Nhops Chapter 1: I. Political Science As A Discipline
Nhops Chapter 1: I. Political Science As A Discipline
Nhops Chapter 1: I. Political Science As A Discipline
NHoPS Chapter 1
I. Political Science as a Discipline
A. Nature of a Discipline
Discipline - a branch of instruction; mental and moral training
there is a strong sense (shifting over time) of what is and what is not
"good" work within the discipline, and
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Concept of Profession
a relatively high-status occupational grade; and the organization of national
and international "professional associations" with securing the status and
indeed salaries of academics thus organized.
there is an increasing tendency to judge work, one's own even more than
others', in terms of increasingly high standards of professional excellence.
B. What is Politics?
Politics - constrained use of social power.
💡 the study of the nature and source of those constraints and the
techniques for the use of social power within those constraints.
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Definition of Power, Dahl's 1957 X has power over Y insofar as:
(i) X is able, in one way or another, to get Y to do something
It is the analysis of those constraints— where they come from, how they
operate, how political agents might operate within them— that seems to us to
lie at the heart of the study of politics
“law of anticipated reactions” expresses the simple idea that if X's actions will
be subject to review by Y, with Y capable of rewarding good actions and/or
punishing bad ones, then X will likely anticipate and consider what it is that Y
wants Friedrich 1963.
In terms of the meaning of the act to the actor, many political acts are at least
in the first instance distinctly non-distributional.
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C. The Several Sciences of Politics
Science - systematic enquiry, building toward an ever more highly-differentiated
set of ordered
propositions about the empirical world.
Logical positivist might cast the aspirations of science in terms of finding some
set of "covering laws" — that sets the aspirations of science much too high ever
to be attained in the study of politics.
The deeper source of errors in (the positivist model of) political science lies in
a misconstrual of the nature of its subject. (billiard balls vs humans
[intentional actors])
Behavioral Revolution
Behavioral revolutionaries, for their part, were devoted to dismissing the
formalisms of politics—institutions, organizational charts, constitutional
myths and legal fictions—as pure sham.
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Rational choice modellers strove, to reduce all politics to the interplay of
narrow material self-interest.
Squeezing out, in the process, people's values and principles and personal
attachments as well as a people's history and institutions.
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💡 The upshot is undoubtedly eclectic, but it is an ordered eclecticism
rather than pure pastiche. (eclectic = many sources, pastiche =
imitation)
A mutatis mutandis — tricks and tools and theories which were initially
developed in one connection can, as often as not, be transposed into other
settings.
A. Classic Texts
Political science, like virtually all the other natural and social sciences, is
increasingly becoming an article-based discipline.
the lingua franca of our shared discipline and the touchstones for further
contributions to it.
"Instant Classic" - books which everyone is talking about and presumed to know,
at least in passing.
LINKS
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaw https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaw
s.com/secure.notion-static.com/ s.com/secure.notion-static.com/
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a8f87e1e-cfd74714850144fb c324b9bc-aa4243b5-b33a-66
480f2a8f/classictexts.txt 3cdfaa7faa/contempclassics.txt
B. Recurring Themes
Politics as the constrained use of social power.
Legacy of history (little novelty in the thought that the coalition structure at
crucial moments in the past might have shaped political life for years to
come)
Nested and embedded nature of social rules and regimes, practices and
possibilities. None is free-standing: all are embedded in)
Political scientists of virtually every ilk are once again according a central
role to people's beliefs and what lies behind them.
What people believe to be true and important, what they believe to be good
and valuable
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Framed around past teachings and past experiences. Shaping those
teachings and experiences can shape people's beliefs and values and
thereby their political choices.
Getting new perspectives on old problems, seeing new ways of doing things,
seeing new things to do: all these, as applied to public problems, are
quintessentially political activities.
insofar as the distinction can be defensibly drawn at all, there are ethical
reasons for insisting upon the primacy of values, for insisting upon a
"political science with a point"
EXAMPLES
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To do so, they need a theoretical framework — rational choice analysis and new
institutionalism.
C. New Voices
Among the most notable new voices clearly represented in political science
today, compared to a quarter-century ago, are postmodernists and feminists
themselves.
Postmodernism more generally has made rather more modest inroads, in part
because its central precepts are cast on such a high theoretical plane.
Wherever once there were clearly defined structures, and now there are none
(or many disconnected ones), the post-structural theoretical arsenal may well
offer insights into how that happened and why.
Subjective aspects of political life, the internal mental life of political actors,
meanings and beliefs and intentions and values.
The rational choice putsch has been remarkably successful, not so much in
pushing out the old behavioral orthodoxy, as in carving out a predominant
role for itself alongside it.
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Growing evidence of the next revolution on its way: the "new institutionalist"
movement.
"Integrator" — anyone who appears at least once in the reference lists in more
than half (that is, five or more) of the eight subdisciplinary parts of the New
Handbook.
A good composite view of the shape of the discipline emerges from combining all
these criteria:
A. who are the "integrators" of the profession,
B. who are "most frequently referenced in the discipline as a whole," and
💡 The general pattern is clear enough: there are highly differentiated sub-
disciplinary communities making great advances. But there is also a
small band of scholars at the peak of the profession who genuinely do
straddle many (in a few cases, most) of those sub disciplinary
communities and integrate them into one coherent disciplinary whole.
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