Empire of Light

2020 ◽  
pp. 106-123
Author(s):  
Jason Blakely
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Francis Fukuyama ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Social Scientific

False claims to scientific authority were used to advance the American and British war on terror. In popular rhetoric, President George W. Bush borrowed (and distorted) one of the most influential theses of political science, the claim that democracies do not fight with one another. Bush also named prominent political scientists, including Francis Fukuyama—who claimed history had reached its culmination in liberal democracies—to prominent advisory positions in government. In addition, other prominent social scientists, such as Samuel Huntington, provided alternative social scientific justifications for the war on terror and later nationalistic public policy that relied on creating permanent outsider identities for Muslims and Latinos. Scientism helped American and British citizens imagine that their use of military violence was fully rational and objectively justified as the war on terror turned into the rise of ultranationalism.

Symposium on Scientific Explanation in Political Science: Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry

1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1233-1246
Author(s):  
John G. Gunnell
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Many

The purpose here is to explore certain aspects of the philosophy of science which have serious implications both for the practice of social and political science and for understanding that practice. The current relationship between social science and the philosophy of science (or the philosophy of the social sciences) is a curious one. Despite the emergence of a considerable body of literature in philosophy which is pertinent to the methodological problems of social science, there has been a lack of osteusive ties between the two areas. A justified concern with the independence of social scientific research has contributed to a tendency toward isolation which is unfortunate in view of the proliferation of philosophical problems which necessarily attends the rapid expansion of any empirical discipline. Although in the literature of contemporary social science there are frequent references to certain works in the philosophy of science and to philosophical issues relating to methodology, these are most often in the context of bald pronouncements and shibboleths relating to the nature of science, its goals, and the character of its reasoning. But what is most disturbing about the fact that social scientists have little direct and thorough acquaintance with the philosophy of science is not merely that there has been a failure to carefully examine the many logical and epistemological assumptions which are implicit in social scientific inquiry, since this task might normally and properly be considered to be within the province of the philospher of science.

Metaphor, Intertextuality, and the Post-War Consensus

Politics ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Post War ◽  
Scientific Argument

The idea of a once ‘postwar consensus’, between the Labour and Conservative parties, has become a commonplace in the academic literature of British political science. Here, I intend to briefly consider two aspects of this. I want to look at how the phrase ‘postwar consensus’ is used in a rather loose and indeterminate metaphorical fashion; and how the idea remains something of an intertextual construct rather than being a more fully developed social scientific argument The simple moral or lesson being that social scientists require to be highly circumspect with regard to the subsumption of broad extents of time and/or space under some all-embracing catch-all label or designation.

The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Public Policy and Administration

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Herbert Simon ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Mancur Olson ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Over Time

This handbook presents assessments of classic works in public policy and administration by an international collection of contemporary scholars. These classic works include books written by such illustrious intellectuals as Mancur Olson, Elinor Ostrom, and Herbert Simon. The list of contributors offering assessments of these classic works is impressive as well, featuring scholars such as Peter John, David Lowery, and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Each chapter of the handbook presents a classic work, lays out its treatment in the years and decades since its publication, and comes to an assessment of its place in the field of public policy and administration. The collection of classic works demonstrates the breadth of the field of public policy and administration, touching on topics ranging from mobilization and political participation to decision-making across types of organizations and levels of government. Although public policy and administration may not in some respects constitute a well-defined area of inquiry, this collection demonstrates that there is a core of classic works that have had a seminal impact in the field, broadly construed, over time and across national and continental boundaries. The collection also elucidates enduring interactions between public policy and administration and other social scientific disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and especially political science.

Twin Studies and Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levente Littvay
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Behavioral Genetics ◽  
Twin Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Genetic Transmission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Direction Of Causation ◽  
Social Part ◽  
The Impact

As recently as 2005, John Alford and colleagues surprised political science with their twin study that found empirical evidence of the genetic transmission of political attitudes and behaviors. Reactions in the field were mixed, but one thing is for sure: it is not time to mourn the social part of the social sciences. Genetics is not the deterministic mechanism that social scientists often assume it to be. No specific part of DNA is responsible for anything but minute, indirect effects on political orientations. Genes express themselves differently in different contexts, suggesting that the political phenomenon behavioral political scientists take for granted may be quite volatile; hence, the impact of genetics is also much less stable in its foundations than initially assumed. Twin studies can offer a unique and powerful avenue to study these behavioral processes as they are more powerful than cross-sectional (or even longitudinal) studies not only for understanding heritability but also for asserting the direction of causation, the social (and, of course, genetic) pathways that explain how political phenomena are related to each other. This chapter aims to take the reader through this journey that political science has gone through over the past decade and a half and point to the synergies behavioral political science and behavioral genetics offer to the advancement of the discipline.

Genes, cognition, and social behavior: Next steps for foundations and researchers

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Lupia
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Political Science ◽  
National Science Foundation ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Unpublished Report ◽  
Summary Statement ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Value

Editor's note This well circulated but heretofore unpublished report is the summary statement of an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars convened by the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia on June 28, 2010. The workshop, which was funded by the NSF's Political Science Program (Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Grant #1037831), was convened to answer two compelling questions: Are studies of social behavior that build from discoveries about genes and/or cognition of greater social and scientific value than studies of the same topics that ignore such factors? And, how can fundable research on genes, cognition, and politics generate transformative scientific practices, infrastructure, and findings of high social value? Assembled for the workshop were a group of scholars representing diverse yet increasingly connected research areas, including genetics, cognitive science and neuroscience, decision making and risk analysis, economics, political science, and sociology. The resulting report outlines the substantial challenges facing interdisciplinary research but also describes the considerable contributions to knowledge that could result from sustained collaborations between biologists, geneticists, and brain scientists on the one hand and social scientists on the other. Following this main report are three white papers by Jeremy Freese. Elizabeth Hammock, and Rose McDermott, which address importmant considerations related to the discussion. For a download of the full report, see http://www.isr.umich.edu.cps/workshop.Welcome.html.

Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Emily Hauptmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The University ◽  
University Consortium

ArgumentMost social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves.

Using Community Resources to Teach Public Policy

1984 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Keith J. Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Community Resources ◽  
Alternative Instruction ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Energy Environment ◽  
Science Departments ◽  
Specific Health

The recent growth in policy studies curricula in political science departments affords increased opportunities for experimentation with alternative instruction modes. This article describes one innovation found to be appropriate for courses for which the instructor has access to experts in the policy being studied. In this example, community experts in health policy issues were used as resource persons to assist in discussion of specific health policy concerns. Other policy courses should be amenable to this format, including energy, environment, and economic development courses. Even without using community experts, the general format of weekly colloquiums could be replicated for other policy courses.The courses described herein is an upper division/graduate level course in American Health Policy. It is taught for one semester every other year as one of several topical courses in the public policy track within political science.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document