmo Discipline out of Touch with Real-World Concerns
Therese S. Gunawardena-Vaughn

Perestroika: For An Ecumenical Science of Politics

Gregory Kaska
new

__________________________________________ http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/Perestroika.htm#_Peres troika:_For_An

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." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 Associations 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 Hawaii, 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. Johns 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 Hawaii 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 APSAs 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. Perestroikas 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 socalled 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 APSAs 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 peoples 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 movements 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 todays 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 Shapiros 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 others 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 todays 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 dont 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 politicsit 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 dont 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 abovein 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 ns they need, or at deductive theory, where they may generalize without any ns 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 theorys 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 resultsit 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, Jos 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. 1.

2.

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. 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. 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

3. 3.

4. 4.

business schools in todays academy, the cost of reducing a social science to sterile theoretical endeavors is obvious.

5. 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. 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. 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 masters 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.

6. 6.

7. 7.

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 Rikers 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