Ten years ago this October, the members of the political science community might have heard a short, but quite fascinating, cri de coeur about the prevailing practices of the discipline in the United States at the turn of the century. Circulating as an e-mail message shortly after the 2000 APSA Annual Meeting, it popped up in the inboxes of a few political scientists and graduate students throughout the academy, who then quickly redirected its message to hundreds and then thousands of their colleagues. Signed “Mr. Perestroika,” the e-mail's short passages bemoaned the profession of political science as it was unfolding under the allegedly misguided aegis of an “Orwellian system” of methodological formalism. Portraying the discipline as trapped in this intellectual cul de sac, Mr. Perestroika depicted an essentially degraded social science discipline that favored the political views of a “coterie” of “East Coast Brahmins” by ratifying their narrow methodological practices (cited in Monroe Reference Monroe2005, 9–11). Such practices, based mostly on “statistics or game theory,” wrongly promoted a simplistic and, for far too many students of the state and society, discredited economic understanding of politics. This unenviable methodological parochialism in turn favored a style of “professional correctness” that froze out other political perspectives and analytical approaches (Luke Reference Luke1999, 345–63) in the discipline's key journals, major organizations, and scholarly practices. For Mr. Perestroika, these distorted academic norms were also compromising the relevance, utility, and validity of political science as an applied social science.

Many of the claims made in this e-mail were heady stuff for young, disgruntled political theory graduate students researching the history of political theory and science, as well as senior faculty members holding firmly to their own varied, pluralistic visions of political science. The e-mail certainly struck a chord with a wide variety of graduate students, particularly those who were out on the job market at the time. Whether the allegations were accurate or exaggerated, this dissident e-mail listed an eerily familiar set of complaints about political science in the United States. For example, just as Mr. Perestroika's East Coast Brahmins were seen as promoting a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches,” so too had another group of disaffected political scientists in the late 1960s chafed under what they perceived as the heavy-handed and often inept application of behavioral methods to the exclusion of other traditional or more critical approaches, which were seen as more timely, relevant, and politically engaged for the crises of that time (Monroe Reference Monroe2005, 1–9).

The disaffection of this earlier group of dissidents led to the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) at the 1967 APSA Annual Meeting, which organized itself around a collective and personal commitment “to make the study of politics relevant to the struggle for a better world” (Barrow Reference Barrow2008, 215). As these different groups of contrarians sought to challenge the discipline's status quo, whether in the 2000s or 1960s, they followed similar paths in their rebellions. Both groups, early in their respective movements, challenged methodological conventions and then threatened to up-end the settled balance of power within the discipline, to the extent that any real power was either being exercised within the discipline's professional organizations or was being misdirected in official scholarly publications. However, for both movements, early success seems to have given way over time to the normalizing pressures of ordinary disciplinary practices, although in different ways and to greater or lesser degrees. Indeed, since the 1970s, a strategic compromise after 1969's post-behaviorialist turn appears to have left many of the discipline's most common professional folkways relatively unchanged amidst an uneasily institutionalized consensus to accept certain divided movements of scholarly dissidents within the discipline under the larger academy's shifting economic and epistemic regime.

Much of the Perestroika e-mail (Reference Monroe2005, 9–11) was concerned with the leadership of the APSA. Mr. Perestroika asserted that the association had failed to be truly representative of the discipline with regard to subfields, gender, methodologies, race, geographic regions, or institutional prestige. Hence, he ironically suggested a list of possible alternate candidates for the APSA presidency, including Theda Skocpol of Harvard University and Susanne Rudolph of the University of Chicago. To some members of the discipline, these women too could be regarded as “East Coast Brahmins,” since both had earned Harvard Ph.D.s (albeit a generation apart), but they became the preferred representatives of this dissident network's alternative leadership. Indeed, with Perestroika's backing and their own strong academic records, both Skocpol and Rudolph were elected and then served as president of the APSA shortly after the original Perestroika e-mail circulated throughout the American academy. The movement, however, has not been as successful in more recent elections at promoting other clearly identifiable “Perestroikan” candidates. Similarly, the CNPS earlier had promoted its own slate of candidates in more open and contested elections during the late sixties through the late seventies, although none were elected president of the APSA.

Along with the presidency of the association, Mr. Perestroika fretted about the discipline's journals. American political science increasingly has become more defined by the literary economy of “journal science” in setting its professional norms (Agger Reference Agger2000), so decisions of what gets published where, by whom and how often, always carry weight. On this front, both the CNPS and Perestroika movements were able to secure more respect for their intellectual approaches in the domains of peer-reviewed publishing space. The CNPS launched its own small, collectively produced journal in the 1970s, New Political Science. A small handful of Caucus members kept it in print during the 1980s and 1990s, until Taylor & Francis assumed production responsibility in the late 1990s. Along with this change at New Political Science which became a more accessible and visible outlet for political scientists in many research subfields, the APSA also recognized the CNPS as an “official ASPA section,” dubbed “New Political Science.” The impact of Perestroika has been less institutionalized, but also not inconsiderable. In the wake of broad-based discussions going back to 1998 about dissatisfaction with the APSR, the APSA in 2000 launched Perspectives on Politics, a journal perceived as being much “friendlier” to “alternative” methods of research beyond those regarded as “methodologically parochial” by many members of the Perestroika movement (Hochschild Reference Hochschild and Monroe2005, 336–39).

The late 1960s also saw the formation of the Women's Caucus for Political Science (WCPS) and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) after the emergence of the CNPS. All three of these groups are often dismissed by mainstream critics for “being marginal” in the discipline, but this essentially obvious, if not silly, observation is, at the same time, the material foundation for all three groups' organization and vitality. These movements on the margins were joined in the 1980s and 1990s by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Political Science Caucus; the Latino Caucus in Political Science; and the Asian Pacific American Caucus, all of which organized to represent the unique concerns of political scientists who felt that they too were being marginalized within the APSA. This shared condition of marginalization has, in turn, anchored a diverse resistance to many of the APSA's mainstream members with regard to the discipline's basic organizational practices, internal governance procedures, and enduring methodological prejudices.

Some political scientists have questioned the individual and collective effectiveness of these small resistance groups (Ruget Reference Ruget2002, 469–78). Some have argued that these movements exemplify the core mission of political science to interrogate power and question the nature of the status quo (McGovern Reference McGovern2005, 199–213). Others have dismissed their existence as little more than the association's indulgence of the commonplace maneuvers of symbolic interest groups to keep the larger professional organization intact (Scott Reference Scott and Monroe2005, 265–77). Nonetheless, these pressures from Perestroika and its fellow travelers from earlier days in the APSA have had a discernable effect on the individuals chosen to serve in the organization's key leadership positions. Since 2000, four female political scientists (Theda Skocpol, Susanne Rudolph, Margaret Levi, and Dianne M. Pinderhughes) have been elected president of the APSA. The incoming president-elect (Carole Pateman) will soon make that number five, which stands in sharp contrast to the APSA's two female presidents (Judith Shklar and Elinor Ostrom) from 1903 to 2000. Likewise, only three African American presidents (Ralph J. Bunche, Lucius Barker, and Matthew Holden) were elected to the presidency prior to 2000, but Dianne M. Pinderhughes served in 2007–08 as its fourth African American and first female African American president.

In terms of the profession addressing the movement's grievances in some substantive or symbolic manner, Perestroika can be seen as somewhat successful. At the end of the day, groups of colleagues who felt excluded and unappreciated gained access to key leadership positions in the discipline's professional organization, and movement has been made toward the acceptance of slightly more flexible publishing practices in many political science journals. A central figure in Perestroika in the early 2000s, Cyrus Ernesto “Ernie” Zirakzadeh, is assuming the editorship of Polity in 2010, and many regard his selection as a positive sign for the future of a Perestroika-like methodological pluralism—at least for those working with that journal. Still, in the long run, any hopes for establishing a truly ecumenical methodological approach within political science must be measured against the experience of the CNPS, the history of which provides a cautionary tale for the Perestroika movement. Although the membership of the CNPS nearly doubled in the years right after the emergence of the Perestroika movement, and these increased levels of affiliation have remained high, as John Dryzek points out, long-term revolutionary successes within the discipline are few and far between (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2006). Because they are hard to achieve, he is unable to articulate either how such a revolution should advanced or to define how its success could be gauged. Of course, the CNPS has now survived in some form for decades, and its efforts have not ended. Nonetheless, stubborn facts about the discipline's progress endure. Like the earlier CNPS, the Perestroika movement's disaffection with the practices of political science has not led to a grander vision of what political science in the United States should be. Both rebellions advanced their own spirited critique of the discipline's mainstream methods, basic ideological positions, and the ambiguous “relation between political science and established political power,” as they failed to provide “a consensus on what constitutes new political science beyond [their] critical stance toward the existing discipline and [their] agreement that political science, as an academic discipline, should be committed to being” relevant in today's politics (Barrow Reference Barrow2008, 216). It is not clear, of course, that the existence of such a consensus is a definitive or desirable indicator of disciplinary success. Nevertheless, the pressures for creating some mainstream disciplinary conformity are quite real in American research universities as the many new and old academic disciplines all struggle for recognition and resources on campus (Luke Reference Luke and Monroe2005, 468–85).

Perhaps, then, rebellions within the APSA may best be understood in a manner similar to Jorgen Rasmussen's view of research approaches within the political science discipline. That is, research in political science ought to be regarded more as a track meet, where those in the lead often lap those that lag (Reference Rasmussen, Graham and Carey1972, 72). Someone who lags need only wait, knowing “full well that in due time [the leaders] will come thundering around the turn behind and as they lap him, he will be among the vanguard” (Sigelman Reference Sigelman2006, 472).