On the Borders of Politics

Abstract

Political science has often been described, sometimes cheerfully but most often despairingly, as a discipline without discipline. But it can equally be described as suffering from too much discipline. When I assumed the editorship of Polity in 2000, I bemoaned the fragmentation of the study of politics into subdisciplinary churches, not with the hope of forging unity through the introduction of some overarching orthodoxy, but in accord with what I saw as the journal's tradition of encouraging doctrinal transgressions in the name of the perhaps mythical broadly educated readers with an interest in politics rather than methodological disputes or border controls. Eight years later, the situation within political science is not much different. The so-called Perestroika movement, directed against its vision of a quantitative and rational choice hegemony over some journals, the American Political Science Association, and many political science departments, has come and mostly gone. Qualitative methods is now firmly ensconced as a requirement in graduate programs, alongside its quantitative forebear, but the subfield borderlines remain largely as they were. Polity's place in political science has traditionally straddled the borders of two of those subfields: political theory and American politics. More specifically, it has received and published more submissions in the area of the history of political theory, on the one hand, and in what has come to be called American Political Development, on the other, than it has in international relations, comparative politics, contemporary Continental political theory, so-called empirical theory, methodology, or the more quantitatively oriented studies of American politics, among other things. For the most part, people working in these latter areas simply do not think to submit their work to Polity rather than to journals that are associated with these particular subjects and approaches or to the American Political Science Review (APSR). Thus Polity has run up against some specific barriers, but peer-reviewed political science journals in general have a built-in mechanism that makes it