The Future Development of Political Science Over the Next 20 Years

Abstract

Within political science, and academia in general, research productivity is the Holy Grail. Career promotion and retention are largely based on research. Faculty prestige — and that of their universities — also is often based on it. Those of us who have sat through conversations about faculty research in relation to hiring or promotion often hear about a scholar’s “productivity” and “impact.” Productivity is most often defined by quantity and impact by citation levels or the relative rankings of the journals in which the work appeared. Rarely does the discussion around impact touch on whether or not the work has had a “real world” effect on alleviating inequality or advancing the cause of social justice. Yet, the world of the 21st century contains a growing set of societal problems that, because of a lack of focus on the impact of the scholarly work, political science seems ill-equipped to address in a sustained way. The result is that the concerns of many of the most marginal members of political communities around the world, and, even more important, the social, political, and economic processes that led to that marginalization, remain substantially unexplored and, therefore, unexplained, within the discipline. This observation is not new. In the fall of 2009 the New York Times published a story asserting that political science was experiencing increasing difficulty making a case for its relevance in broader social and political discourse, with deep disagreements about the direction of the discipline, the questions that should be pursued, and the usefulness of much of the research undertaken. Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University and current editor of Perspectives on Politics, is quoted in this article as saying: “[W]e’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it. We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.” The article also noted that the methods used to study political questions often emphasize technical sophistication that can lead to greater and greater specialization, in which scholars pursue narrow questions rather than addressing “the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” These assessments of political science — the concerns about insufficient engagement with contemporary issues and about the overly narrow focus of much of the work in the discipline — have been raised in other APSA reports (see, for example, the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy 2004). One way overspecialization and insufficient engagement are reflected is in what is published in the discipline’s flagship journals. One of the persistent complaints of organized dissent in the association is that its journals have not published a sufficient number of articles that reflect the demographic changes taking place in the United States and other countries, and the research questions they entail. A number of studies have pointed out that the flagship journals have, on the whole, rarely addressed issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. Another arena in which the absence of any discussion of the demographic changes taking place is noticeable is in the general introductory texts used to teach American politics to undergraduates; here, too, race, ethnicity, and gender are treated as marginal aspects of the political system, rather than seen as woven into the fabric of American politics.