What's Wrong With Political Science

...Merriam’s intellectual heirs eventually began to think him a bit antiquated, for Merriam had been personally active in politics outside the classroom and saw no conflict between his avocation and his scientific studies of the subject...

...Political science’s contribution to the American people could be to help them remedy this frustration, to teach them how their system really works and how they can make it work for them...

...Herbert Kaufman, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who is listened to by many people outside academe, concedes that “what I know directly from modern political science you could write on the back of a matchbook cover...

...It’s like the scene in Moliere,” a fellow-sufferer told me, “where the guy asks the doctor why opium makes you sleep and the doctor says it’s because of opium’s soporific power...

...People on all rungs of the social ladder are more intimately affected by government today than ever before...

...If, as Shaw said in The Doctor’s Dilemma , “all professions are conspiracies against the laity,” political science at the age of 21 was clearly a failed one...

...Though APSA had tried to establish all the trappings of a profession-journal, conventions, and so on-by 1924, only a handful of colleges recognized political science as meriting a department of its own...

...Bums and Rossiter based theirs in history...

...it’s obscure, it’s outdated, it’s unintelligible.’ In fact, they would be no more inclined to hire a political scientist than anybody else...

...The bearer of a Ph.D...

...But they too are exceptions that affirm the rule, for their historical, non-quantitative research methods leave them in a quite different field from their behavioral brethren...

...By Appointment Only.’ ” “Hang out a...

...w] idespread knowledge of this situation,” Somit and Tanenhaus note in their history, “did not adversely affect conversions to the faith...

...After all, other social sciences are valued in the marketplace...

...pop” psychology books like I‘m OK, You’re OK frequently crowd the best-seller lists...

...You are not...

...isn’t overly handicapped by what he learned in graduate school...

...Was it contemporary history, as some argued, or political economy, or political sociology, or law, or what...

...Having rushed to imitate its fellows by professionalizing, it now found itself a profession without a clientele...

...In fact, as the mental, social, and economic health of the nation worsened, one could always count on an increase in the number of psychologists, sociologists, and economists hired...

...These are exceptipns, however, that prove the rule: Barber and Kearns rooted their research not in the methods of political science but in the substance of psychologY...

...In short, we can hang out shingles...

...Nearly half of America’s psychologists and economists actually practice their professions...

...It was Reed’s ambition to transform political science from an enterprise of dry and largely unread description to an instrument of “education for democratic citizenship :” political science would see to it that both citizens and public officials were thoroughly trained to exercise their powers and meet their responsibilities...

...Unfortunately, things went downhill from there...

...They will learn from being in or around government, as much by feel as by analysis, the subtle interaction of personalities, values, pressures, and uncertainties that are involved in the way things really work...

...Fortunately, things have not gotten that bad...

...the typical scholarly oeuvre consisted of sleep-inducing, legalistic descriptions of the formal institutions of government...

...In truth, the only place we are likely to find out why political 14 science is so little valued is in this history I am about to tell...

...not surprisingly, tdo very different schools of thought emerged on what that something ought to be...

...We’ll Go Knocking on Theirs The latest fad to sweep political science is equally unpromising...

...Conversions to the Faith’ Propelled by the proliferation of computing devices, European intellectual currents, and the general ascendancy of science, the behavioral tide surged even stronger after World War 11...

...And what’s worse is that we’ve got a Gresham’s Law of our own: for the sake of keeping up with all this current stuff that has little or nothing to say, our students stop reading the gncient political philosophers, who had plenty to say...

...But economists, psychologists, and the rest actually seem to thrive on the incomprehensibility of what they say and do...

...What distinguished the theories of this new generation was that when people outside academics came to the professors who had mastered them and said, “Make X happen,” the social scientists could tell them which knobs to turn-and sometimes X happened...

...You may well suppose that you are about to be taken hack to the ancient Greece of Aristotle and Plato, guided about, and led triumphantly forward through centuries of Augustine, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and the other distinguished political thinkers of history...

...What effects do they have on what the government does...

...If a political scientist said something like that they’d laugh...

...That’s success...

...20 We ought to begin-by recognizing that wisdom is the result of equal parts of philosophy and experience, of thinking and doing...

...They advanced because they built on their philosophical foundations rather than abandoning them...

...Still, Merriam had another selling 16 point that was, if anything, even more compelling than his vision: millions of dollars in Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund money for his newly created Social Science Research Council (SSRC...

...The first contribution of the Michigan people was to take the most trivial of all these questions-How do people decide who to vote for?-and study the hell out of it, Why concentrate on that...

...It is not, however, an easy option, for it requires us to go back several decades to the prebehavioral days, bury our mistakes, and take the fork in the road we bypassed then...

...They still believe in the basic goodness of the system, but feel powerless to make unelected bureaucrats and distant legislators respond to their needs instead of the other way around...

...Scholars who hoped to i-eceive grants soon saw the advantages in doing behavioral studies...

...At about the same time, psychology turned up its Freud and sociology its own somewhat lesser lights, Weber and Durkheim...

...As a result, says George F. Will, the political scientist-turned-journalist, “other social sciences deal with matters of substance...

...James MacGregor Burns writes widely read biographies and essays, as did the late Clinton Rossiter...

...It got to the point where one could pick up the current issue of the American Political Science Review and come away blissfully ignorant of all the burning politi-Humphrey, a one-the doctoral candidate in political science, among other things, let it be known in 1969 that he might like to teach at the University of Minnesota, the highly behavioral department there rebelled-after all, what did Hubert Humphrey know about modern political science...

...He was assisted in the research for this article by Mane Hurley...

...They had a head start...

...In 1924, Merriam was 50 years old, a vibrant, articulate scholar-politician...

...You’ve got to remember,” Austin Ranney, a political scientist with a Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (and thus a bit of an exception himself) told me, “that we’re a very young discipline, less than a hundred years old...

...Modem economics and the others go back a century or more before that...

...now, like camp followers whose idols keep forgetting their names, we are to be pathetic as well...

...Oh, mm-hmm...

...The story begins, then, just before the turn of the century, at a time when there was hardly any “modern” political science worth talking about...

...People in government, in business, in the media, and so on have no expectations of us at all...

...Then turn the abandoned political science offices into squash courts...

...There was just one problem: because political scientists abandoned their own philosophical heritage for the sake of aping their colleagues, it was now hard to find two of them who agreed on what their newly professionalized discipline was...

...Soon the Ford Foundation was pouring in all sorts of money to fund behavioral research in the social sciences...

...In fact, The Federalist Papers, thought by many to be America’s one enduring contribution to political theory, was first published as a series of campaign tracts by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay...

...There is also an entire wing of the political science profession that is listened to: Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are ample proof of the influence of international relations scholars...

...That is about the extent of what a political scientist can do with all his years of advanced and specialized training: teach undergraduates who are, I suppose, hoping to learn how to read the newspaper a bit more intelligently, and teach the graduate students who will someday take his place...

...They weren’t always right, of course, but they were right just often enough so that people began to believe that theirs were true sciences...

...I plan to hang out a shingle...

...But it will mean that we can also work outside of the classroom, helping people fend for themselves against their grossly overgrown government...

...He never thought to mention Kissinger or Brzezinski...

...When they look at a question, it’s more likely to be a question whose answer a layman might want to hear...

...in economics may not get on the Council of Economic Advisers or Time’s Board of Economists, but he can take some comfort in knowing that these things exist as he chooses from a range of high-paying careers in business and government . Even sociologists and anthropologists do better...

...As wealthy Midwesterners once sent their daughters East for finishing, so gi-aduate departments now pack off their progeny to Michigan each summer to learn the latest in statistics and modeling...

...Clearly our fiist task, though, is to find out these things for ourselves...

...Make X Happen’ What made political science’s fail: ure even worse was the success that its sister social sciences were enjoying...

...You would think, wouldn’t you, that newspapers (which report on government), businesses (which are vitally affected by what government does to and for them), and the government itself would have some interest in the services of highly educated people who study government for a living...

...After a century or more of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and several o t hers-people who had thought about the great economic questions at their most profound, theoretical level-economics produced its Keynes, a doer who could take this knowledge and show how the economy could be not only understood, but directed...

...Seeing how well the other social sciences were doing with their jargon and models, he trumpeted a new, “behavioral” approach to the study of politics that would be as scientific as the rest of them...

...Political Scientist...

...People who look at our journals and sneer at the jargon and statistics look at an equally baffling economics journal, slacken their jaws, and hire an economist to translate for them...

...Jimmy Carter said James David Barber’s The Presidential Character was the best book on the presidency he had read...

...Thick arrows go back and forth from one box to the other-“we need them,” the drawing suggests, “but they need us just as much,” a notion that will undoubtedly come as news to “government practitioners...

...Of course, the great danger of getting inside the system is that one can get co-opted or, more innocently, simply lose sight of the forest for the trees...

...economists eleven times...

...I’m a grad student in political science,” I’d tell people foolish enough to ask...

...A psychologist can hang out a shingle and reasonably expect that people will come knocking at his door...

...This means changing not just our purpose, but our methods of discovery...

...That is why the study of philosophy, history, and literature remains vital both to keep us mindful of our duty to the people and to enable us to place the insights of experience into a perspective broad enough to yield understanding...

...the rest lumped it in with history or something...

...No, really, what does one do with a-” “One teaches...

...Perhaps nothing illustrates the barrenness of the behavioral movementits sacrifice of concern for learning how the system really works for the sake of intricate statistical modelsbetter than the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies...

...From election to election, ever more powerful statistical techniques were brought to bear by the Michiganders, awesome and complex models developed and refined to recreate the voter’s psyche...

...You know: ‘Michael Nelson...

...Apparently it is not enough to look silly...

...That must be very interesting...

...But Reed’s vision was not nearly so bold, nor his foundation resources so vast, as those of Professor Charles Merriam of the University of Chicago...

...Psychology Today sells half a million copies every month...

...An English historian named Morse Stephens complained that after two frustrating years in the United States, he had been unable to find anyone who could explain to him what this political science was supposed to be...

...The “real world” places almost no value, financial or aesthetic, on the training we political scientists receive‘ And the academic well is about dry: by the early 1980s, the American Political Science Association (APSA) reports, there will be no new faculty positions in political science...

...It’s about that vague...

...Its methods would be statistical and technical, its avowed purpose to discover the basic laws of political behavior...

...There is a market for political scientists, a set of ears willing to listen...

...When political scientists look at questions, I’m struck by the synthetic nature of their concerns...

...They say ‘political science doesn’t tell me anything...

...Are elections a good or bad thing...

...Which they did, cognizant perhaps that the hooey just made them seem all the more scientific...

...anthropologists .four times...

...This may seem strange (in the same way that not claiming legitimate royal ancestry would seem strange), but it provides a handy excuse when you ask a political scientist why nobody is buying or listening to what his profession has to say...

...They shape the questions to fit their models and methods, not the other way around, and they get answers that either no one is interested in or that are perfectly obvious...

...At that point , they were free to get as statistical and obscure to the layman as they wanted...

...in fact, we still have our best option left...

...Oh, I get it, very funny...

...To political scientists, particularly during the depression years that followed, those dollars were virtually all the research money there was to be hail...

...But now, by lowering our sights, we can elevate our purpose...

...The Civil Service Commission recognizes anthropologists, economists, et al...

...And, who knows, maybe we will earn the pleasure of seeing the next generation of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists jump on our bandwagon...

...Suffice it to say that there is no Political Science Today magazine, no Council of Political Science Advisers...

...Michigan’s flagship has been its election studies series...

...This curriculum of thought and action will surely improve our work in the classroom...

...Because once one has decided to quantify, one can study only that which is quantifiable...

...Back in the dark, pre-bkhavioral days, students of politics used to approach elections’ primitively, by exploring questions like these: What is their role in a democracy...

...But this didn’t help political science any as it sat home on APSA’s 21st birthday, all dressed up and no place to go...

...Will, who took his doctorate at Princeton and then taught for a while, went on to suggest that “we should take all the political philosophers and send them off to the philosophy departments, send the political sociologists to sociology, the political historians to history, and so on...

...Kaufman describes policy analysis as “plain old public administration with a couple of economics courses thrown in...

...Modern political scientists don’t claim kin with the likes of them...

...That fork, of course, leads to a political science dedicated to education for democratic citizenship, to “better minds for better government” in Thomas Reed’s phrase...

...One is impressed, in reading the collected works of three decades of Michigan and other behavioral researchers, with both the dullness of their questions and the poverty of their answers...

...When Watergate (a purely political crisis if there ever was one) exploded the world turned not to us but to lawyers and historians to find out what had gone wrong...

...Thomas Mann reports that “even when political scientists get jobs outside the classroom, they turn their backs on us...

...The pollyannalike civics training most people got in school, which probably did not even mention bureaucracy, political parties, pressure groups, mass media, and other components of real-world politics, left them no better informed...

...Personal experience in politics will quickly disabuse political scientists of the notion that the most important factors in making the system work can be fitted into equations...

...But the new behavioralists eschewed personal value judgments on the grounds that morals clouded understanding...

...So eager were many of the political scientists of that and succeeding generations to get once again on the economists’ and psychologists’ bandwagons-to follow their colleagues in hope of sharing in their prestige-that they rallied enthusiastically to Merriam’s call...

...Professor Thomas Reed led one of them...

...The American Political Science Association was created, its rather vague purpose being to “do for political science what the American Economic and American Historical Associations are doing for economics and history,” according to one of its founding fathers...

...When Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus wrote their semiofficial history, The Development of Political Science, they said, “We deliberately limited our attention to those aspects of the past which bear directly on the present ‘state of discipline.’ ” That took them back not to Plato’s cave but to New York in 1880...

...Reed briefly managed to grab control of APSA...

...through their logic, politics took a back seat to science...

...In light of political science’s history, the problem seems clear enough: over the years we have spent most of our energy rushing to imitate our sister social sciences’ methods of finding answers, conveniently fooling ourselves into forgetting that they have something we lack-a rich legacy of provocative questions, born of long years of purposeful thinking...

...he also turned up $75,000 in Carnegie Corporation money, which financed a lot of conferences and the like...

...Maybe I’m crazy, but this bothers me...

...Thus the cover of the new Policy Studies Journal shows two little boxes, one each for “Academic Political Science” and “Government Practitioners...

...if an economist or a psychologist said it they’d give him a grant...

...When I asked Evron Kirkpatrick, executive director of APSA, whether anyone listens to political scientists, he thought about it for a couple of days, then triumphantly showed me a half-dozen dusty old reports that his colleagues had had some hand in writing...

...The feeling was strong that something had to be done to make the rest of the world sit up and take notice...

...But this was the heyday of the professional, and every trade from barbers on up was caught up in the rush to organize itself...

...You would think, to be crassly material, that the market would be willing to pay such people for their services...

...While we in the political science department at Johns Hopkins walked around on linoleum floors and sat in creaky chairs supplied by the university, the sociologists upstairs enjoyed wall-to-wall carpeting and plush conference rooms, paid for out of the grants they were continually receiving to study this or that...

...What does one do with a degree in, uh, political science...

...I won’t belabor the comparison...

...as distinct occupational categories, butyou guessed it-not political scientists...

...in my research, I have found that they sense, and resent, the weight of bureaucratic regulation bearing down heavily on them in their personal lives...

...For some reason we have chosen to ignore the people up until now-in fact, to write and speak in a language they could not understand...

...Sociologists get six times per capita what political scientists get in research money from the federal government...

...But in their eagerness they ignored a central point: scientific methods enable one only to test theories, not to create them...

...This produced the remarkable insight that voters make up their minds through some blend of their party affiliation, their opinions on the issues, and their appraisals of the candidates-the nature of the blend is still hdtly contested...

...Further, political science was becoming an intellectual desert...

...In fact, some employers have to be convinced that a political scientist Michael Nelson is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The National Science Foundation “had to be bludgeoned into accepting political science as a legitimate social science,” according to an APSA report...

...Beardsley Ruml, the Fufld’s director, was a young alumnus of the University of Chicago who had admired Merriam greatly and latef became his close personal friend...

...Variously called “policy studies,” “policy analysis,” and “policy science,” and a host of other names, it rests on the premise that if business and government will not beat a path to our door, we will just have to go knocking on theirs with an offer to, uh, analyze their policies for them...

...In & sense, it is the mecca of rnoodeni political science...

...It is no coincidence that our last-generation of great political thinkers-the framers of the Cons tit u t i o n -was also intensely involved in politics...

...There are, of course, exceptionspolitical scientists who have managed to reach out to a larger audience...

...If a political scientist comes to Washington and waves his sheepskin,” says Thomas Mann of APSA, “he’ll get his ass kicked...

...Forward Through the Centuries None of this brings us any closer to an answer...

...theories are born of those long years of “unscientific” stewing and pondering that political science, unlike the other social sciences, had never gone through...

...ushingto Imitate So here we are after almost a century of trying to keep up with the Joneses, as ignored and unvalued as ever...

...By 1903, the historians, economists, and sociologists had formed associations, so those few scholars who were chiefly interested in the goings-on of governments figured they had better get on the bandwagon too...

...Doris Kearns wrote a best18 selling psychohistory of Lyndon Johnson...

...universities found that by setting up independent political science departments they could lure some of the money their way, Clearly the Merriam wing was holding all the cards: status, professional envy, and money...