Making Political Science Matter

Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method

Sanford F. Schram, Brian Caterino, Sanford F. Schram, Brian Caterino

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780814740330
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814788523
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Making Political Science Matter brings together a number of prominent scholars to discuss the state of the field of Political Science. In particular, these scholars are interested in ways to reinvigorate the discipline by connecting it to present day political struggles. Uniformly well-written and steeped in a strong sense of history, the contributors consider such important topics as: the usefulness of rational choice theory; the ethical limits of pluralism; the use (and misuse) of empirical research in political science; the present-day divorce between political theory and empirical science; the connection between political science scholarship and political struggles, and the future of the discipline. This volume builds on the debate in the discipline over the significance of the work of Bent Flyvbjerg, whose book Making Social Science Matter has been characterized as a manifesto for the Perestroika Movement that has roiled the field in recent years.
Contributors include: Brian Caterino, Stewart Clegg, Bent Flyvbjerg, Mary Hawkesworth, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Gregory J. Kasza, David Kettler, David D. Laitin, Timothy W. Luke, Theodore R. Schatzki, Sanford F. Schram, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, Corey S. Shdaimah, Roland W. Stahl, and Leslie Paul Thiele.

Part I

The Flyvbjerg Debate

1

Return to Politics

Perestroika, Phronesis, and Post-Paradigmatic Political Science

Sanford F. Schram

Years ago, my good colleague Chuck Green enlisted me to teach a second section of an undergraduate research methods course in political science that we offered to majors. Chuck had organized his course around a simulation in which all the students in the class were to submit research grant proposals to a hypothetical foundation for funding. In his class, the hypothetical foundation was always called the Gnosis Foundation. As an alternative, I called mine the Phronesis Federation, which, given differences in the Greek names, was to be dedicated to financing research that informed practical reasoning about the real problems that confront society. I eventually dropped the simulation when teaching methods elsewhere, but the commitment to what Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) calls “phronetic social science” stuck. Years later, I got my hands on Making Social Science Matter, and, with the first reading, I was enchanted. Here was a book that was saying so much that I always wanted to say, and saying it so eloquently. By then, I was an active participant in a renegade movement to promote methodological pluralism in political science called Perestroika, and my research methods seminar was now called “Paradigms and Perestroika.” The book affirmed my efforts. The circle had been squared. Yet, when David Laitin (2003) published his critique of Making Social Science Matter as a way of criticizing Perestroika, I knew that not everyone agreed and that there was an important debate brewing about the future of political inquiry (see chapter 2).

None of this is an accident. Political science is receiving increased critical scrutiny as a discipline these days, and much of that scrutiny is coming from within its own ranks. A growing number of political scientists have signed on to efforts aimed at specifically challenging the dominance of positivistic research, particularly research that assumes that political behavior can be predicted according to theories of rationality and that such predictions underwrite cumulative explanations that constitute the growth of political knowledge. This movement to question such thinking is most dramatically represented in the network of scholars that has developed in response to the eponymous Mr. Perestroika letter that raised this challenge in poignant terms when it first circulated over the Internet back in October 2000.

Perestroika, it turns out, is a loose collection of political scientists, from graduate students to senior scholars, who do not always themselves agree on which features of the dominant approach they want to critique—some focus on the overly abstract nature of much of the research done today, some on the lack of nuance in decontextualized, large-sample empirical studies, others on the inhumaneness of thinking about social relations in causal terms, and still others on the ways in which contemporary social science all too often fails to produce the kind of knowledge that can meaningfully inform social life. As a group, the Perestroika movement, however, has championed methodological pluralism, charging that exclusionary practices have made graduate education less hospitable to historical and field research, qualitative case studies, interpretive and critical analysis, and a variety of context-sensitive approaches to the study of politics. The major journals of the field, perestroikans argue, have become preoccupied with publishing research that conforms to overly restrictive scientistic assumptions about what constitutes contributions to political knowledge. Perestroika is a healthy development for political science and all other social sciences as well, opening for reconsideration these very questionable assumptions about what constitutes political knowledge in particular and social knowledge in general.

From the vantage point of many perestroikans, the dominant paradigm in the field operates according to the following hierarchy of assumptions: (1) political science exists to help promote understanding of the truth about politics; (2) political science research contributes to this quest by adding to the accumulation of an expanding base of objective knowledge about politics; (3) the growth of this knowledge base is contingent upon the building of theory that offers explanations of politics; (4) the building of theory is dependent on the development of universal generalizations regarding the behavior of political actors; (5) the development of a growing body of generalizations occurs by testing falsifiable causal hypotheses that demonstrate their success in making predictions; (6) the accumulation of a growing body of predictions about political behavior comes from the study of variables in samples involving large numbers of cases; and (7) this growing body of objective causal knowledge can be put in service of society, particularly by influencing public policymakers and the stewards of the state.

This paradigm excludes much valuable research. For instance, it assumes that the study of a single case is “unscientific,” provides no basis for generalizing, does not build theory, cannot contribute to the growth of political knowledge, and, as a result, is not even to be considered for publication in the leading journals and is to be discouraged as a legitimate doctoral dissertation project.¹ While there have always been dissenters to the drift toward “large-n,” quantitative research in service of objective, decontextualized, and universally generalizable truths about politics, there is a good case to be made that the dissenters have increasingly been marginalized as the center of gravity of the discipline has drifted more and more toward reflecting these core assumptions about political knowledge.

Perestroika in political science has at a minimum provided an opportunity to halt this drift by questioning these assumptions and posing alternatives. At its best, the perestroikan impulse creates the possibility to question the idea that political science research exists as a unitary enterprise dedicated to the accumulation of an expanding knowledge base of universal, decontextualized generalizations about politics. In its place, Perestroika would put a more pluralistic emphasis on allowing for the blossoming of more contextual, contingent, and multiple political truths that involve a greater tie between theory and practice and a greater connection between thought and action in specific settings. Perestroika lays open the possibility that political science could actually be a very different sort of discipline, one less obsessed with proving it is a “science” and one more connected to providing delimited, contextualized, even local knowledges that might serve people within specific contexts.

Such a political science would therefore have very different standards as to what counts as meaningful political knowledge. It would, for instance, be less interested in studying such things as “development” or “modernization” in the abstract as objects of inquiry on their own, as when economics becomes the study of “the market” as opposed to the examination of the variety of markets. Instead of focusing solely on “development” or “modernization” per se, political science would be more about studying change in particular countries or using concepts like “development” or “modernization” in contextually sensitive ways to compare change in different countries.

This alternative political science would also be less preoccupied with perfecting method or pursuing research strictly for knowledge’s own sake. As Rogers Smith (2002) has underscored, “knowledge does not have a sake”; all knowledge is tied to serving particular values. Therefore, this new political science would not be one that is dedicated to replacing one method with another. Instead, such a discipline, if that word is still appropriate, would encourage scholars to draw on a wide variety of methods from a diversity of theoretical perspectives, combining theory and empirical work in different and creative ways, all in dialogue with political actors in specific contexts. Problem-driven research would replace method-driven research (Shapiro 2002).

My own version of Perestroika would build on this problem-driven, contextually sensitive approach to enable people on the bottom, working in dialogue with social researchers, to challenge power. My perestroikaninspired political science would be open to allowing ongoing political struggle to serve as the context for deciding what methods will be used in what ways to address which problems. This new dialogic political science would not find its standards for credible scholarship in arcane vocabularies and insular methods that are removed from local contexts and seem objective but are not without their own agendas. Instead, my political science would find its standards of knowledge in asking whether scholarship can demonstrate its contributions to enriching political discourse in contextualized settings.

Such a new political science, however, would at the same time recognize the risks associated with connecting to ongoing politics. It would guard against losing its critical capacity for the sake of achieving relevance. It would retain its critical capacity while in dialogue with ongoing political struggle, providing therefore a powerful “critical connectedness”—what Charles Lemert (2001) has called “global methods.” It would, however, be less interested than the old political science in serving the state with objective knowledge. It would forgo the dream of scientific grandeur that aims to produce socially useful, decontextualized, objective knowledge, independent of politics.

A political science that forgoes the dream of a science of politics in order to dedicate itself to enhancing the critical capacity of people to practice a politics is, for me, an exciting prospect. A political science that does this to enhance the capacity to challenge power from below is all the more exciting. I would argue that the new political science would not just be more politically efficacious but also more intelligent, offering more robust forms of political knowledge.

Nothing, of course, springs full grown from the head of Zeus, and it is critically important to note that the potential of Perestroika has always been manifest in selected efforts in social science, if in recent decades more at the margins and most frequently outside the disciplines in interdisciplinary work and “applied” fields. I use the word “applied” hesitantly, however, since it reinforces the hegemonic perspective of a particular sort of epistemic privilege that assumes theory precedes action, that research is top-down in that first we study things as they exist objectively in truth and then we “apply” those understandings, grounded in theory from above, down to the real world of practice. This is to privilege decontextualized, universal knowledge over situated knowledges and only ends up reinforcing the idea that the social sciences need to ape the natural sciences in the pursuit of scientifically tested and validated generalizations about reality. Instead, throughout the relatively short hundred or so years of modern social science, there have always been practitioners of this craft who have been animated by alternative understandings of the kind of knowledge that social science can meaningfully produce. These practitioners have sought not just to criticize the Olympian perspective of the top-down hegemonic approach, and not just to propose alternatives, but to convincingly demonstrate them in their own work. These researchers can be found across the social sciences, employing a diversity of methodologies and studying a variety of topics. They situate their studies in the world of action, they insist on framing their work in terms of its relevance to ongoing human struggles and concerns, and they let their work emerge from the bottom up with the hope of producing not universal truths but poignantly relevant forms of knowledge that can help inform the human condition as it is experienced, fought over, and changed by the very same people being studied. A few examples are in order.

James Scott’s writings, for instance, from The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1990) to Seeing like a State (1998), have looked at the world of power from the perspective of those on the bottom. He has, in Seeing like a State, demonstrated quite convincingly that the bottom-up perspective affords not only a different view but a better one, more attuned the needs of people in contextualized settings. A similar perspective is offered in the politically poignant analyses of Cynthia Enloe in such books as Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1990) and The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993). Enloe highlights the gendered character of international relations in a world of superpowerdom and demonstrates in telling ways its particularly devastating consequences for women. Like Scott, she illustrates in her work that a bottom-up perspective produces a situated knowledge that can inform ongoing efforts to engage political power and produce political and social change.

The work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward represents an especially noteworthy example for my particular version of what Perestroika can bring to a revived political science. From Regulating the Poor (1971) to Why Americans Still Don’t Vote (2000), their research grows from the bottom up, informed by ongoing political struggle, seeking to theorize and strategize about what is needed to feed back into those specific struggles. Like Enloe and Scott, Piven and Cloward employ a number of case studies, as in Poor People’s Movements (1977), to tease out helpful lessons for those working to challenge power. Sometimes their theorizing is employed to inform a specific struggle, but it also offers more general understandings that could be applied beyond that struggle (see Schram 2002). Enloe, Scott, and Piven and Cloward are not alone; there are many other instances of such work scattered around the margins of political science and in other fields.

In fact, there is a rich tradition of several decades that is now leading to a growing number of studies in what is popularly called Participatory Action Research (PAR). The PAR approach emphasizes the alliance between researchers and those being studied so as to overcome the unquestioned assumptions and privileges associated with some people studying other people. Compelling examples here include Chester Hartman’s 1974 Yerba Buena, which grew out of his activism working with tenants to resist their displacement in the face of land-grabbing developers. and William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte’s 1988 Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex. The Whytes’ analysis richly details how their research grew out of and effectively fed back into the struggles the Mondragon community was caught up in as its members sought to find a way to make socialism in a capitalist world sustainable. Within political science more than, say, sociology, this sort of work is still marginal, making the Perestroika challenge all the more necessary.

In addition, there is a strong philosophical base for the perestroikan perspective I am articulating that provides it with a intellectual grounding and ties it to broader movements for change that are roiling the human sciences across the board. One important source is Stephen Toulmin’s Return to Reason (2001). Toulmin builds on his life’s work in the philosophy of science, ordinary language philosophy, rhetoric, and the analysis of practical arts to offer a historically informed analysis of the problem of scientism in the social sciences. His primary argument is that since Descartes, and especially since Kant, western philosophical thought has been increasingly enchanted with the dream of realizing universal rationality as the highest form of knowledge and the basis for truth. Yet, Toulmin stresses that it was only relatively recently, in the twentieth century, that this dream came to be ascendant as the hegemonic ideal for organizing knowledge practices in the academy in general and the social sciences in particular. The dream of universal rationality as the gold standard for objective knowledge of truth became ascendant with rise of modern science and the growing influence of the argument that science, as best represented by particular natural sciences, was the best route toward achieving universal rationality, objective knowledge, and truth with a capital T. In its wake, the modern university was built and then increasingly compartmentalized into the multiversity, with growing numbers of specialized disciplines, each increasingly preoccupied with perfecting its own methodological prowess as to how to best arrive at truth.

Toulmin’s main argument is that this derangement was a long time coming, involving arduous efforts as part of a campaign that achieved hegemonic status relatively recently. For Toulmin, before then, much of the history of modern Western philosophy can be understood in terms of striking a balance between universal rationality and contextual reason. The campaigners had to confront time and again the problem that what is universally rational may not be reasonable in particular situations. For centuries, the dream of universal rationality was counterbalanced by the practice of everyday reason. Humans experienced their lives and made sense of them between these poles. Yet, the rise of modern science increased the emphasis on the production of objective knowledge in the most abstract and generalizable terms possible. Theory was everything, and practice was subordinated to it. Theory-driven modern science’s preferred discourse was mathematics, which, since Descartes, was the ideal idiom for expressing in abstract and generalizable terms the objective knowledge of universal rationality. Sciences began to be ranked by the degree to which they could produce universal rationality as expressed in mathematical terms. “Physics envy” spread. Then again, in the twentieth century, science in general became ascendant as the best way to produce such knowledge. The fact that “science as use” was conflated with “science as truth” helped greatly in vaulting science to the forefront as the supposedly superior road to truth as dramatic developments in technology were increasingly showcased as proof positive that science not only could do things but also knew the truth of what it was doing (Stevens 2002).

The idea that there is a distinctive scientific method that all sciences share began to gain greater currency, and all other forms of knowledge production came to be seen as inferior to the degree that they failed to conform to the dictates of the scientific method. Physics envy morphed into science envy, with the social sciences increasingly miming what was seen as the methods of the natural sciences in order to lay their own claim to scientific legitimacy. At this point, the precarious balance between abstract rationality and everyday reason was now seriously upset, and universal rationality in service of abstract generalizable knowledge, stated in the mathematical terms, was seen as the only real form of truth worth taking seriously. The wisdom of everyday reason was increasingly relegated to folklore or to applied fields, and it itself started to become a popular area of study, not so much for the truths it afforded but as an object of inquiry that could be used as data to test various hypotheses about which types of people in what cultures tended to think in what ways and why. The science of wisdom, as it were, whether studied in anthropology or philosophy, was a sure sign that rationality had triumphed over reason.

Toulmin effectively illuminates the rise of universal rationality, first in philosophy from Descartes on, then in the sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: The Flyvbjerg Debate
• PART II: Phronesis Reconsidered
• PART III: Making Political Science Matter
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index