Suchergebnisse

Criticism of trends in political science centers on specific methodologies—quantitative methods or rational choice. However, the more worrisome development is scholasticism—a tendency for research to become overspecialized and ingrown. I define that trend more closely and document its growth through increases in numbers of journals, organized sections in the American Political Science Association, and divisions within the APSA conference. I also code articles published in the American Political Science Review to show a growth in scholastic features in recent decades. The changes affect all fields in political science. Scholasticism serves values of rigor. To restrain it will require reemphasizing relevance to real-world issues and audiences. To do this should also help restore morale among political scientists.

Despite increasing interest in recent years, disability remains a neglected area of study within mainstream political science. Beginning with a brief overview of the ways that disability studies scholars have defined disability, I address the issues that have arisen in trying to measure disability as well as the limits and possibilities that follow from thinking of people with disabilities as a minority group with defined political beliefs and interests. To the extent that much of the work on disability in political science looks to the research on gender, race, ethnicity, and class as a touchstone, I consider the lessons that might be drawn from this work both as it relates to disability as a social category and regarding efforts to conceive of disability and ability in more structural and ideological terms. Turning to the literature on disability in political theory, I examine the ways that disability has been deployed to reveal the ableist assumptions that pervade canonical and more contemporary texts. I conclude by highlighting avenues for future research, including whether it is possible—or, indeed, desirable—to move beyond the civil rights and identity-based frameworks that have so defined disability politics and organizing.

Whether or no it be true, as someone has said, that with words we govern men, it is at least certain that when a name has once passed into common speech it becomes a fact and a power. The term Political Science seems now generally accepted and your Association has by its very title expressed the opinion that Politics is a science. Nevertheless, to prevent misconception, we may properly ask "What sort of a science is it?" The mathematical sciences are described as exact sciences: and so too are such departments of knowledge as mechanics and physics. The laws and conclusions of these sciences can be expressed in precise terms. They can be stated in numbers. As the facts which these sciences deal with are the same everywhere and at all times, so the relations of those facts which we call Laws are of universal application. That being so we can predict their action and rely upon them to be the same in the future as they have been in the past.

The current debate in political science over methods and fundamental
theoretical stances recalls similar debates in other fields. Part of
the debate focuses on the merits of the use of statistical methods
or the use of mathematics and quasi-mathematical reasoning, as in
game theory and much of rational choice. Among the critics of those
who use these approaches are many who focus more on interpretive
approaches to understanding social institutions and behavior. In
some ways, the debate seems dated in that the largest and most
compelling body of quasi-economic work is broad studies of the
relationships between political and economic development. Such work,
often with relatively sharply defined statistical models, spans more
than two generations of scholars in political science. Such work has
given compelling answers to many questions about the workings and
workability of democracy. It typically abstracts from culture and it
fits congenially with rational choice theory in its focus on
microfoundations for various claims.

Frontmatter --Contents --Editors' Note and Acknowledgments /Górnisiewicz, Arkadiusz / Szlachta, Bogdan --1 The Ambiguity of Constitutionalism /Szlachta, Bogdan --2 Epistemology of Constitution /Kaczorowski, Paweł --3 Can the Constitution Do Away with Nation State? /Jokubaitis, Alvydas --4 Remarks on the Legal and the Practical: The Rechtsstaat in Europe's Development of the Rule of Law /Skrobacki, Waldemar A. --5 Magna Carta and the Rise of Anglo-American Constitutionalism /Pietrzyk-Reeves, Dorota --6 The Case of France: Vitality of the Republican Legal Tradition /Ujazdowski, Kazimierz Michał --7 Is the Historical Constitution of Hungary Still a Living Tradition? A Proposal for Reinterpretation /Hörcher, Ferenc --8 Polish Constitutional Traditions /Rzegocki, Arkady --9 Russian Constitutionalism /Osipov, Igor D. / Smorgunov, Leonid V. --10 Theoretical Problems in the Preamble to the 1997 Polish Constitution in the Perspective of History of Political Thought /Szlachta, Bogdan --Index

If at one time we thought that the movement to science would yield unification of the discipline, it is now apparent that there are many roads to science. Still it is important for us to consider yet again what the appropriate goals are for our scientific enterprise. What works in theory building; induction and deduction; prediction and control; the search for useful principles to guide us - examining these questions, we can build a better science. Political science has come so far as a discipline that different schools and scholars have different interpretations of science in the study of pol

C. P. Snow, in his Rede Lecture on the scientific and literary worlds as separate cultures, lists four groups needed by a country if it is to "come out top" in the scientific revolution. First, as many top scientists as it can produce; second, a larger group trained for supporting research and high class design; third, educated supporting technicians; and "fourthly and last, politicians, administrators, an entire community, who know enough science to have a sense of what the scientists are talking about."It seems increasingly clear that the growing army of "political" scientists—meaning natural scientists in politics—is more likely to be aided by students of politics prepared to understand the effects of science in political terms than by most of the recent efforts to understand politics in scientific terms. When one looks over the journals in political science, and in related areas of public opinion and social psychology, searching for significant conclusions in articles where much time has been spent on the elaboration of method, it is difficult to avoid V. O. Key's conclusion "that a considerable proportion of the literature commonly classified under the heading of 'political behavior' has no real bearing on politics, or at least that its relevance has not been made clear."

Among political scientists, even among political theorists, there is a widespread conviction that political theory has entered upon a time of troubles. Few, however, regard it simply as a "dead dog," and political theorists continue, as they should, to administer critical self-analysis, and to define and defend their methodological and philosophical positions. The basis for a unity of opposites is still a subject for dispute. This paper is offered, not as a solution, but as a statement of one conception of the role of political theory.A time-honored technique of dialectic is to seek well-reasoned objections to the view one does not hold. A medicine often commended to the political scientists is a body of systematic, scientific theory akin to economic theory in approach and methodological sophistication. Accordingly, this article takes issue with that interpretation which conceives of political theory as, ideally, the master discipline whereby the science of politics is to be unified and systematized, and empirical investigation oriented and guided. A few definite and carefully developed proposals for reconstruction along these lines, familar to political scientists, are G. E. G. Catlin's The Science and Method of Politics, Harold D. Lasswell's and Abraham Kaplan's Power and Society, and David Easton's The Political System. These works can serve as an initial point of purchase for analysis and discussion.

Political scientists are wary of engaging with 'the public' on mainstream and social media because they fear those mediums fail to get across the deep and nuanced argument they develop in their own research. This article suggests a way of justifying public engagement that begins not with debates about the ethical and political concerns of doing this in practice (of which there are many), but how we as political scientists justify public media engagement to ourselves on the basis of the ethical and political process of 'doing' political science. As such, this article identifies the disciplinary basis upon which we may justify media-driven public engagement as an integral part of political science as an academic enterprise. Drawing on current epistemological debates in political science, the article characterises moments of political research as impressionistic exercises, which require public engagement. This means making the public aware of the deep and valuable insights of political science, in a way that sketches out how the discipline can shed light on important social and political phenomena, thereby informing our own scholarly thinking, and that of those we engage with.