The Political Science Profession in 1970: Basic Characteristics

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (01) ◽  
pp. 33-39
Author(s):  
Earl M. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
National Register ◽  
Science Section ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Restrictive Definition

The number of political scientists registered in the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel increased 25% from 1968 to 1970, from 5,176 to 6,493. This reflects a “natural” growth of perhaps 15–20%, over the two years while the remaining increase can be attributed to the greater scope of the American Political Science Association survey of political scientists in 1970. This growth in the political science section of the Register occurred despite a more restrictive definition of “professional political scientist” than had been used in 1968. Insofar as the APSA membership list can be used to gauge the completeness of the response, it would suggest that the Register is substantially complete for political science, allowing for the non-professional members of the Association and a probable residue of non-respondents. Political scientists comprise 2% of the total number of United States scientists (313,000 in 1970) in both years. More than half of National Register scientists are in three disciplines, chemistry, biology and physics.

scholarly journals Spotlight: Grain of Sand Award of 2009 Presented to Professors Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Dvora Yanow
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
The Creation ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association is proud to announce the creation of the “Grain of Sand” Award to honor a political scientist whose contributions to interpretive studies of the political, and, indeed, to the discipline itself, its ideas, and its persons, have been longstanding and merit special recognition.

The Political Scientist Decides: An Examination of the 1969 APSA Ballot

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (03) ◽  
pp. 311-320
Author(s):  
John E. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Response Rate ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Alphabetical Order ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
First Time ◽  
Vote Result ◽  
Science Association

I always vote for the man, not the party.–Trad.In its election for offices in 1969, the American Political Science Association, apparently for the first time in its rarely turbulent history, found the nominees of its Official Nominating Committee challenged by an insurgent group. In order to handle this unprecedented situation, it was decided at the annual meeting to carry out the election by mail ballot and the American Arbitration Association was engaged to administer the operation.Ballots were mailed to the 13,061 members of the Association in October, 1969. Accompanying them were materials containing statements of belief and biographies for each of the candidates. The response rate was 64 percent.The ballots carried the contestants indicated in Table 1. For each office the candidates are listed in the Table in the order of their vote result (they were listed in alphabetical order on the ballot) and for each candidate the group endorsements, as they were presented on the ballot, are indicated. Except for the group endorsements, no identifying information accompanied the names of the candidates on the ballots.

Political Science and Federal Employment

1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-310
Author(s):  
Frederick M. Davenport ◽  
Lewis B. Sims ◽  
Leonard D. White ◽  
G. Lyle Belsley ◽  
Frances R. Fussell
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Federal Employment ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

Only since 1939 have political scientists, as such, had much chance to gain entrance into the permanent federal civil service. This opportunity came as the result of two well-timed phenomena: (1) the demand of a number of federal agencies for young men and women educated in certain branches of political science, and (2) the United States Civil Service Commission's announcement of the Junior Professional Assistant examination, which included an optional called “Junior Administrative Technician.” This combination of happy circumstances, however, did not solve all the problems of the young political scientist or clarify all the requirements for federal employment; so, at the 1939 meeting of the American Political Science Association a committee was appointed to study the question.

What's Old Is New Again: Political Science, Law, and Constitutional Meaning

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (03) ◽  
pp. 493-497
Author(s):  
Robert J. Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Public Law ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
Constitutional Meaning ◽  
American Political Science

Political science and law intersect not only in the political world, but as disciplines. This is as it should be, and for two important reasons: disciplinary history and content. As Fisher (2009, 798) notes, the first political science graduate program, founded in 1880, studied “history, law, and philosophy.” The American Political Science Association, founded in 1903, defined itself in terms of six distinct areas of study, five of which—comparative legislation, international law, constitutional law, administrative law, and jurisprudence—were in some manner about law (798). In addition, law is the expression of authority by the state. Its formation, content, and consequences form the purest expression of governmental power through what we more comprehensively define today as public policy. Early in the history of our discipline, political scientists approached the law in a manner that was “legalistic, formalistic, conceptually barren and largely devoid of what would today be called empirical data” (Somit and Tannenhaus 1967, 69). That is, they approached it as did lawyers of the time. Yet as political science matured, those who studied public law ceased being merely “little lawyers,” vesting their work with no less respect for the content of law, but tempered also with the tools and perspectives of what was by now a distinct discipline. No early political scientist better exemplified this maturation than Edward Corwin, especially (although not exclusively) as reflected in his timeless study,The President: Office and Powers(1957).

scholarly journals An Assessment of Publisher Quality by Political Science Librarians

2000 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice S. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Book Selection ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
Selection Decisions ◽  
Science Section ◽  
Similar Survey ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

Publisher quality is one criterion used by collection development librarians in making book selection decisions. Few studies have assessed the perceptions subject specialist librarians have about the quality of academic publishers’ output in specific disciplines. The author surveyed a sample of members of the Association of College and Research Libraries Law & Political Science Section, asking them to assess the overall quality of political science books published by sixty-two academic presses and imprints. The results are reported, analyzed, and compared to a similar survey of members of the American Political Science Association. Many similarities are seen in the rankings, although, on the whole, librarians ranked university presses higher and commercial publishers lower than did political scientists.

The Political Science Curriculum in War-Time: Report of the Committee of the American Political Science Association on War-Time Changes in the Political Science Curriculum

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1142-1146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan P. Allen ◽  
Rodney L. Mott ◽  
Kenneth O. Warner ◽  
Francis O. Wilcox ◽  
E. M. Kirkpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Science Curriculum ◽  
Educational Leaders ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Time Changes ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

In these days of war, with democracy facing the greatest challenge in its history, it would be a sad mistake for anyone to assume an attitude of smug complacency. Such would be disastrous if not literally treasonable. Educators, therefore, along with labor and industry, business and agriculture, need to re-examine and revaluate their contribution to the common welfare of the community. Engaged in a war that threatens the very existence of freedom of thought, scholarship, and teaching, educational leaders have an obligation to see that the best possible use is made of one of democracy's outstanding institutions—a free educational system. If the democratic nations fail to train men in good moral and intellectual habits, fail to produce men of keen insight and critical judgment, fail to give us free minds that can join in our struggle toward a better life for all the people of the world, they will have failed in one of their most important obligations to the human race, no matter how the struggle upon the field of battle may end.

Politics and Power

Philosophy ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 38 (144) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
P. H. Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Proper Definition ◽  
Definition Of

In recent years, political scientists have talked a great deal about the proper definition of their subject, and of how the ‘field’ of the political scientist is best distinguished from that of other social scientists. One proposal that is frequently made is that political science might quite properly be defined as the study of power, its forms, its sources, its distribution, its modes of exercise, its effects. The general justification for this proposal is, of course, that political activity itself appears to be connected very intimately with power: it is often said that political activity is a struggle for power; that constitutions and other political institutions are methods of defining and regularising the distribution and the exercise of power, and so on. Since there seems to be some sense in which one can say that, within the wider area of social life, the political field is that which has some special connection with power, it may seem plausible then to suggest that the study of politics focusses upon the study of power.

Crisis, Choice, and Change in Retrospect

1992 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel A. Almond ◽  
Scott C. Flanagan ◽  
Robert J. Mundt
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
New Institutionalism ◽  
American Political Science Review ◽  
Program Committee ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

THE ‘NEW INSTITUTIONALISM’ HAS BEEN THE MOST VISIBLE movement in American political science during the last decade. It is a recoil from reductionism that is said to have dominated the political science of the previous decades. During the American Political Science Association presidency of Charles E. Lindblom in 1981, with Theodore Lowi and Sidney Tarrow as co-chairs of the Program Committee, it was decided that all titles of panels and round tables at the annual meeting were to have ‘and the state’ tacked on. The implication was that the behavioural revolution had resulted in the neglect of the power and autonomy of the state. But this adding on ‘and the state’ had very little effect on the content of the papers, and seemed primarily to have ‘buzzword’ significance. A second manifestation of this discomfort was an article in the American Political Science Review of 1984 by James March and Johan Olsen, entitled ‘The New Institutionalism; The Organizational Factor in Political Life’, followed by a book by the same two authors called Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics.

Identity challenges Facing the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 77-79
Author(s):  
David Goetze
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Success ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

Founded in 1980, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) sought to establish biopolitics as a recognized field and to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science. The association's founders established these goals to encourage a generation of scholars and promote the spread of biopolitical knowledge. There was early success when the American Political Science Association (APSA) recognized biopolitics as an organized section. However, this development did not leave an appreciable imprint on the political science profession and the experiment conjoining the two did not last long. The other goal of the founders, to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science, faced more formidable obstacles and still faces challenges, though not without some progress.

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