Search results

Should political science be publicly relevant? Instead of furnishing a direct answer, I propose to complicate the question. Yet in doing so, I will indicate an answer. And the answer is yes, political science should be publicly relevant – but not in any simple sense, since 'political science', 'should' and indeed 'publicly relevant' are less straightforward than they might seem. In what follows I will first complicate the questions posed to political science. I will proceed to reflect on the connection between publication – one of the central activities of all science, including political science – and publicity. I will then briefly tell a story about the journal that I edit, Perspectives on Politics, and the distinctive mission of this journal, which is to serve as 'a political science public sphere'. I will conclude with some brief reflections on the best ways of thinking about how political science can and should be 'publicly relevant'.

A bibliography of Canadian political science theses completed between 1977 & 1979 & in progress.

Concepts are central to the enterprise of political science. If we fail to develop clear and precise concepts, our theoretical insights and empirical discoveries will fail to be clear and precise, too. This paper reviews major pitfalls for conceptual analysis as well as the fundamental challenges to concept formation and conceptual innovation in the study of politics. ; La formación de conceptos es una labor fundamental en las ciencias sociales. Si no logramos desarrollar conceptos claros y precisos, nuestras proposiciones teóricas y nuestros hallazgos empíricos no podrán ser claros y precisos tampoco. Después de una breve introducción sobre la naturaleza (normativa) de conceptos, el presente documento revisa de manera crítica y sintetizada riesgos y retos fundamentales para la formación e innovación de conceptos en los estudios políticos.

I am pleased to be able to address this, the eighteenth annual meeting of the Social Science History Association. I have many valued memories of presidential addresses, but my favorite was Jerry Clubb's 1984 talk in the Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where speakers, waiters, and many other patrons all competed in a cacophonic, noisy free-for-all. Jerry did not even try to finish the talk, so we had to wait until it appeared in the journal (Clubb 1986).

Among the various facets of the new public history movement, applied history holds particular interest for social science historians. Public history generally involves the effort to use historical work for nonacademic audiences; it thus embraces historical museum work, aspects of archive preservation, and media presentations for general audiences. All these are admirable goals, not of course novel, but receiving new and explicit attention in a variety of recent programs, and in the Public History Association. Applied history, though part of public history in its broadest sense, has a more specific mission (one must note that some of the presentation training programs in public history are labeled "applied," a terminological confusion that one hopes can be remedied). Applied historians seek directly to integrate certain kinds of historical research with the process of policy research, in both public and private sectors. Applied historians do this research themselves, most typically on a contract basis from academic sanctuaries but potentially as policy researchers independent of a direct academic base. They are also involved in training graduate students in this research mode, and in several cases have also mounted undergraduate courses or programs in the genre.

Political behavior research has delivered less than the "behavioral revolution" seemed originally to promise. A survey of recent work suggests that the reason is not its epistemological premises (which are accepted here) or its methodology, but (1) its unsystematic, atheoretical character and limited range of research topics, and (2) the erroneous conception of human nature on which research rests. Compared with either the established principles of modern biobehavioral science or the conceptions of human problems of earlier political science, political behavior research remains "pre-behavioral."To progress beyond this stage, political scientists must recognize and apply the basic knowledge about human behavior provided by the biobehavioral sciences. Two brief examples of such application are given: how ethological knowledge can supply a needed theoretical perspective for identifying political behavior problems worth studying; and how neurophysiological knowledge, particularly psychophysiology and psychophysics, can correct mistaken conceptions of the relationship between political attitudes, political words, and political actions.

China's contemporary political economy is among the most exciting and demanding frontiers of research in comparative politics. The country's sheer size and internal diversity offer a natural laboratory for examining topics at multiple levels and units of analysis, and in varied regional environments. China's salience in the international media and business community also presents scholars with the added opportunity (and even responsibility) for clarifying popular misconceptions through original empirical research. An abundance of research possibilities is accompanied by a ready audience of nonacademic consumers.