Suchergebnisse

'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.

Report prepared for the International political science association.

Address before the Am. political science association, New York, Dec. 28, 1949.

The purpose of this report is to examine, on an international scale, the current trends in political science research.The initial intention was to base the survey on the available information about researches being carried on by institutions, but it soon became apparent that such a survey could not give an adequate picture of current work or trends. In the first place, systematic information about research by institutions was, at the time of writing, available on a comparable basis only for a few countries and areas. In the second place, even if information on research by institutions were available for all countries, an analysis of it would give a very one-sided picture of the main trends in political science research. For it would leave out of account all the work being done by individual scholars, and even groups of scholars, in the ordinary course of their academic work. To single out the work being done by research institutes (whether they are attached to universities or established independently) and to call this "research," would be putting a narrrow interpretation on the word. It is, of course, tempting to do so. It is possible to canvass institutions and compile a comparative register of their researches; it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to compile a register that would list all the significant thinking being done in political science, including the theoretical work being done by individual academic political scientists in all the universities.

Few persons who look at the world thoughtfully are complacent. It is difficult to believe that the balance of power will become more stable. Quite the contrary! A degree of bi-polarity in world politics has been reached which compels each of the opposing groups to bend its efforts to bring the remaining neutrals into its orbit and to augment its power. If the war which each regards as a possibility should come, each wants to be sure that it will not be the loser. The race in atomic weapons and armaments of all kinds is on and experience suggests, as in the rivalries between sections before the American Civil War and the rivalries between alliances before the first World War, that such a race will eventuate in war.There is no balancer in a bi-polar world, nor are there uncommitted powers which may cast their lot on one side or the other in a crisis. The process of nucleation about the two poles makes prediction of the power potential of each more and more feasible. It becomes increasingly clear to one side that time is with it and to the other that time is against it. Under such circumstances each expects war and it can be anticipated that the side which becomes convinced that time is against it will start the war. Fortunately there are still many unknown variables in the present situation. No precise calculation is yet possible, though it may be in the course of a few years. However, if war comes, there are few who doubt that atomic weapons would be used and that the human race would face disaster.

Social science is a social activity as well as a method of discovery. The researchers' values and politics colour their work and so do their choices of scientific method. This book is about both - the technical effects of values and the political effects of technique. The author reports what social scientists and historians actually do. He sorts out the scientific from the political content in a wide range of old and new work in history, sociology, political science and economics. The overall work is a detailed political and technical criticism of the 'scientistic' programme which would hav.

For some time, the growing stature of political science as an independent social science has been a notable feature in American universities. Yet, up to the present time, the categories of this new field of scientific endeavor have not found their way into the indexing departments of libraries, nor have they been recognized by indexers of other collections. Even the editors of encyclopedias, people of great learning and ability, have omitted some of the most significant topics of political science, because of the lack of any accepted index indicating the range of the field and focusing attention upon its primary categories. The American Political Science Review itself is confronted with the problem of a suitable subject-index. The growing complexity of all kinds of materials bearing upon the work of political scientists, and more particularly the increasing mass of public documents, has become more and more baffling. Even the skillful indexers of the Congressional Record, for example, seem unaware of the major topics of interest for political science, and thus no sign-posts of the usual kind have been made available to workers in our field.

WE HAVE ENTERED UPON A NEW STAGE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE as well as in the study of world affairs, the stage of large-scale computer-based world models. These models became practicable because of three changes. First, thanks to the United Nations and many national governments, many more better quality statistical data have now become available. Secondly, because of the techniques of sampling and of interviewing, we now can have survey data from very many countries and groups of people. These survey data cover many different aspects of people's views and attitudes, or of their experiences, or of their reports of what they thought they did. We can then compare the number of people who say they have written a letter with the number of letters the post office says they sent or got; thus we can, as it were, cross-examine the statistical data critically. Thirdly, we now have large computers which can store, recall, tabulate and analyze large amounts of data, if somebody works out a suitable programme for them. The computers can then tirelessly and patiently do work in minutes which individuals could not have achieved in a lifetime. Thanks to these advances in the last twenty or thirty years–the greater availability of statistics, survey and sampling techniques, and computers–we now have world models.

Writing in the October Atlantic Monthly, Paul P. Cram insists that "the task of our teachers at the present moment is one of the most terrible responsibilities in modern times." In less troubled eras, some of us would probably reply that teachers have little influence over college students, who are more interested in sex, football, and liquor than in democracy and war and peace. But Bismarck declared that the German history professor had more to do with winning the Franco-Prussian war than any other group in the Fatherland with the exception of the German High Command. And the fate of France demonstrates with terrible clarity the misfortune that may befall a nation if its people are mentally unprepared to meet existing emergencies.