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NHoPS Chapter 1
I. Political Science as a Discipline
A. Nature of a Discipline
Discipline - a branch of instruction; mental and moral training

An academic "discipline" may enjoy minimal scope to "punish,"

at least in the most literal senses Foucault 1977.

Still, the community of scholars which collectively constitutes a discipline does

exercise a strict supervisory function

there is a strong sense (shifting over time) of what is and what is not
"good" work within the discipline, and

there is a certain amount of almost rote learning involved in "mastering" a

discipline.

Academic disciplines as "professions."

"Sciences know, professions profess." Dwight Waldo's 1975

123

Discipline, academic or otherwise, is thus a classic instance of a useful self-

binding mechanism.

Subjecting oneself to the discipline of a discipline —is conducive to more and

indisputably better work, both individually and collectively.

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 Concept of Profession
a relatively high-status occupational grade; and the organization of national
and international "professional associations" with securing the status and
indeed salaries of academics thus organized.

a certain attitude toward one's work.

a self-organizing community, oriented toward certain well-defined tasks or

functions.

A professional community is characterized by certain self-imposed standards and

norms.

💡 Incoming members of the profession are socialized into those standards

and norms, ongoing members are evaluated in terms of them.

Varying professional norms but - "minimal professional competence," captured

by the ritual of "qualifying examinations" with "role responsibilities" attaching to
membership in a profession.

TWO MAIN POINTS:

 there is increasing agreement to a "common core" which can be taken to
define "minimal professional competence" within the profession.

 there is an increasing tendency to judge work, one's own even more than
others', in terms of increasingly high standards of professional excellence.

B. What is Politics?
Politics - constrained use of social power.

💡 the study of the nature and source of those constraints and the
techniques for the use of social power within those constraints.

Defining politics in terms of the constrained use of power

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 Definition of Power, Dahl's 1957 X has power over Y insofar as:
(i) X is able, in one way or another, to get Y to do something

(ii) that is more to X's liking, and

(iii) which Y would not otherwise have done.

It is the analysis of those constraints— where they come from, how they
operate, how political agents might operate within them— that seems to us to
lie at the heart of the study of politics

Use of Social Power to cover:

 Intentional acts as well as unintended consequences of purposeful action.

 Covert manipulatory politics as well as overt power plays.

 Passive as well as active workings of power, internalized norms as well as

external threats

 The infamous "law of anticipated reactions,"* non-decisions and the

hegemonic shaping of people's preferences.

“law of anticipated reactions” expresses the simple idea that if X's actions will
be subject to review by Y, with Y capable of rewarding good actions and/or
punishing bad ones, then X will likely anticipate and consider what it is that Y
wants Friedrich 1963.

Defining politics in distribution

We explicitly depart from the purely distributional tradition

In terms of the meaning of the act to the actor, many political acts are at least
in the first instance distinctly non-distributional.

Distributional struggles are characterized, as squabbles over where we sit on

the Paretian frontier

💡 our understanding of politics should be attuned to distributive

struggles, then, it is equally important that it not be committed in
advance to analyzing all else exclusively in terms of them.

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 C. The Several Sciences of Politics
Science - systematic enquiry, building toward an ever more highly-differentiated
set of ordered
propositions about the empirical world.
Logical positivist might cast the aspirations of science in terms of finding some
set of "covering laws" — that sets the aspirations of science much too high ever
to be attained in the study of politics.

💡 truths of political science, essentially probabilistic in form. (NOT

'always' or 'never' but 'more or less likely')

The deeper source of errors in (the positivist model of) political science lies in
a misconstrual of the nature of its subject. (billiard balls vs humans
[intentional actors])

Mathematical modelling and statistical testing : we are picking up with those

tools are seen, now, not as inexorable workings of external forces on passive
actors, but rather as common or conventional responses of similar people in
similar plights.

II. The Maturation of the Profession

Maturity - a growing capacity to see things from the other's point of view

Behavioral Revolution
 Behavioral revolutionaries, for their part, were devoted to dismissing the
formalisms of politics—institutions, organizational charts, constitutional
myths and legal fictions—as pure sham.

 A generation later, "rational choice" revolutionaries, imposed formal order and

mathematical rigor upon loose logic borrowed by behavioralists from
psychology.

Manichean Good-versus-Evil form

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 Rational choice modellers strove, to reduce all politics to the interplay of
narrow material self-interest.

Squeezing out, in the process, people's values and principles and personal
attachments as well as a people's history and institutions.

 "New Institutionalism." constitutes of:

no longer think in the either/or terms of agency or structure, interests or

institutions as the driving forces: now, virtually all serious students of the
discipline would say it is a matter of a judicious blend of both.

no longer think in the either/or terms of behavioral propensities or

organization charts: now say it is a matter of analyzing behavior within
the parameters set by institutional facts and opportunity structures.

no longer think in the either/or terms of rationality or habituation: now

appreciate the constraints under which real people take political actions,
and incorporate within their own models many of the sorts of cognitive
shortcuts that political psychologists have long been studying.

no longer think in the either/or terms of realism or idealism, interests or

ideas as driving forces in history: virtually all serious students of the
subject carve out a substantial role for both.

no longer think in either/or terms of science or story-telling, wide-ranging

cross-national comparisons or carefully crafted case studies unique unto
themselves: virtually all serious students of the subject now see the merit
in attending to local detail and appreciate the possibilities of systematic,
statistically compelling study even in small-N situations.

no longer think in either/or terms of history or science, mono-causality or

hopeless complexity: even hard-bitten econometricians have now been
forced to admit the virtues of estimation procedures which are sensitive
to "path" effects, and simplistic early models of politico-economic
interactions have now been greatly enriched

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 💡 The upshot is undoubtedly eclectic, but it is an ordered eclecticism
rather than pure pastiche. (eclectic = many sources, pastiche =
imitation)

A modus vivendi sufficient for productive collaboration is likely to emerge within

an academic discipline only at lower levels of analysis and abstraction.

Sheer folly to seek to bully or cajole a diverse and dispersed community of

scholars into an inevitably false and fragile consensus on foundational issues.

A mutatis mutandis — tricks and tools and theories which were initially
developed in one connection can, as often as not, be transposed into other
settings.

Much mutation, adaptation and reinterpretation is, indeed, often required to

render borrowed tools appropriate to their new uses.

III. Professional Touchstones

Whatever their particular specialties, share at least a minimal grounding in
broadly the same methodological techniques and in broadly the same core
literature.

A. Classic Texts
Political science, like virtually all the other natural and social sciences, is
increasingly becoming an article-based discipline.

the lingua franca of our shared discipline and the touchstones for further
contributions to it.

"Instant Classic" - books which everyone is talking about and presumed to know,
at least in passing.

LINKS

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaw https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaw
s.com/secure.notion-static.com/ s.com/secure.notion-static.com/

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480f2a8f/classictexts.txt 3cdfaa7faa/contempclassics.txt

B. Recurring Themes
Politics as the constrained use of social power.

💡 Politics as constraints has, in one way or another, been a recurring

theme of political science over the past quarter century.

"New Institutionalism" comes a renewed appreciation of history and

happenstance, rules and regimes as constraining forces in political life.
Constraints of New Institutionalism:

 Legacy of history (little novelty in the thought that the coalition structure at
crucial moments in the past might have shaped political life for years to
come)

 Nested and embedded nature of social rules and regimes, practices and
possibilities. None is free-standing: all are embedded in)

 Socio-economic constraints - the more deeply nested aspects of social

organization are sociologically familiar and materially productive: herein lie
the ultimate source of their strength as constraints on the use of social power.

Exercise their influence unobtrusively, passing unnoticed and

unquestioned, are therefore virtually never on display.

 Socio-economic forces that work right at the surface of social life.

 The exercise of pure (and, more especially, practical) reason.

Political scientists of virtually every ilk are once again according a central
role to people's beliefs and what lies behind them.

 What people believe to be true and important, what they believe to be good
and valuable

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 Framed around past teachings and past experiences. Shaping those
teachings and experiences can shape people's beliefs and values and
thereby their political choices.

💡 Increasing appreciation that ideas have consequences.

Getting new perspectives on old problems, seeing new ways of doing things,
seeing new things to do: all these, as applied to public problems, are
quintessentially political activities.

The fact vs. value distinction

There are metatheoretical reasons aplenty for resisting the distinction; and

insofar as the distinction can be defensibly drawn at all, there are ethical
reasons for insisting upon the primacy of values, for insisting upon a
"political science with a point"

EXAMPLES

James Scott's Moral Economy of the Peasant 1976

explains peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia to perplexed policy-makers in
simple terms of people's reactions against policies they perceive to be unjust,
according to conventional local understandings of what justice requires.
Barrington Moore's Injustice 1978
aspires to generalize the proposition. The spread of the democratic ideal
across southern Europe, then Latin America, then eastern Europe might
similarly be seen as political action inspired by a vision of what was good,
combined with a vision of what was possible.

💡 Political scientists find themselves increasingly wanting to employ

complex research designs systematically relating structures, processes
and outcomes.

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 To do so, they need a theoretical framework — rational choice analysis and new
institutionalism.

C. New Voices
Among the most notable new voices clearly represented in political science
today, compared to a quarter-century ago, are postmodernists and feminists
themselves.

Postmodernism more generally has made rather more modest inroads, in part
because its central precepts are cast on such a high theoretical plane.

Wherever once there were clearly defined structures, and now there are none
(or many disconnected ones), the post-structural theoretical arsenal may well
offer insights into how that happened and why.

Contemporary political science is decidedly substantially post-positivist, (taken

lessons of the hermeneutic critique)

Subjective aspects of political life, the internal mental life of political actors,
meanings and beliefs and intentions and values.

Political methodology, entering a postmodern phase.

Emphasize the need for contextualized and path-dependent explanations.

represents something of a retreat away from generality and toward

particularity, away from universality and toward situatedness, in the
explanatory accounts we offer for political phenomena.

IV. The Shape of the Profession: A

Bibliometric Analysis
We see quite strikingly the residues of the "two revolutions," first the behavioral
revolution and then the rational choice one, on the contemporary profession:

The rational choice putsch has been remarkably successful, not so much in
pushing out the old behavioral orthodoxy, as in carving out a predominant
role for itself alongside it.

Residue of the older revolution is still so strongly in evidence

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 Growing evidence of the next revolution on its way: the "new institutionalist"
movement.

Partly in league with the rational choice movement.

In other authors' hands, new institutionalism takes on a decidedly

sociological and anti-rational choice cast.

"Integrator" — anyone who appears at least once in the reference lists in more
than half (that is, five or more) of the eight subdisciplinary parts of the New
Handbook.

 Two subdisciplines (Comparative Politics and Political Economy) - well-

integrated into the profession as a whole.

 Other subdisciplines (Public Policy and Administration and Political

Theory) - most referenced authors serve as integrators for the discipline
as a whole, while there are others (notably, Political Institutions) which
largely lack integrators but whose own most frequently referenced authors
are among the most frequently referenced within the discipline as a whole.

 Other subdiscipline (Political Methodology) whose own most frequently

referenced authors figure neither among the larger discipline's integrators
nor among its most-frequently referenced.

A good composite view of the shape of the discipline emerges from combining all
these criteria:
A. who are the "integrators" of the profession,
B. who are "most frequently referenced in the discipline as a whole," and

C. who are "most frequently referenced within their own subdisciplines."

💡 The general pattern is clear enough: there are highly differentiated sub-
disciplinary communities making great advances. But there is also a
small band of scholars at the peak of the profession who genuinely do
straddle many (in a few cases, most) of those sub disciplinary
communities and integrate them into one coherent disciplinary whole.

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