Citizenship studies: A general theory

Societies face two contradictory principles. They are organised around issues of scarcity, which result in exclusionary structures such as gender divisions, social classes and status groups, but they must also secure social solidarity. In social science, these contradictory principles are characteristically referred to as the allocative and integrative requirements. In a secular society, especially where social inequality is intensified by economic rationalism, citizenship functions as a major foundation of social solidarity. The article also explores the scope of citizenship studies through an examination of identity, civic virtue and community. It concludes with an extensive critique of the legacy of T. H. Marshall, pointing to the future of citizenship studies around the theme of globalisation and human rights.     

Making social science research applicable: The case of agricultural extension research in Egypt

One problem in the management of agricultural research is the integration of research and extension. The links between research and extension are tenuous for many reasons, including institutional and administrative factors that thwart collaboration; geographic isolation of extension staff; differences in status, prestige and educational attainment between extension workers and researchers; and motivational issues impeding stronger ties between extension and research personnel. This article argues that the problem with much research intended for extension audiences is that it is supply driven and not demand driven. Using a social science research unit within the Agricultural Research Center of the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture as a case study, this article analyses the research produced by the unit and assesses its potential usefulness for extension. It then attempts to show why it does not reach this potential. Among the reasons are that the researchers lack experience and background in rural issues and agricultural extension; research results lag behind extension's need for the information; and there is no plan to disseminate the results to the extension community after research is completed. The article offers some suggestions for overcoming such barriers, including involving extension in the design of research projects and holding seminars on research results after projects are completed; changing the incentives for researchers to do more applied research; and diversifying the methods and disciplines used to conduct the research.     

Multi- and interdisciplinary research—Problems of initiation,control, integration and reward

This paper reviews some of the difficulties of initiating and completing interdisciplinary research involving both bio-physical and social systems. Drawing on the author's experience as project director of a large interdisciplinary project concerned with man's effects on Lake Tahoe, it includes a structural analysis of the organization of universities which has the effect of inhibiting interdisciplinary research. Specific suggestions for the conduct and design of such projects are made. The political implications of recent changes in national science policy are also reviewed.The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable assistance of Prof. Robert Johnston, Division of Environmental Studies, U. C. Davis.     

Scaling up Utopias: E.O. Wright and the Search for Economic Alternatives

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of political science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect political science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public sociology and public anthropology as well as dissonant movements in economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic social science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge, 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences, while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing. Today, phronetic social science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This article provides a genealogy of efforts to connect political science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed-methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The article concludes with implications for realizing a more political political science by way of taking a phronetic approach.     

POLICY RESEARCH AS SOCIAL SCIENCE: OUTFLANKING THE VALUE DILEMMA

Social scientists fear that policy research compromises their objectivity. As a result, policy science is becoming a separate discipline which is accorded lower status that other fields of social inquiry. However, the history, sociology and psychology of science show that the elaboration of robust social theory would be aided by a more intimate relation between policy research and academic social science than currently obtains. The traditional canons of value freedom, which have been invoked to justify the independence of social science from policy, misrepresent the relation between facts and values in science. Objective knowledge is consequent on dispute and triangulation by a many-valued community of fallible social scientists; but it does not eventuate from consensual value neutralism. Social knowledge interacts with social values to change phenomena our theories represent. This self-restructuring characteristic of social events warrants singular attention by social scientists. Policy researchers are in a particularly opportune position to provide that attention.     

Undergraduate Research at Two-Year Community Colleges

There is a growing movement in academia that focuses on increased efforts at undergraduate research. Historically, this movement has been driven by faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and has only recently become a focus for social sciences in general and political science in particular. For students to be successful at conducting undergraduate research, they should be exposed to it as soon as they are ready. This requires exposing students to undergraduate research in the freshmen and sophomore years. There is no reason this exposure should be limited to four-year institutions. To that end, a new journal has been created for students in political science and other social science courses at two-year colleges so they can be recognized for their undergraduate research. The Social Science Text and Academic Research (STAR) Journal is a peer/faculty-reviewed journal limited to students at two-year colleges.     

Economic grievances and political protest

How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic grievances and political participation remains empirically inconclusive. It is argued in this article that this is due to two distinct shortcomings, which are effectively addressed by combining the strengths of political economy and social movement theories. Based on ESS and EU-SILC data from 2006–2012, as well as newly collected data on political protest in 28 European countries, a novel, more fine-grained conceptualisation of objective economic grievances considerably improves our understanding of the direct link between economic grievances and protest behaviour. While structural economic disadvantage (i.e., the level of grievances) unambiguously de-mobilises individuals, the deterioration of economic prospects (i.e., a change in grievances) instead increases political activity. Revealing these two countervailing effects provides an important clarification that helps reconcile many seemingly conflicting findings in the existing literature. Second, the article shows that the level of political mobilisation substantially moderates this direct link between individual hardship and political activity. In a strongly mobilised environment, even structural economic disadvantage is no longer an impediment to political participation. There is a strong political message in this interacting factor: if the presence of organised and visible political action is a decisive signal for citizens that conditions the micro-level link between economic grievances and protest, then democracy itself – that is, organised collective action – can help sustain political equality and prevent the vicious circle of democratic erosion.     

Public Engagement for Informing Science and Technology Policy: What Do We Know,What Do We Need to Know,and How Will We Get There?

This article examines social science relevant to public engagements and identifies the challenges to the goal of meaningful public input into science and technology policy. Specifically, when considering “which forms, features, and conditions of public engagement are optimal for what purposes, and why?” we find social science has not clarified matters. We offer a model to guide systematic research that defines and empirically connects variations in features and types of public engagement activities to specifically defined variations in effective processes and outcomes. The specification of models, as we have done, will guide policy makers, practitioners, and the public in determining what kinds of engagement techniques are optimal for what kinds of purposes. Our model is presented to start conversations and inspire research that in the future should help to ensure meaningful public participation that meets the promise of contributing thoughtful societal values and perspectives into governmental policies impacting science and technology research.     

Kooperative Politikberatung ohne machtpolitisches Kalkül?

The paper contributes to the discussion about policy advice, initiated by Falk et al. in PVS 2/2007. Based on a differentiation between output- and input oriented politics, several notions of advice and knowledge are discussed. This leads to the insight that the relevance of studies in political science does rely on the careful consideration of the strategic influence of knowledge in the political process. The fruitfulness of such a perspective is exemplified by a short view on some institutional developments in the field of political advice. A detailed analysis of the newly organised economic policy report “Gemeinschaftsdiagnose” then reveals that the diagnosis of new cooperative modes of governmental acting, as postulated by Falk et al., has to be modified. Particularly with regard to core fields of governmental acting, like economic and social policy, there is an unbroken continuity of hierarchical forms of governing.     

Expecting something special? Developing assumptions of involvement organised interests as a source of regulatory quality in the European Union

Organised interests play a double role in policymaking: as representatives of societal interests and as policy experts adding to regulatory quality. The former of these 2 roles has been examined over and over again, whereas the latter has almost completely evaded scholarly interest for a number of reasons. One reason is that it demands a focus on output rather than on traditional darlings such as representation, input legitimacy, or influence. Another is that it demands an interdisciplinary approach as regulatory quality—that which the involvement of organised interests seek to furnish—is a concept that includes elements from both law and political science. The question of how to design involvement of organised interests in order to support regulatory quality, however, is a question with both academic and practical relevance. Building on an empirical study, this paper attempts to spur theorising to address this relevant question. The result is 4 assumptions that describe the relationship between involvement of organised interests and regulatory quality.     

You gotta move: advancing the debate on the record of dispersal

This paper summarizes the social science research on the record of housing dispersal programs since 1995. The research shows a consistently disappointing record of benefits to low-income households. Households moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods, voluntarily and involuntarily, show few or no beneficial effects in terms of economic self-sufficiency, health benefits, or social integration. The benefits of dispersal are confined to feelings of greater safety and satisfaction with neighborhood environmental conditions. We offer a framework for understanding the disappointing record of dispersal, highlighting its translation from social science diagnosis to policy, problems in the policy's implementation, its underlying theory of poverty, and the political context within which dispersal has been applied.     

Welfare Reform and Models of Public Policy: Why Policy Sciences Are Required

Policy could be studied on the basis of three different models: ideological, social science, and policy sciences. Policy in accordance with ideology may not necessarily rely on solid rigorous research to back it up. Policy made solely in accordance with a rigorous social science model might be able to demonstrate a causal relationship between a given policy and desired outcomes, and in the process establish a clear role for good research in the policy process. But it often fails to account for the larger social and political context in which policy is formulated. Good policy should be based on rigorous social science research, while also factoring in the values of the broader society, that is, ideology. This would imply that in order to bridge the gap, that good policy should be formulated in accordance with the policy sciences model because it connects the rigorous methodology of the social sciences with the larger social policy context, that is, the broader policy process. When analyzing the reform of 1996 within the framework of these models, it becomes clear that while the legislation is highly ideological, it is not based on any serious research that would satisfy the criteria of the social science model. It fails the policy sciences model, in part, because its absence of clearly defined objectives, or a single objective, makes the task of measurement difficult. On the contrary, this legislation is a good example of why the policy community would do better to rely more on the policy sciences.     

Scientific management of science?

A framework is advanced for allocating research resources, based on the value of the information that proposed projects are expected to produce. As an organizing device, the framework uses integrated assessments, showing the relationships between the predictors of outcomes arising in important decisions (e.g., interest rates, mortality rates, crop yields, crime probabilities). Proposed projects are evaluated in terms of their ability to sharpen estimates either of those variables or of the relationships among them. This approach is intended to allow diverse forms of science to show their potential impacts – while encouraging them to integrate their work. Where suitable estimates are available, the expected value of the information from alternative studies can be computed and compared. However, even at a qualitative level, formal analyses can improve the efficiency and integration of research programs.     

Congress writes a law: Research and welfare reform

This paper traces the development of the Family Support Act of 1988 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author, a Republican staff member, examines the impact of research on the policy environment that made welfare reform possible, on the arguments presented in committee hearings and bill-writing sessions, on the House debate, and on the final House/Senate Conference Committee approval. He concludes that social science research can and does play a useful role in formulation of public policy, although the domain of application is not as broad as many scholars think. However, given the partisan nature of policy formulation and the desire of social scientists to join the process, normal methods of quality control in social science research are too often forgotten, to the detriment of sound public decision-making.     

公共管理视角下的中国危机管理研究——现状、趋势和未来方向

中国近年来社会科学视角的危机管理研究已进入瓶颈期。本文旨在梳理这十年来公共管理视角下的危机管理相关研究,以期为危机管理研究进一步深入发展提供参考。评述文献主要来源于公共管理、政治学、管理学和综合社会科学领域的重要学术期刊以及依据专业知识所选取的近些年来具有代表性的研究专著和报告。在对文献进行分类、编码和统计分析之后,分析结果表明:危机事前分析的文章占据主导地位,而对危机应对过程和危机后分析相对不足;应然研究类文章占据很大比重,但对于危机理论的建构和实证检验的研究比较缺乏;对于危机的综合分析多于单灾种分析。近些年中,虽然上述研究方式依然居于主导地位,但是研究者开始关注危机后的分析,注意理论的建构和检验,特别值得注意的是对于社会安全事件的分析呈上升趋势。最后,本文结合危机管理研究的现状和趋势总结出未来值得研究的若干领域。     

Useful to whom? Public management research,social science,and the standpoint problem

Answering “Big Questions” in public management will require close connections to social science, in particular political science. Yet connections are impeded by the difference in standpoint from which these questions are regarded by public management researchers and political scientists. Changing to a citizen standpoint changes the Big Questions and pushes political science and PM research toward unification. It also makes research more useful—at least to citizens.     

国外关于经济增长的政治学研究综述

本文运用文献分析法,从政策选择与政治条件两个维度来梳理国外关于经济增长的政治学理论,并在各维度内对已有文献的观点进行分类归纳。结合文献梳理的成果,笔者提出关于经济增长的政治学研究范式的一些思考。     

Experimente in der Politikwissenschaft: Vom Mauerblümchen zum Mainstream

The use of experimental research designs is on the rise. Internationally, experiments are becoming ever more established in the field, as shown by the increasing number of journal articles, books, and conferences. In German political science, however, using experimental methods is still rather uncommon. After a (brief) discussion of the relevance of experiments for political science, we will—in general terms—introduce the logic of experimental research as well as different types of experiments. Then we shall provide a (selective) overview of experimental research in political science that has been conducted: First, we cursorily review the state of (experimental) research done in the fields of elections and public opinion, public goods and collective action, social trust and finally legislative bargaining and decision-making. Following that, we discuss in greater detail the field experimental strand of research studying voter mobilization.     

受限理性:H.西蒙社会科学哲学的基点

作为西蒙的标志性理论,受限理性(Bounded Rationality)是其社会科学哲学的基点。西蒙在行政管理研究中发现受限理性,在对经济学传统理论的批判中提出受限理性理论,并在政治学、心理学以及人工科学等领域演进中发展受限理性的内涵。受限理性在众多研究领域中产生变革性影响,促进社会科学中理性研究的成就,延展并拓深社会科学哲学的论域。     

Consulting critics: A new role for academic policy analysts

It is by now widely accepted that social science research has only an indirect and general impact on public policymaking. Academic social science research, it is often argued, is antithetical to policy research: the former is animated by traditional scientific canons while the latter is specific and problem-oriented. Moreover, modern bureaucracies are now understood as political environments within which pure research will be routinely ignored if it does not serve someone's interests. For these and other reasons, social scientists are being encouraged either to eschew policy research or not to expect much influence. This article provides an alternative model of social scientists in the policy process, as consulting critics reviewing, analyzing and commenting upon substantive policy research. This model holds benefits for both scholars and clients, turns the canons of scientific inquiry into assets instead of liabilities, and responds to some of the concerns recently raised in the literature concerning the role of social science in the policy process.