Article on Perestroika Movement in US Poli Sci

[Michael Hoover <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Perestroika,
Here is a pre-translated version of a piece on the perestroika
movement which has just appeared in a French journal.
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L'Economie Politique no. 26
Sommaire 2005, pp. 95-105

Perestroika dans la science politique americaine
Kurt Jacobsen, University of Chicago

Does democracy, or the lack of it, affect research methods?
Philosophers of science Paul Feyerabend, and, less flamboyantly,
Thomas Kuhn are among those who have implied such a link. In the
superpower that advertises itself as the world's greatest democracy
(despite the precipitous Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, Abu Graib
and suspicions of electronic and other forms of vote rigging in the
2004 US election) one might imagine that the American Political
Science Association (APSA), which represents 15,000 scholars and
teachers of the art of politics, preaches the gospel that the best
system of government, despite all its faults, is democracy.
Actually, as with any group fancying itself an elite, many eminent
APSA members harbor grave doubts as to how far this unruly form of
government ought to go not only in the world but inside their own
club. From inception the Association has never entertained the
subversive notion of conducting internal elections through a secret
ballot, that is, until recently. Does this situation exert any impact
upon the content of political science research? A rebellious group of
US political scientists explicitly connect the recent dominance of a
stultifyingly formal and quantitative view of political life to the
absence of internal democracy in the APSA.

What governs the APSA is a cozy arrangement where a committee chosen
by the president nominates his (eighty times "his" versus four times
"her") successor who then picks the governing council who pick the
next president who picks the next Council, and so on. APSA officers
are answerable to people whom they themselves appoint, a splendidly
regal arrangement. What does this coziness mean for the vitality of
teaching, research and democracy?  An ancient academic joke has a
surly scholar complain about a successful experiment: "That's all
very well in practice but how does it work in theory?"  The joke is
only a slight exaggeration about the otherworldly plight of American
political science. Today it is the elegance and artificial neatness
of models - not relevance to real world activities - that reap the
greatest kudos. Other sorts of scholars have gotten the clear message
that they need not apply. This disturbing trend would not have come
to light except for a sudden surprising revolt against what
disgruntled scholars claim is the suffocating grip of mathematical
models and of formal theory (rational choice, public choice) in
economics as well as political science.

Rational choice theory derives from an especially abstract version of
neo-classical economics, which political scientists cannot help but
enviously notice win Nobel Prizes, though often for no intelligible
reason and with no discernible benefit to mankind. The theory deploys
an arid set of assumptions about human behavior which reduce
complicated lives and societies to prioritized "rational" choices
that we supposedly make in order to maximize our patently obvious
"utility" in any given situation. In this dusty chalkboard universe
people are viewed as specimens of 'homo economicus,' a stern concept
wherein any trace of culture, history, personality, accident, whimsy,
self-reflectiveness or any other impurity that might smudge the
model's tidiness is erased. In the political science discipline the
equation of 'empirical' with 'quantitative' is a commonplace and,
indeed, increasingly compulsory error, as Peri Schwartz-Shea of the
University of Utah, among others, notes .

Although some dissidents exclude statistical techniques from their
critique of the hubris of formal theorizing, Greg Kasza of Indiana
University insists that it is "radical quantifiers" who "popularized
the study of politics outside of its historical and cultural setting,
who made methodology into the core of graduate education while
degrading political philosophy and foreign language study, and who
spawned the trend toward method-driven rather than problem-driven
research." Kasza observes, with a good deal of justice, that American
graduate students are forced to "earn their passports to the clouds
in qualifying exams that grill them on multiple regression,
most-different-systems analysis, and the small-n problem" when many
have yet to master the history, economics, social structure, and
politics of even one "n" . . ."

Few critics deny that rational choice, and the statistical apparatus
that often accompanies it, has merit if employed with a bit of
humility, especially in studies of collective action. The chronic
trouble is that formal models dangle the tantalizing appearance of
explanations for almost anything, although these explanations,
critics retort, either are trivial or reinvent (and rephrase the
invention of) the wheel or fail to display even a nodding
acquaintance with recognizable reality.  Unscholarly citizens
especially in the UK and US may well wonder why recent economic
growth consistently generates a maldistribution of wealth or why the
best and brightest market economists encouraged the Russians to send
their economy, so far as the average Russian is concerned, straight
to hell. Few economists or rational choice connoisseurs pay any
serious attention to such vulgar everyday policy questions. Can this
serene disengagement from public life go on forever?

'Beyond generic group death and disability insurance, discounts on
otherunreadable scholastic publications, cheap tickets to APSA
meetings, and periodically-issued surveys of what many academics
pretend is 'cutting edge research,' the APSA does very little,"
Professor Timothy Luke of Vermont drolly accuses. "It no longer
aspires to guide the nation's public life, it bars members from
making political pronouncements in any collective manner, and it
produces a fairly apolitical and largely unscientific run of
self-referential literature by, for, and of college professors.'

Like the "post autistic economics" movement erupting in France in
2000 against formalistic "excesses" of economics, the American
perestroikans too advocate a "plurality of approaches adapted to the
complexity of the object studied." American economics proved fiercely
resistant and so the reform movement ignited instead within political
science, which zealously imitates economics. The clarion call of the
US revolt came in October 2000 in an e-mail circulated by "Mr.
Perestroika" - perhaps a junior faculty member or group of junior
faculty and graduate students- who lashed out against "poor
game-theorists who cannot for the life of me compete with a third
grade economics student" yet are able to stifle the "diversity of
methodologies and areas of the world that APSA 'purports' to
represent." Perestroika, according to its - ahem - original sponsors,
promoted the "vital creativity" of society's members; development of
democracy, "initiative and independence" and "the widening of
criticism and self-criticism in all spheres of social life" in the
long gone Soviet Union. Mr. Perestroika recently stated that the goal
of the movement is providing "a forum where people can discuss and
debate methodology, politics, theory, and the world in such a manner
that APSA and APSR (American Political Science review) and our
discipline become more open and more diverse in gender, racial,
ethnic, and methodological terms - in teaching, publishing and hiring
practices.'

The anonymous 'Mr. Perestroika' became the elusive catalyst for a
lively reform movement. Within a month of the original e-mailing an
enthusiastic movement of insurgent professors crystallized, led by a
bevy of eminent scholars whom APSA authorities simply could not
afford to ignore.  By January 2001 more than 200 tenured faculty
signed a slightly toned-down version of the original petition,
charging that formal modelers are slowly but surely elbowing out
other valuable forms of research. Signatories included 24 named
chairs - luminaries ranging from Yale's political ethnographer James
Scott to University of Chicago's South Asia experts Susanne and Lloyd
Rudolph to Penn's political semioticist Ann Norton and American
studies scholar Rogers Smith.

Political science has "been taken over by methodological
parochialists who believe that the only worthwhile scholarship in
political science speaks the language of mathematics," stated Chicago
security specialist John Mearsheimer. Only counting "counts" inasmuch
as mathematics conveys a seductive and illusory sense of precision.
Numbers cannot lie. Just ask vote tabulators in Florida, accountants
at Enron or any tax attorney. The dubious, indeed daft, belief that
quantitative data are not themselves an interpretation has become
widely institutionalized, a sad fact which forecloses many potential
analytical insights. One consequence is that economists and political
scientists have less and less to say about anything that mere mortals
recognize as the actual world they move in.

Young scholars, like it or not, bend to prevailing disciplinary
winds. In America rational choice modelers rapidly became notorious
for forming potent coteries intent on expanding their paradigmatic
presence. This imperialistic behavior has not gone unnoticed in
Britain either: "The governing principle in most sensible political
science departments is that rational choice theorists should be on
tap but not on top," the former Chair of a top UK politics
department, who preferred diplomatic anonymity, told me. "They should
exist, be permitted to flourish, but never be permitted dominance.
Once dominant they are incapable of appointing other than their own;
the more vulgar they are the more this is true."  Dissidents complain
that rational choice/mathematical modelers cannot admit that
equations are just as much metaphors as any lofty literary image
deployed by supposedly "soft" (and , therefore, second-rate) social
scientists. Giandomenico Majone, who lectures in the US and Europe,
believes the fault lies not with formal models in themselves but with
the excesses of undereducated disciples: "You should know more than
the tool you use," he observed. Indeed.

One side benefit of this strenuous hyperspecialization - what
Thorstein Veblen long ago labeled a 'trained incompetence' - for
acolytes (at least those without any sense of intellectual adventure)
is that whenever they encounter flak from more broadly
(multi-disciplinary) educated colleagues, they just retreat along a
trail of numerological platitudes into the APSA institutional
fortress where like-minded number crunchers rule the roost. Other
fields are virtually off-limits. The result is that they can punish
anyone who knows more than they do. It is all too common for formal
modelers to take a framework derived from a Western context and apply
it blithely and blindly. An example I witnessed is a paper by overly
numerate academics who imposed a one-size-fits-all conflict framework
upon Northern Ireland where, among other howlers, they asserted that
the Irish Republic could pressure the Reverand Ian Paisley to endorse
the fitful peace process, which is akin to calling on the Pope to
control Osama bin Laden. A graduate student in the perestroika list
serve recalled an ambitious faculty modeler who decided to
incorporate India into his data set without developing any grasp of
its history or culture. "Isn't Dehli the national language of
India?,' the undaunted chap asked.  Everything looks like easy prey
if you never tried to capture it and just need to look as if you
have.  Practitioners often slip into the touristic assumption that
American values and practices are, or ought to be, universal. They
often get away with flawed concoctions by invoking the axiom that
numbers and their allegedly neutral formal theories make whatever
they do scientific.

The American reform movement has two prongs. One is opposition to the
non-competitive process by which political scientists in the world's
second largest democracy have chosen to organize themselves. The
second is opposition to the hegemony of formal and quantitative work
in the journals and fori of the Association, and support for
diversity in forms of knowledge. Opposition has taken several forms.
The most severe criticisms of monopolistic formal-quantitative
approaches have targeted the American Political Science Review, flag
ship journal of the Association. The journals of  regional
associations likewise have come under scrutiny. These august organs
are used by many departments as a certifying authorities for faculty
recruitment, promotion and tenure, which is useful particularly for
departments who wish to relieve themselves of the onerous burden of
personally reading and evaluating the work of prospective candidates.
.

In an initial dismissive response to perestroikans Ada Finifter, APSR
journal editor in 2001, evinced her belief that only sordid ambition
was at stake, and was unable to imagine why so many prominent
dissenters were upset since they are so successful at publishing
their work anyway. Finifter was wholly oblivious to the ominous
ambiguity inherent in claiming that all is well so long as scholars
provide "high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research
problem" - as if the very definition of those estepmed methods were
not the major issue.

Still, in 2001, a conciliatory APSA announced the selection of a
Perestroika-backed candidate as President, Harvard's Theda Skocpol.
Even this move was viewed with some suspicion out of concern that the
APSA honchos reckoned that Skocpol, despite renown for being no
pushover, might be co-opted into the tight coteries of the East coast
network and so opt to preserve the old undemocratic mechanisms.
Everyone has read their Machiavelli - in which case, of course, it is
rather harder to be successfully Machiavellian. Most dissidents were
pleased that, as Mr. Perestroika put it, there was a tantalizing
prospect of a "dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in
the APSA." Yet it speaks volumes that junior scholars today still
fear to reveal identities in a profession that purports to prize
vigorous open exchange.  When lifelong students of the way power
works express surprise, and in some cases dumbfounding indignation,
that some perestroikans must conceal their identities for fear of
reprisals, one gets a whiff of apparatchiki or else naifs at work,
even among some perestroikans. 'One does not need to be a rocket
scientist - or a political scientist - to see that transparency does
not always serve insurgency well,' Anne Norton replied to a few
indignant perestroikans who primly demanded that Mr. Perestroika
disclose his/their identity.

"If P 'came out of the closet' and turned out to be a graduate
student at Michigan State, a junior faculty member at Los Angeles
Community College, a recent PhD with no job and no book contract, one
esteemed recent PhD from Chicago with a visiting post at a small
college, and some senior scholar somewhere, how many of us would give
their collective opinions equal weight with those of Anne Norton,
Rogers Smith? Sure we all would," pointedly writes Michael Bosia.
"But talk to graduate students and recent PhDs (and many scholars)
about why they don't post on Perestroika, and you might learn that we
don't weigh all voices equally. The group P, then, equalizes the
discussion. Perestroika or P is a disembodied voice with no more
power than the ability to remind and recall."

Since 2001 the network has undergone two 'constitutional crises': one
over whether to become a formalized institution with officers
(rejected) and the other whether to become a forum for general
political criticism (mostly rejected). Apart from the decision not to
become a formal organization, the e-mail net-work, which continues to
be brokered by the mysterious Mr. Perestroika, has become
semi-institutionalized. It has given rise to relatively coherent
project collaboration by colleagues who often have never seen each
other. In 2003 a committee of major scholars was formed to oversee
list serve traffic while at the same time protecting Mr.
Perestroika's identity. A list serve, or course, cannot be free from
foibles. Discussants often get diverted to hobbyhorse concerns of a
few garrulous members. The list serve recently seemed in danger of
takeover by prominent conservatives who, in a hard era spanning
Reagan, Bushs senior and junior, and a Southern Democrat who scuttled
the US welfare system, complained that they suffer awful
discrimination inside the liberal Academy.

Theda Skocpol was succeeded as APSA President in September 2003 by
perestroikan Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Rudolph, Skocpol and predecessor
Robert Putnam appointed perestroikans to various decision bodies of
the Association. An initiative set in motion earlier to launch a  new
journal as an alternative to the parochialism of the APSR, and give
members a choice, was accelerated by the Perestroika presence.
Jennifer Hochschld oversaw the first few years of 'Perspective on
Politics.' New APSR editor Lee Siegelman acknowledged the grievances
concerning absence of diversity in his journal. Issues of the APSR
under his watch have shown improvement. From the September 2002 to
the February 2004 issue, an inquisitive Perestroikan found that twice
as many qualitative articles (10 - 14%) appeared as in the prior
decade. A self-nominated committee on reform of Association
governance also was busy formulating proposals for competitive
elections..

Not everything smacks of sweetness and light. A "Mr. Pravda"
intervened in the list serve to suggest Perestrokans were motivated
by sheer careerism.  There is a grain of truth to this, as no
movement is made up entirely of saints (not even saints). Still,
association with Perestroika hardly wins you points from most hiring
committees. Skocpol testily chided Perestroika itself as being
unrepresentative while APSA nominating committee member Joan
Vecchiarelli Scott opined that many reforms were in the pipeline
anyway. Rudolph received many letters warning of sinister cooptation,
that the reform agenda might well be buried  by  sly inertia and
resistance. One prominent Perestroikan warned of Thermidore. Some
fear that the new journal is fated to be deemed a second-class
repository of non-formulaic manuscripts. Studies of the regional
journals show they "continue to represent a narrow section of the
scholarship and a small section of the membership in our profession."
During Rudolph's term, which concluded last Fall, plans for elections
were stymied within the Election committee. Current President
Margaret Levi of the University of Washington, the third woman in a
row, is not regarded as a perestroikan sympathizer, favoring instead
a somewhat left-wing variant of rational choice. However,
President-Elect Ira Katznelson of Columbia University, who assumes
office in September, very much favors methodological pluralism.

One formidable problem that Perestroikans haven't solved is how to
introduce diversity into departmental hiring processes, which are
said to be largely controlled by the hegemonic formalist persuasion.
Recent discussions in cyberspace raised the possibility of an
informal process to rank departments according to degree of
diversity, relying on the information process itself as a form of
critique and consciousness-raising. So far, the discussion is held up
by finicky questions of, you guessed it, methodology. Perestroikans
certainly do not oppose formal methods or mathematical models,
Susanne Rudolph stresses, but only resist their consecration as holy
devices, squeezing out rival cultural, historical and psychological
approaches. Rudolph asserts that the essential objective is
"high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research
problem," but follows fellow dissident Margaret Keck of John Hopkins
University in believing that  "the problem dictates the method" - not
the other way around.

Like much else in the world of American politics, the Perestroika
movement is many-stranded. The objectives of several marginalized
demographic groups within the Association overlap with those of
Perestroika. Skocpol was supported by the women's caucus while
Rudolph was supported by the  women's caucus, the black caucus, the
lesbian and gay caucus, and the Hispanic caucus.

Ironically, when the September 11 attacks occurred a ferocious debate
erupted that was sidetracked quickly to other websites. Most
perestroikans are shy of provoking splits within their fragile
melange of methodological approaches and political leanings. In
contrast, Chris Howell of Oberlin argues that over-reliance on
quantitative methods are only a symptom and that the "real goal is a
critical and engaged political science that does not readily conform
to what the powers that be want of it." Certainly, a key "purpose of
education is precisely to promote reflection on preferences," Mark
Graber noted. Timothy Luke observed how "formally inclined rational
choicers look down on others as story tellers and journalists"
Indeed, no single epithet is more damning.  A rigidly self-defined
political science department in North Carolina some years ago
contemptuously discarded a young academic as being little more than a
mere journalist -- just months before he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize
for a political biography.

Mr. Perestroika sees the nature and organizational form of the
insurgency as aiming to retain "the amorphous character of this
movement and list group. However, we will form working groups in
democracy, publishing, future initiatives to broaden intellectual
base.  In the same vein, perestroika as it stands needs to make a
real effort to draw in people of color and other oft-marginalized
communities if it is to make any valid claims to representativeness."
There is always a lurking danger of serious rifts among a delicately
constructed coalition of scholars who are up against a cohesive set
of opponents. There also is always room for humility. "I rarely
encounter any political scientist," said Professor Rogers Smith
during an online chat, "who is 100 percent versatile in all the
methods that are employed within political science." A discipline
that is "methodologically dexterous is bound to advance more
effectively," observed former president Skocpol, "than one becoming
overly specialized in narrow or fixed techniques."

The hard tasks now for the rebels are to consolidate gains, decide an
agenda, mollify various factions, debate strategy, and maintain a
perestroikan presence at regional and national conferences. All
rebels do agree that diversity of methods must be encouraged and that
APSA elections must be democratized.  They are looking into and
contestng NSF and SSRC funding practices, which some believe have
uncritically backed the rise of quantitative hegemony. There is also
some attention trained on the permanent non-elected APSA bureaucracy
who, as perestroikan Ido Oren found, have a rather intriguing history
of links to the national security establishment.

The overwhelming practical challenge remains inducing changes in
hiring and promotion criteria, which are controlled not by the APSA
but by individual departments. So there is a long struggle ahead on
literally hundreds of fronts. The dissidents hope that the effort to
improve democracy within their profession will also help improve
democratic practices outside. The increasingly otherworldly methods
of "the social sciences make it difficult to communicate with and
make our work relevant to the wider public," laments Chicago's Lloyd
Rudolph. "We have to know and live with differences within our
profession as well as in the world."  Or, as Forrest Gump might aptly
have put it, "rational is as rational does."

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