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Political science offers a valuable and developing set of insights into how politics works. The challenge for the discipline, however, is that it is methodologically and culturally ill equipped to adopt a solution-oriented approach. This article makes the case for a shift in focus and points to political science work that takes the challenge of designing politics as its intellectual focus. It identifies key features of a design-oriented political science and points to examples which suggest that it is a neglected path for political science rather than an impossible road down which to travel.

ABSTRACTThe politics of public policy is a vibrant research area increasingly at the forefront of intellectual innovations in the discipline. We argue that political scientists are best positioned to undertake research on the politics of public policy when they possess expertise in particular policy areas. Policy expertise positions scholars to conduct theoretically innovative work and to ensure that empirical research reflects the reality they aim to analyze. It also confers important practical advantages, such as access to a significant number of academic positions and major sources of research funding not otherwise available to political scientists. Perhaps most importantly, scholars with policy expertise are equipped to defend the value of political science degrees and research in the public sphere.

The tables that follow together with those that appeared in the Fall, 1972 issue ofPSgive some roughly comparable data on Ph.D. output in political science for seven years. Perhaps, the most important change in the new data is the contrast between the 1975 and 1976 totals. Output fell by 77. The drop was accounted for mostly by decreases in the figures for the three sub-fields of Foreign and Cross-National Political Institutions and Behavior; International Law, Organization and Politics; and U.S. Political Institutions, Processes and Behavior.The most important changes in the presentation between this and the earlier article are these: first, the division of former Table I into Table IA and IB, each covering only two years. This change was required by the new classification of dissertation topics that began in 1975. That year two of the earlier categories were dropped—Constitutional and Administrative Law in the United States, and Canadian Government and Politics. Three new categories were added—Methodology; Political Stability, Instability and Change; and Public Policy: Formation and Content. Three were altered in both scope and terminology—Political Theory; Foreign and Cross-National Institutions and Behavior; and U.S. Political Institutions, Processes and Behavior. Only two were unaltered-Public Administration; and International Law, Organization and Politics. Given these changes, no confident comparisons can be made between any of the sub-field categories of the present and the past, though the two unaltered categories may allow for rough comparisons.

The turmoil surrounding the 1980 Olympic Games, says the author, was nothing new--it was merely the most recent, and most complex, manifestation of the political content of modern sport. Despite the mythology perpetrated by Olympic publicists, the modern Olympic Games were founded with expressly political goals in mind and continue to thrive on tie