The NY Times has a nice rundown of the recent attempt by Sen Tom Calburn to end National Science Foundation funding of political science. The article pretty veers left to offer a state-of-the-discipline assessment. After reviewing the Perestroika events of a few years back, it comes round to this:
What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”
In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.
In recent years he and other scholars, including Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, both former presidents of the American Political Science Association, have urged colleagues not to shy away from “the big questions.”
Graduate students discussing their field, said Peter Katzenstein, a political science professor at Cornell University, often speak in terms of “an interesting puzzle,” a small intellectual conundrum that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.
This is all well and good–I agree with all of it–but I can’t shake the feeling that most of the folks cited are or have been guilty of these very crimes. Nye is a purveyor of rigorously rationalist (if not statistical) political analysis. Putman much the same.
Katzenstein’s work may be a bit more heterodox, but I’m not sure he’s in an ideal position to accuse. From what I understand, grad students in his department continue to turn out puzzle based research as much as those elsewhere. This is, presumably, because he and others have encouraged them to do so.
Raise your hand if you’ve been told, as a graduate student, to seek out specific, analytically rigid ‘good puzzles,’ and not the big, messy stuff these guys are now selling as the proper object of study. I couldn’t agree more, myself. I don’t imagine they’d have trouble talking good graduate students, junior professors, and so on, into doing this kind of research. It would just be more convincing if they hadn’t spent the last few decades on the other side of the debate.