Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public

Political Science for the 21st Century

Rainer Eisfeld

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789811359279
• eBook ISBN: 9789811359286
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the first comprehensive study to respond to the ongoing debates on political sciences' fragmentation, doubtful relevance, and disconnect with the larger public. It explores the implications of the argument that political science ought to become more topic-driven, more relevant and more comprehensible for "lay" audiences. Consequences would include evolving a culture of public engagement, challenging tendencies toward liars' rule, and emphasizing the role of "large" themes in academic education and research, the latter being identified as those areas where severe democratic erosion is occurring – such as escalating income and wealth disparities pushing democracy towards plutocracy, ubiquitous change triggering insecurity and aggression, racist prejudice polarizing societies, and counter-terrorism strategies subverting civil liberties.
Political science needs to address these pressing problems ahead of other issues by in-depth research andbroadly accessible public narratives, including solution-orientated normative notions. This need provides the final justification for evolving a discipline where problems would take priority over methods and public relevance over sophisticated specialization.

Part ICommitments

© The Author(s) 2019

Rainer EisfeldEmpowering Citizens, Engaging the Publichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Improving the Human Condition

The Tenets of Twenty-First-Century Political Science

Rainer Eisfeld¹

(1)

Fachbereich 1, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany

Rainer Eisfeld

Email: [email protected]

Increasingly expected to help resolve citizens’ difficulties, the discipline—perceived as fragmented and method-driven—faces the challenge of becoming more relevant, more comprehensible, and (where necessary) more critical of governments, political and business elites.

End Abstract

“A neglect of the citizen”: No less was attested to political science in its present state by 2009 Economics Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. During an interview, she illustrated her criticism with the observation that once, while waiting at a meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), she had been asked why she was reading a book on peasants. Political science, she had been reminded, “was about presidents, parties, and Congress” (Toonen 2010: 197).

Ostrom was scheduled to be keynote speaker at the 2012 Madrid World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA). Her research focus on polycentric systems of power and on the direct involvement of citizens in the governance of such systems has provided inspirations for political science, for a hopefully renascent political economy, and for climate policies (see Tarko 2017: 12/13, 53, 172; passim). Sadly, she died from cancer a few weeks before the world congress.

Any political scientist who remains unconvinced by the mere reference to a past APSA President’s—and James Madison Award recipient’s—reading habits could do worse than glance at the following sentences by António de Figueiredo, journalist and campaigner in Salazarist Portugal (de Figueiredo 1975: 10–12): “Reading and writing letters for illiterate peasants made me understand that poverty takes many cruel forms other than occasional hunger.” He sensed, Figueiredo wrote, “how my intrusion must have inhibited them and saw how inarticulate they were.” He also recalled his shock of discovering at an early age “that illiteracy or semi-literacy were not a product of casual neglect but part of the established social order.”

Figueiredo went on to recount how, while reading to a gathering of peasants from the speeches of President Roosevelt promising freedom, a rural Republican Guard had threatened to beat him up if he persisted “in disturbing the minds of local people with that ‘Communist poison’”. At the time, he had determined for himself that one day he would be capable to figure out the guard’s motives and the basis of his power.

As with Figueiredo, should not a similarly determined effort rank high among the concerns of political science to broaden our own and others’ understanding about the ways in which citizens are being encouraged or prevented to effectively participate in their political systems? And should not such an effort include, as Ostrom insisted in her 1997 APSA Presidential address, a searching look at the knowledge and the skills which our discipline presently provides?

“All too many of our textbooks focus exclusively on leaders”, Ostrom held. They do not inform future citizens “of the actions they need to know and can undertake”. Nor are their moral decisions discussed. “We are producing generations of cynical citizens with little trust in one another” (Ostrom 1998: 3, 18).

The shortcoming which this admonishment called by name was unexpectedly brought into the limelight by a US legislator’s derogatory assessment of the discipline. Submitting, in November 2009, an amendment to the 2010 Commerce, Justice & Science Appropriation Act, Senator Thomas Coburn (R, OK) contended that the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Political Science Program drew resources away from research which might otherwise yield “discoveries that can improve the human condition”. The implication was obvious.

Coburn wished to bar the NSF from allocating—or, as he read into the record, from “wasting”—federal research money for any political science project. His motion obtained 36 votes in the US Senate, with a majority of 62 senators voting against (Eisfeld 2011: 220). Four years after his first attempt, Coburn tried again, this time choosing a time-proven approach which came close to succeeding. The “human condition” was not mentioned again. Instead, the 2013 Coburn Amendment wanted to restrict NSF political science funding to projects certified by the agency as “promoting” either national security or the economic interests of the United States.

Favored by a situation, when avoiding a government shutdown required rapidly resolving a budget stalemate between the Democratic-controlled US Senate and the Republican-led House of Representatives, Coburn managed to reach an agreement with Appropriations Committee Chair Barbara Mikulski (D, MD). Passed by acclamation (voice vote), rather than by recorded (roll call) vote, the amendment was included in the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, prompting the NSF to cancel the current political science grant cycle (APA 2013; Reilly 2013; Mole 2013).

After some debate, APSA responded in an equally time-honored way. The organization did not refer either to possible improvements of the human condition. Rather, it spent $48,000 in hiring the services of a Washington lobbying firm which provides “strategic communication services to clients who wish to have an impact on decision-makers”: Barbara Kennelly Associates, established by a congresswoman from Connecticut who is also a political science professor. According to APSA President John H. Aldrich, someone was needed “with access to Senator Mikulski”. The effort paid off: When Congress passed the omnibus appropriations bill in early 2014, the restricting amendment was omitted (Stratford 2014).

While the outcome may be considered a victory, of course it does not touch on problems posed by the state of the discipline. Soberingly enough, observations such as Ostrom’s have been piling up over the past two decades. Giovanni Sartori contended in 2004 that political science—at least American-style, largely quantitative political science—“is going nowhere… Practice-wise, it is largely useless science that does not supply knowledge for use” (Sartori 2004: 786). The New York Times quoted Joseph S. Nye in 2009 with the assessment that the discipline may “be moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less” (Cohen 2009). Two years later, former IPSA Secretary General John Trent, who had organized the organization’s world congresses from 1973 to 1988 and again in 2000, highlighted the discipline’s “retreat” from public debate: There are “few ‘public intellectuals’ and few connections with the political class”. The general result, Trent concluded echoing Ostrom, is “a sense that we are not helping citizens” (Trent 2011: 196/197).

To a considerable extent, these misgivings stem from two ongoing debates about the fragmentation (less kindly, the balkanization) of the discipline and about how much relevant work is being done in a predominantly method-driven field, whose mainstream approach has come to be “symbolized by multiple-regression equations” (Smith 1997: 254).

• Advanced fragmentation—or compartmentalization—has been tied to the emergence of “niches” where highly specialized political scientists survive by defending their “turf”—their priorities, their projects, and their responsibilities. They conduct “highly particularized” research, and they write for their own kind—for “highly specialized audiences”, rather than for “a few specialists and many non-specialists” (Sigelman 2006: 475). The specialization of individual scholars has been supplemented, even fortified, by the specialization of loosely organized, research-oriented standing sections or working groups. By 2010, four national organizations alone—the British Political Studies Association, the American, German, and Russian Political Science Associations—had collectively generated no fewer than 147 such sub-groups. In many instances, there has been little or no mutual awareness of each other’s projects, meetings, or publications. Cross-field research, engaging salient issue areas by cutting across traditional domains, remains underdeveloped (Eisfeld 2016: 16, 18).
• Formalized method taking precedence over substantive issues implies that problems addressed will be “fairly narrow” (due to obtainability of quantitative data), results “limited” in range, much of the work terminologically “incomprehensible” to a general public and “uninteresting” as regards content—in a word, “arcane” (Smith 2009: 2). For the sub-field of environmental policy studies—which will resurface in this book—the assessment was recently borne out by Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, two long-time past editors of the leading journal Global Environmental Politics: Critical faculties are impaired, as refinement of sophisticated approaches takes precedence over examining their appropriateness for addressing salient problems. Increasingly complex modeling and statistical methods risk to disconnect scholarship from policy and issue orientation (Dauvergne and Clapp 2016: 3). More determined critics, such as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, have dissected what they label the “pathologies” of method-driven political science, due to practitioners’ eagerness “to vindicate” their models, rather than “to understand and explain actual political outcomes ” (Green and Shapiro 1994: 33; Shapiro 2002: 598).

To add insult to injury, the adopted mathematics, as will be seen below, did not always convince mathematicians.

The results of fragmentation and of method-driven, rather than problem- ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Commitments
• Part II. Issue Areas
• Part III. Partisanship
• Back Matter