Critics have berated the Perestroika movement since it erupted in 2000 for engaging in academic politics before improving the tools available for apprehending the political world. But the guiding thread of any group's thinking generally arises out of its common activities, as Karl Mannheim pointed out. So it is no surprise that Perestroika, as a movement of disaffected political scientists, would coalesce first as an attempt to storm the discipline's citadels in the name of “methodological pluralism.” Some years later, however, we are in a better position to assess the principles implicated in the movement and its slogan, a judgment now enabled by the publication of Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe.
The 39 essays in this volume do not represent the full debate incited by “Mr. Perestroika's” original e-mail (pp. 9–11), which decried the dominance of statistical methodology, on the one hand, and rational choice theory, on the other. And since that communique's author remains anonymous, the movement may never have a named and authoritative voice. A number of the contributors emphasize that they write “with,” rather than “for,” Perestroika. Yet Monroe's volume is an enormously valuable—and frequently insightful—roadbook to the troubled terrain of political science today.
It may be best to begin with the book's assessments of the disciplinary “hegemony” of statistical methodology and rational choice theory. Lee Sigelman concedes in his contribution that by the time of Perestroika's emergence, “the rich theoretical, methodological, and substantive variety of our discipline was not being reflected nearly as well as it should have been” in the American Political Science Review (p. 324). Only five “qualitative” articles—ones uncategorized as “statistical,” “math modeling,” or “theory”—made it into the APSR from 1991 to 2000, as shown by David Pion-Berlin and Dan Cleary (Table 24.1). Elsewhere, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea finds that more than half of 57 leading graduate political science programs she surveyed effectively define “empirical” research as “quantitative” research—requiring statistics courses, while dropping language requirements and not offering “qualitative” methods instruction (Tables 30.1, 30.2). That said, however, the documented response of the APSR to the Perestroikans suggests that methodological hegemony was never institutionally centered. Sven Steinmo describes his seemingly unopposed campaign to “take back” the APSR in an article entitled “The Emperor Had No Clothes.” But on his account, the emperor's lack of a defensible Winter Palace or a Rasputin seems to have been more important than any sartorial deficits.
The response by the APSR has its parallel in the selection of Perestroikans for key American Political Science Association offices. In the section of Monroe's volume devoted to associational governance, the focus broadens from methodological representation to embrace race, gender, sexual orientation, and institutional type. From the beginning, many Perestroikans promoted mandatory competitive elections for APSA offices. The report of an APSA committee chaired by Gary C. Jacobson (pp. 241–49) rejected the idea, primarily because there already exists a mechanism for forcing competitive elections and because such elections could harm attempts at including underrepresented groups in APSA's leadership. Contributors such as Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Martha Ackelsberg disagree on the plausibility of seeing democratic and inclusionary interests as being at odds with each other. But there seems to be agreement that both interests are important ones, and that they represent polls of the present debate. The way out may be some combination of set-asides for selected groups—de facto the current approach—with a voting system that can sustain representation even for minorities, such as the single transferable vote (although a 2005 APSA special committee report advised against adopting STV).
The centerpiece of the volume, for many readers, will be its methodological contributions. Throughout, Perestroikans and their opponents attempt to define each other with stylized dichotomies. True, most contributors avoid the otherwise-prevalent qualitative versus quantitative. But at times they replace it with “scientific” versus “interpretive” (p. 15); “project of a scientific discipline” versus “fear of the modern” (p. 115); “positivist” versus “constructivist-interpretivist” (p. 206); “hard science” versus “qualitative empirical” (p. 343); and “description” versus “work at the [scientific] frontier” (p. 349). These oppositions do not illuminate because only a dupe would accept the disfavored labels, as described; because, when it comes to the philosophy of science, most political scientists are irregular churchgoers, not theologians; and because there are more problems in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in these antitheses.
Yet despite the failure of these broadest attempts to characterize what is at stake in the volume it is clear that many Perestroikans, in contrast to their opponents, do proceed from two important and familiar premises. The first is that human beings—individually, but especially jointly—are self-interpreting and reflective, capable of assigning meanings to their actions and revising these meanings recursively. This insight is behind the frequent references to “interpretation” and “meaning” by a number of contributors, including Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (p. 15), Sanford F. Schram (p. 113), Brian Caterino (p. 136), and Dvora Yanow (p. 206). The second, related, premise is that social scientific study is directed, most broadly, toward interrelated and irreversible processes of historical change, rather than undifferentiated amalgams of events and measurements—a point well expressed by Samuel H. Beer (p. 59), and echoed by Brian Caterino (p. 136) and Greg Kasza (p. 428). These premises, jointly, disturb the search for strictly universal social, economic, and political laws because what seems to be a stable relation at one time or in one society may not be so in another—and this because of actual changes in the interconnections of things, not merely because the full set of relevant variables was not previously identified. For example, because social agents can act on and interpret terms such as “democracy” in their own ways, and can both learn from and be affected by the history of democratization, there may be, as Ian Shapiro argues, “no single path to democracy” and no “serviceable generalization” to be made about “which conditions give rise to democratic transitions” (p. 76). If so, as he points out, “looking for a general theory of what gives rise to democracy may be like looking for a general theory of holes” (p. 76).
One could wish that these shared tenets about meaning and history were supplemented by equally prominent reflections on other problems often poorly conceptualized by political scientists—such as power, as well as structure, viewed most challengingly for Perestroikans as a limit to self-interpretive agency. In any case, even meaning and history are more often alluded to than lengthily explored by many contributors to the volume. And this may be because there is not much new to be said about these topics. Some of the most interesting contributions, instead, focus more concretely on the interplay among investigators, their tools of inquiry, and particular social objects and processes. These essays are thoughtful about the difficulty and importance of properly conceptualizing the social and political world, and of asking what aspects of it are in the most urgent need of explanation before deciding what investigatory approach to use. (These are, or ought to be, key features of what Shapiro and many Perestroikans call problem-driven investigation.)
Stuart J. Kaufman's article on ethnic war argues that while rational calculation may help guide the conduct of some parties who precipitate genocide, the more momentous issue is generally “why genocide [becomes] a thinkable option at all,” along with the role of “myths on both sides” and the “tendency to exaggerate both the hostility and the cohesion of the opposing group” (pp. 95, 98–99). If Kaufman is right, rationalist approaches are not ruled out as “positivist” or “hard.” Rather, they simply do not generate “the best or most promising theories” of ethnic violence (p. 98).
Kamal Sadiq highlights one of the difficulties that arises from the fact that data are not socially indifferent objects “collected” by scientists, but rather are the outcome of social activities. In particular, Sadiq points out that states themselves are major producers of the very data in light of which many scholars propose to study state activities. After reviewing the manipulation of demographic categories by the Malaysian government (pp. 183–89), Sadiq argues that even those who do multicountry (“large-n”) studies can only properly interpret such data in light of the kind of local, historical knowledge usually cultivated by their “small-n” colleagues. Serious reflection on the “politics of data collection” (p. 195), Sadiq argues, has to be part of any data-driven study of politics.
Dorian T. Warren points to the way in which adopting a particular methodology and the sources of evidence associated with it can implicitly narrow the questions an investigator asks and cause him or her to conceptualize the objects of study differently (pp. 223–26). Warren writes that previously, she might have more conventionally focused on individual union members' attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender. Instead she decided to ask the historical question why there has been change in “unions' politics around race” (p. 223), a project that required her to conceptualize “unions as political organizations and sites of collective action” (p. 224)—and one in which union members' “attitudes” might play only a part.
Finally, Rogers M. Smith argues that in his work on American citizenship, the important thing was to establish the existence of an illiberal tradition in legislation and judicial practice concerning immigration. Knowing that critics would focus on this interpretative construction of opposed traditions, Smith writes, “I devoted much of my text to defending my categorizations, not to statistical inference testing of the data set of citizenship laws and rulings I had generated” (p. 530).
Perestroika emerged as a movement within political science, not—like the Caucus for a New Political Science—as the scholarly wing of a broader political movement. Indeed, most participants in Perestroika's online discussions “have successfully argued in favor of restricting the challenge posed by Perestroika to one of ‘methods,’” according to Cecilia Lynch (p. 163). But it is not clear that political questions can be avoided. To mention just one example, a number of contributors, including Schram (p. 108), Caterino (p. 147), Yanow (p. 211), and Lloyd I. Rudolph (p. 230), see an imperative to recognize the political knowledge of lay actors, especially less powerful and privileged ones, as growing out of their interpretive methodology.
Maurice J. Meilleur, in bringing up John Dewey, places this profoundly important topic—political scientists and their political obligations—within a helpful framework for thinking about it. Dewey insisted on situating all philosophy and scientific inquiry within the context of what he called “experience,” a repeated, continual social process, beginning with problematic situations, continuing with practical attempts to resolve them and then intellectual reflection on the results of those attempts. Neither philosophy nor science could ever escape its status as just a step in this process—nor could the results of either one be adequately assessed except as contributions to practical attempts to manage common affairs. In this light, Meilleur suggests a Deweyan model for political science that would regard it as a “profession,” rather than a “discipline” (p. 500). The professional political scientist would focus, among other things, on clearing up errors in public perceptions, countering ideological manipulation, highlighting alternatives to existing arrangements, and promoting the ability of democratic citizens to solve their own problems (pp. 499–500).
Yet Dewey has been rightly criticized for naïveté in thinking that because inquiry was integrally bound up with practice, society could solve its problems when citizens learned to be better investigators. Too often missing from Dewey's analysis was a proper recognition of conflict and power. A related problem for scholars who might like to be Deweyan professionals is the fact that complex societies are characterized by a division between intellectual and other laborers. In such a situation, scholars respond not just to the problems confronted by society at large, however urgent, but also (perhaps even more so) to the “problems” of getting along with colleagues, advancing in the field, getting published, and obtaining tenure. As the Perestroikan controversy itself demonstrates, the sociology of political science has its own unique problems, many of which may have to be overcome before Dewey's vision can be realized.
