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Prying Open American Political ‘Science’ Bruce Cumings
and Kurt Jacobsen (University of Chicago, USA) © Copyright: Bruce Cumings
and Kurt Jacobsen 2006 Numbers are seductive. We love what we are good at so
it is hardly surprising when a math wiz imagines that numbers contain the
whole truth and nothing but the truth. A mathematically talented teen
recently told one of us of an alleged encounter centuries ago of a famous
French philosopher with a Russian mathematician who proceeded to spout an
algebraic equation and to claim, because the equation made sense, that he had
proven there was a god. The philosopher, according to the story, was
dumbstruck, which our young friend interpreted as abject surrender to a
superior mind. We replied that the philosopher doubtless was flabbergasted
that a bright fellow could be so gullible as to believe that a perfectly
enclosed and self-referential system like mathematics necessarily had anything
reliable to say about the wider and wilder world around it. Perhaps we were interpreting too,
but the point stands. Run numbers through a complicated enough set of
procedures and they enchant especially managerial mentalities who like to
conjure a tidy abstract universe where there’s no need to use careful
judgment based on extensive research and hard-won experience about the way
societies operate. Fill in the blank spaces to a formula and, presto, you’ve
solved the problem. Skip all the steps in between and forget there was any
processing as to what the numbers mean. A great deal gets lost when numbers
are used without humility or reflection. Lousy policies are one result.
Critics argue, for example, that environmental costs cannot be expressed
adequately in money terms. What figure captures all the harm of polluted air,
soil or water? The use of GDP to calculate prosperity is misleading since it
counts disasters positively - the costs of clean-up raise GDP. Numbers may get you from here to the Moon
or Baghdad but won’t tell you if the trip is worth it. Instead of regarding
numbers as a necessary evil we need to beware of, econometricians typically
treat them with adoration. Economists, laden with glittering faux Nobel
prizes, have led a strong trend toward quantification in all the social
science by deploying econometric models - models, moreover, that tend to
favour neoliberal market schemes. (After all,
nothing commodifies you like a number does.) Accordingly, in American political
science today any research paper lacking phalanxes of jitterbugging numbers
seems suspect, not science at all. Political science is
hardly alone these
days in privileging method
and numbers. Economics, of course, is
fully colonized by
this mentality, to
the great detriment
of economic history.
Sociology neglects its political and historical dimensions,
and thus rarely
produces figures like
C. Wright Mills who
command both a
disciplinary and general
reading public; and even
in history, owing
to different theoretical
proclivities, political history is considered boring
and passe.
The result is that many students
in top universities have
trouble finding courses
on actually-existing politics. A revolt was brewing
among some of their disgruntled
teachers. So in October 2000 an anonymous American political
scientist (or perhaps several of them) under the name “Mr. perestroika’
dispatched a scorching email to a number of noted senior figures in the
discipline. The email excoriated the domination of political science by
enthusiasts of formal theory and of quantitative methods, who tend to make
common cause. The problem was not so much that certain factions within
political science were ascendant but that formal theorists did not believe
anything except their own brand of theory mattered and that many exponents of
quantitative methods did not believe anything but their own manipulation of
mathematical symbols deserved the label ‘method.’ Hence, they were
disinclined, as they gained control of departments, to heed or hire any but
their own. “Mr Perestroika" deplored these "poor game-theorists who
cannot for the life of me compete with a third-grade economics student"
yet are allowed to crush "diversity of methodologies and areas of the
world that [American Political Science Association] 'purports' to
represent." ‘Perestroika’ lamented that the cost to knowledge in
the study of politics stood to be enormous in the sense of the fabled man
with a hammer as his only tool treating everything as a nail, or seeing only
hammers and nail-like items as worth knowing anything about. Disgruntlement
with this dogma had been growing all along among other scholars, the sort who
want to know their subjects well before playing reductionist
games with them, and they were only awaiting a spark. So the email – likely
inspired by the post-autistic economics movement in France - ignited a
rousing scholarly movement in America.1 One could not hope to assemble a more
unlikely band of insurrectionists, ranging from apprehensive grad students to
greying professors ensconced in named chairs. Several hundred
tenured scholars signed a petition charging that a dangerous fad for formal
models and number-crunching was squeezing out valuable forms of research. At
the 2001 American Political Science Association (APSA)
meetings attendance at several perestroika-themed panels spilled into the
hallways. Well-known panelists included Penn's
Rogers Smith, Harvard's Steve Walt, Johns Hopkins University's Margaret Keck,
Colorado’s Sven Steinmo, Indiana’s Gregory Kasza, Chicago's Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph and Yale’s Ian Shapiro and James Scott, the
lattermost becoming perestroika's first representative on the APSA Council. Political science has "been taken over
by methodological parochialists who believe that
the only worthwhile scholarship in political science speaks the language of
mathematics," said Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer
of foes whom, he warned, were formidable. For the latter, only counting
matters because mathematics conveys a sense of precision, as if numbers never
lie. As the belief that quantitative data are not themselves a form of
interpretation becomes institutionalised, this naïve orthodoxy excludes
important sources of insight. One consequence is that economists and
political scientists seem to have less and less to say about anything that we
recognize as the world we move in. Most have nothing to say about
expanding social inequalities, neo-imperialistic crusades and ecological woes. The perestroika movement – approximately 900 out of 15
thousand American Political Science Association members - is the latest round
in a recurrent battle between different notions of legitimate research in the social sphere. Anthropologist
Clifford Geertz once joked that in social science
old ideas tend less to fade away than to go into second editions. The
struggle today harks back to the 1960s when the Caucus for a New Political
Science arose to combat pretensions of behavioral
‘hard science,’ to battles in
sociology departments in the 1950s such as Columbia where Paul Lazersfeld’s statisticians and C. Wright Mills more plain
spoken disciples squared off, and even stretch centuries back to the piquant
(and self-serving) Latin dictum that only knowledge expressed in numbers
matters.2 Obviously there are scholars well-versed in both
quantitative and qualitative methods who deftly integrate them. These few are
not the problem. The field today is again enticed by the ambition that establishing
a dominant method, as in 19th century physics, is the sine qua non
of a first-rate science. It is just as reasonable to argue that the pursuit
of a single paradigm is really the pursuit of the right not to have to think
or raise discomfiting questions. Plug in pre-digested data and let the
paradigm do the work for you. How very handy. One can see why this quest
appeals to certain sorts of intellects. Numeracy is
a wonderful thing - so long as it does not entail illiteracy in other fields. As Thomas Kuhn, and other historians and philosophers
of science, attest, every paradigm is a selective device, making a particular
kind of informational demand on the multi-layered nature of reality, and
deliberately excluding other aspects of it.3 There is no way, within the boundaries of a
single dominant paradigm, to discover if one is mistaken about the importance
of those excluded aspects, and of those shunned perspectives. The paradigm
you adopt pre-determines your answers. Further, because the profession seeks
out, and rewards, generalizable propositions
derived from studies of many (‘large-N”) cases, then those propositions
simply are assumed to have counterparts in reality, no matter how Procrustean
the methods used to slice reality down to such convenient size. Any savvy
philosopher – and anyone who knows the cases on the ground intimately - can
spot how flawed, indeed foolish, these notions are. Rational choice theory derives from neoclassical
economics and deploys simplifying assumptions about human behaviour to boil
down complex experiences to prioritised "rational" choices that we
presumably make in order to maximise our "utility" in any
situation. Rational choice, and mathematical models that accompany it, have
merits when used with humility, especially in studies of collective action.
But its critics point out that the results are often trivial or else remote
from reality.4 Formal
theory, unchecked, gives carte blanche to cram all manner of oblong pegs into
little square holes. Examples of silliness abound. “Is it our task to
understand politics,” Perestroikan Greg Kasza of Indiana University therefore asks, “or to
grapple with the logic of imaginary games?” What he and other perestroikans propose instead is ‘the idea of an
ecumenical science. It is based on three principles: problem-driven research,
methodological pluralism, and interdisciplinary inquiry.’ Apart from
methodological dogmatism, Perestroikans are
concerned about the stacked deck of APSA elections
(where an unelected committee appoints the president for one year terms),
reform of professional journals, and, most difficult of all, hiring
practices. The movement was heartened in February 2001 when the APSA nominating committee selected Theda
Skocpol of Harvard, an academic with diverse
methodological skills, as president elect. Both Skocpol
and predecessor Robert Putnam began including Perestroikans
on decision bodies of the Association. The American Political Science Review,
flagship journal of the APSR, and the journals of
regional associations, came under scrutiny because they are often used by
departments as a short-cut certifying process for faculty recruitment and
promotion. If you don’t see print there, you often are in trouble. An
initiative set in motion earlier by in-house critics of the APSR, to launch a
journal, Perspectives on Politics, as an alternative to the
parochialism of the APSR, was accelerated by Perestroika’s presence. A new editor of
the APSR
recognized the grievances concerning the absence of diversity, and
promised change. All was not sweetness and light internally either. Skocpol, in a show of presidential impartiality, chided
Perestroika itself as unrepresentative while APSA
nominating committee member Joan Vecchiarelli Scott said – taking the role of Simon Schama regarding
the French revolution – that, ho hum, reforms were in the pipeline anyway. Still, the movement gained a major
success in 2003 when the APSA presidency went to perestroikan Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph of the University of Chicago. ‘One of the effects of 9/11 is a
renewed awareness that Americans need enhanced capacity to understand and
interpret the ‘other,” remarked Rudolph at the time. “Corridor talk in the
Association is that my special focus in political science, comparative politics
and India, which would ordinarily be a disadvantage in an association whose
membership is concentrated on America and the West, [probably was] an advantage.”At first glance, the elegant and erudite
Rudolph was not Hollywood central casting's idea of a rabble rouser, but academic trends drove many prominent people
to the metaphorical barricades.
Rudolph received a batch of fretful letters warning darkly of thermidore or of cooptation by wily formalists. Some
colleagues worry that the new journal Perspectives on Political Science
launched in order to broaden the association's appeal is fated to be a second
class ghetto. A self-nominated committee on reform of Association governance
formulated proposals for competitive elections, which ultimately were stymied
during Rudolph’s term. Rudolph’s successor Margaret Levi, the 3rd woman
President in a row, was not a perestroikan but
current President Ira Katznelson of Columbia
University is regarded as sympathetic. So is perestroika an internet
forum for the exchange of views, or a movement, or both? “Perestroika is more an attitude, a set of
concerns, an adherence to certain values as a scholar, that lead each of us
to question the dominant paradigm in Political Science, but obviously for
many different reasons,” perestroikan Michael Bosia sums up. “Perestroika is a movement of
critique, disorganized and uncentered, a forum for
discussion, but never an organization seeking power for itself. Perestroikans are all of us who choose to identify
as critics of established orthodoxies
in Political Science.” Notes 1.On the post-autistic economics
movement see Edward Fullbrook, ed, The Crisis in
Economics (London: Routledge, 2004). . 2. On the Caucus, see Philip Green
and Sanford Levinson, eds, Power
and Community: Dissenting
Essays in Political Science (New York: Pantheon, 1969). 3. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962). 4. See, for example, Donald Green
and Ian Shapiro , Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996) and Steve Walt, “Rational Choice or Rigor Mortis?:
Rational Choice and Security Studies” International Security 23, 4 (Spring
1999), and the exchange in the next
issue. Author contact: jkjacobs@uchicago.edu ___________________________ SUGGESTED CITATION: |