How Can We Get There From Here? Thoughts on the Integration of American and Comparative Politics

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. 558-560
Author(s):  
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph ◽  
Lloyd I. Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Policy Alternatives ◽  
Institutional Determinants ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Third World

The bifurcation of political science into American and comparative politics impoverishes both. The division parochializes them by encapsulating the study of politics within national boundaries. The result is to deprive each of the theoretical contributions generated by the other and to cut them off from the institutional and policy alternatives each has devised. The loss to the study of American politics is probably the more severe because its practitioners have not been prepared to recognize the limitations of their “area specialty.”Historical and institutional determinants help to explain the bifurcation. Because academic political science, that is, political science as a discipline and a profession is, as Bernard Crick has shown, American in its origins and early development, it has been less attentive to non-American contexts. More than other academic social science disciplines, political science's intellectual provenance is located in the new world. Unlike the other social sciences, political science lacks eighteenth and nineteenth century European masters. In the belief that America was showing the world its future, post-war behavioral political science like other aspects of the American way of life became an American export to Europe and the third world.

Area Studies and the Disciplines: A Rejoinder

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-31
Author(s):  
John W. Harbeson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Science Association

Robert Bates’ letter entitled “Area Studies and the Discipline” (American Political Science Association, Comparative Politics 1, Winter 1996, pp. 1-2) uses the occasion of the SSRC’s abolishing of area committees to announce that “within the academy, the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge.” As someone who has done some of his most important work on African development issues, Bates deplores declining investment in area studies as a “loss to the social sciences, as well as to the academy,” at an inopportune moment, “just when our [political science] discipline is becoming equipped to handle area knowledge in a rigorous fashion.”

Onomantic and Semantic Considerations

1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred W. Riggs
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Life Changes ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
The World

Corning and Hines make a useful contribution to the study of politics by distinguishing sharply between “political development” and “political evolution.” Their emphasis on the multidisciplinary dimensions of real life changes as they occur (and have occurred) throughout the world is also needed. We must, assuredly, go beyond political science, both to the other social sciences (including economics) and also, notably, to the life sciences.

Introduction: History and the Other Social Sciences, Part 1

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
Eric Monkkonen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Science History ◽  
Introduction History ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Impact

In this issue of Social Science History we begin a special series of articles surveying the impact and use of historical research and reasoning in the other social sciences—anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology. The authors of the essays have been asked to analyze their disciplines so that readers will get a sense both of major issues and research directions and of influences. In addition, they have been asked to include in their references older important works as well as more recent ones, so that those in other disciplines may use the essays as bibliographic sources. After the series is completed, we expect to publish an expanded version of it as a separate book.

scholarly journals Paradigms in Political Science Revisited

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-118
Author(s):  
Eric A. Winkel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
The One

We are at a crossroads where the time is ripe for the emerging Muslim thought to once again set the standard for universal participation and debate. My continual argument with Mona Abul-Fadl's concept of kairos in The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 1, (September 1989 supplement) is whether the openness of the discourse realm is a result of what Gai Eaton describes as the process of decomposition releasing explosive gases, where the "ripeness" is putridity, or a beneficial progress of ideas. Does postmodern deconstruction, decentralization, and destruction create a foothold for the remembering of Islam? Or will the Islamic discourse enter the scene to be trivialized and relativized in the encounter? From my perspective, I tie the movements of the paradigms to the political encounter with the other, where the self-described American establishment was forced to recognize the non-white, the non-male, the non-consumer. More sensitive to complexities, calmer in her approach, and without any reductionism or oversimplification, Mona Abul-Fadl recognizes the "mundane" links of ideas, but treats them with respect nevertheless. It is her insight to see in the tanzil, in the physical and already interpreted descent of the Qur'an and Sunnah, the one rope on which we may spin, in shaa Allah, the Islamic discourse for it to achieve grounding and affirmation in a world of chaos and alienation. We are in a time when a metacritique may now become possible, where the crisis in Western thought coincides with a dawning epistemic consciousness among Muslims. "We are living," she notes, "at the threshold of a critical era which is steadily being acknowledged as such. The designation 'post­modernity' indicates the direction of the transition away from the established canon of values and beliefs identified with the European Enlightenment." ...

Clouds, Clocks, and the study of Politics

1977 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel A. Almond ◽  
Stephen J. Genco
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hard Science ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychology And Economics

In its eagerness to become scientific, political science has in recent decades tended to lose contact with its ontological base. It has tended to treat political events and phenomena as natural events lending themselves to the same explanatory logic as is found in physics and the other hard sciences. This tendency may be understood in part as a phase in the scientific revolution, as a diffusion, in two steps, of ontological and methodological assumptions from the strikingly successful hard sciences: first to psychology and economics, and then from these bellwether human sciences to sociology, anthropology, political science, and even history. In adopting the agenda of hard science, the social sciences, and political science in particular, were encouraged by the neopositivist school of the philosophy of science which legitimated this assumption of ontological and meta-methodological homogeneity. More recently, some philosophers of science and some psychologists and economists have had second thoughts about the applicability to human subject matters of strategy used in hard science.

Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes

1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Post War ◽  
Theoretical Apparatus

Those who specialize in the study of Soviet government and politics are beginning to feel and acknowledge the need for a more effective theoretical apparatus. The post-war years of expanded research in this field have been fruitful in empirical studies of Soviet political history and institutions, but the theoretical development has not kept pace; and now the lag is beginning to inhibit the further fruitful progress of empirical research itself. Instead of a gradually developing body of theory, we still have a mélange of “ten theories in search of reality,” as Daniel Bell has summed it up in the title of a recent article.The purpose of the present paper is not to propound an eleventh theory. It is only an exploratory effort, a consideration of a somewhat different approach to the problem than has been customary in the field of Soviet studies. In presenting it, I shall try to shed the blinkers of a Russian specialist and take a look at the whole political galaxy in which Russia is only the biggest star and probably no longer the brightest one.The best way out of the theoretical difficulty may lie in making the study of Soviet government and politics more comparative than it has generally been so far, thus bringing it into much closer working relations with political science as a whole and particularly with the slowly growing body of theory in comparative politics. As this statement implies, our work on Soviet government and politics has been characterized by a certain theoretical isolationism.

The Politics of American Political Scientists

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Everett Carll Ladd ◽  
Seymour Martin Lipset
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Party Identification ◽  
The United States ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Views ◽  
General Recognition ◽  
The University

At the heart of the debates which have resounded around political science these past few years are charges and countercharges as to the “politics” of the contenders. Terms likeconservative, liberalandradical areno longer reserved for analysis of positions in the larger society; they have become part of the regular vocabulary with which political scientists evaluate their colleagues. This increase in visible and self-conscious political dissensus extends, of course, throughout the university, but it has left a special mark on political science and the other social sciences where the issues and objects of political disagreement are so enmeshed with the regular subject matter of the discipline.In spite of all of the discussion, and the now seemingly general recognition that the politics of members of the profession has a lot to do with its development and contributions, we still don't have very much firm information on the distribution of political views among the approximately 6,000 faculty members regularly engaged in the teaching of political science in the United States. There have been a number of studies, of course, of party identification and voting behavior, showing political science to be one of the most Democratic fields in academe.

: Comparative Politics1

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War

This chapter examines seven characters in search of a comparative politics: Ostrogorski, the Whig; Bryce, the liberal; Herman Finer, the comparativist; S. E. Finer, the Paretian realist; Philip Williams, the parliamentary democrat; Richard Rose, the social scientist; and Anthony King, the sceptic. While British political scientists may not have originated any grand theories, their contribution to the development of the discipline in the twentieth century can be seen to have been a powerful one. In Britain, the main threat to political science lies not in its being insufficiently ‘professional’, but in the bureaucratization of universities and of research, a process that is bound to prove detrimental to creative work. There has, in addition, been a certain loss of intellectual self-confidence in Britain, parallel perhaps to that loss of national self-confidence which remains the most striking feature of British post-war politics.

scholarly journals Images of America in unified Germany

Literator ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
S. Fröhlich
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
East German ◽  
Cynical View ◽  
Post War

The following article analyses American cultural influence on Germany - especially in the period after unification. “Wendeliteratur" as well as new cultural relations and institutions are emphasised. The role of the mass media, which have conveyed the image of the American way of life, American products and services to East German is also discussed. For a better understanding of these images the author takes a closer look at what “Americanisation" really means to European cultures. All too often cultural observers state that Europe has been exposed to a pernicious Americanism. Such attitudes, however, should caution us against a too negative image of America. Although German-American relations during the post-war period had their ups and downs, West Germans on the whole developed a positive image of America, internalising American cultural elements as part of their own identification. The East Germans, on the other hand, it will be argued, while developing an enthusiasm for America at the time of reunification, turned more and more to a very critical, rather cynical view of American culture, thus letting euphoria fade to a very rational image.

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