Suchergebnisse

The defence of political science rests on a starting proposition that practitioners of political science need to embrace relevance rather than fear. Defending the role of politics in resolving societal dilemmas is in part a responsibility of those who study it and the challenge is significant given evidence of disenchantment with the political process in many established and mew democracies. Political science needs to offer not only an understanding of politics that is theoretical, sophisticated and empirically rigorous but also an approach that is not just problem‐focused but solution‐seeking. Defending political science means defending politics and taking on the challenge of improving its practice.

'Political science' is a 'vanguard' field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider 'political scholarship' utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of 'digital-era' developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of 'instrumentation', informed by post-rational choice theoretical perspectives.

Confusion reigns almost supreme in the field of political science, particularly when the meaning of terms is involved. Some of our most commonly used words have so many meanings, shades of meaning, and connotations that hearers and readers are frequently at a loss as to the meaning and significance of terms used unless the speaker or writer defines them as he uses them. A cursory examination of the term "state" brought to light no fewer than one hundred forty-five different definitions, even though only a few writers were included who might be classed as radical. Less than half of the definitions were in general agreement. Even this statement is based on the assumption that when the same words were used by two writers they were used to mean the same thing; and I doubt whether the assumption is entirely justifiable. Furthermore, "state" is not the only term in political science which is defined in multifold ways. A similar situation was found when others, especially "law," "government," "political," "administration," were investigated.The process of communication between political scientists, as well as between these scientists and laymen or between laymen and laymen, comes to be a guessing game. Consciously or unconsciously, it is suggested, we are spending much of our time guessing what the sender means when he uses even technical words.