Professor John Gunnell’s essay on “Pluralism and the Fate of Perestroika: A Historical Reflection” focuses on one question addressed by modern political science: whether pluralist-behavioral analysis of rich societies with representative government, such as the United States, is adequate. Professor Gunnell is concerned, as the perestroika movement was, with tensions between theory and practice, professionalism and engagement with politics, sophisticated methodology and a focus on crucial issues; and with the connections, or lack thereof, between empirical and normative analysis. He points out that the mantra of pluralism within the discipline – incorporation rather than rejection of dissident movements—has often been substituted for searching discussions of these issues.
Although these are surely important questions, it seems odd to me that Professor Gunnell discusses them within a context that is so United States-centered. Much of the perestroika debate focused on the United States, or on the discipline itself, but comparativists and students of world politics were also involved. In these fields, privileging narrowly-defined methodological standards can have great costs in restricting the range of questions asked and excluding important subjects—for which systematically collected and reliable data may not be available. Yet nowhere in his essay does Professor Gunnell mention international relations, or more broadly, world politics, which includes the manifold and expanding activities of transnational actors. Nor does he devote significant attention to comparative politics.
Not even a glancing reference would lead the reader to reflect on how war affects politics—despite major works on this subject in political science and associated disciplines during the past several decades. Nor does Professor Gunnell’s essay reveal an appreciation of the broader question of how practices and customs diffuse from one society to another—whether through the internet or by means of the exercise of force. Implicitly, his essay views each polity as sufficient unto itself—a perspective more defensible for students of the United States in the 1950s than for students of any other country at any time since at least World War I, or for students of the United States now. In an era of what is known as “globalization,” in which connections among societies are closer than ever before, discussing political science as a discipline without addressing these connections is to ignore “the elephant in the room.”
A major issue in political science since the 1960s has been the relationship between democracy and economic development. Is there an income threshold below which democracy does not thrive? Under what conditions do even relatively wealthy states follow non-democratic paths? Can authoritarian elites, including communist parties, devise effective strategies to maintain authoritarian rule even as their societies become wealthy, with highly-educated populations? When are apparent democracies, crafted to look appropriate in the eyes of the West, actually only nominal; and is such a pattern of nominal democracy sustainable? These are pressing questions that have engaged some of the best minds in political science over the past two generations, yet they are entirely absent from Professor Gunnell’s essay.
More broadly, the whole issue of comparative analysis is missing, although in the perestroika movement concerns about methodological narrowness were especially strong among students of comparative politics. Political scientists are well aware, partly because of the behavioral revolution, of the extent to which politics is embedded in public attitudes, social practices, and norms—which of course vary enormously around the world. So the issue of how democratic and non-democratic polities are affected by the cultural settings in which they are embedded is a pressing one as many countries engage in more or less genuine efforts to institutionalize versions of democratic governance. Since culture implies history, the historical legacies of societies become important explanatory factors for our discipline. Political scientists have wrestled with these questions in recent decades—an enterprise that relies heavily on sophistication in historical interpretation. No wonder that the perestroika challenge to formal and quantitative work as the professionally acceptable way to do political analysis resonated strongly among students of world politics and comparative politics.
Plans for this journal, Perspectives on Politics, were already under way before the first perestroika manifesto, but the perestroika movement surely gave impetus to the project of having an official American Political Science Association journal with a broader ambit than the American Political Science Review, more open to commentary and to broadly interpretive work. Attempts to think systematically about qualitative methods were also already under way, but perestroika at least reflected a widespread interest in validating such research, and may have contributed to the recent vibrancy of qualitative research, which now has its own section of the APSA.
Nevertheless, the relentless pressure of more and more sophisticated quantitative methods continues. When these methods are connected with a genuine sense of politics on the part of investigators—focusing on important questions, raising original and non-obvious hypotheses, and putting them into historical and comparative context—they contribute to intellectual progress in our discipline. All too often, however, they are used unimaginatively to address, in somewhat more precise ways, issues that are already well-understood, while new or more significant developments, since they seem less amenable to such methods, are ignored. Political science is also at risk of following the path of Economics, in which members of the discipline who focus on specific policy problems are relegated to inferior status, by comparison with theorists and methodological innovators.
In some ways the problem of methodologically-induced narrowness to which perestroika responded remains as strong as ever—perhaps even stronger—despite the incorporation of this counter-movement into the mainstream of the discipline. Political science faces a problem of “nominal pluralization,” comparable to the “nominal democratization” that we find in many countries around the world: in the organization of the Association, and in official rhetoric, many flowers bloom, but in actual employment decisions at high-status departments, methodological sophistication and theoretical pretension trump genuine engagement with politics and policy, informed by the exercise of imagination and sophistication about how politics works. We should therefore be grateful that Professor Gunnell, despite the limited focus of his essay, has called renewed attention to this ongoing problem.
