The Trial of Scopes: Perestroika,Epic Political Theory,and the Dominance of Method

This work takes up where Vanessa Ruget's 2002 New Political Science article leaves off in discussing the nature of political science in light of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Ruget argues that there is a clear “establishment” at work in the discipline, benefiting from various types of “capital” and other reproduction strategies. The Perestroika movement, she believes, seeks in part to expose the supremacy of certain approaches to political science. I build upon Bourdieu's notion of reproduction strategies and discuss the limiting of the scope of political theory over the past 30 years as part of the (re)production strategy of a “methodized” political science. In this I utilize Sheldon Wolin's arguments concerning political theory as vocation and the importance of “epic” political theory as an attempt to resist the narrowing re-scoping of political theory and science.     

A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text

Georg Vanberg Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265 e-mail: gvanberg{at}unc.edu (corresponding author) In a recent article in the American Political Science Review,Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, "Extracting policy positionsfrom political texts using words as data," 97:311–331)propose a new method for conducting content analysis. TheirWordscores approach, by automating text-coding procedures, representsan advance in content analysis that will potentially have alarge long-term impact on research across the discipline. Toallow substantive interpretation, the scores produced by theWordscores procedure require transformation. In this note, weaddress several shortcomings in the transformation procedureintroduced in the original program. We demonstrate that theoriginal transformation distorts the metric on which contentscores are placed—hindering the ability of scholars tomake meaningful comparisons across texts—and that it isvery sensitive to the texts that are scored—opening upthe possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertentlyor not, results that depend on the texts they choose to includein their analyses. We propose a transformation procedure thatsolves these problems. Authors' note: We would like to thank Ken Benoit, Michael Laver,three anonymous referees, and the editor for comments on earlierversions of this article.     

Western Political Research Approaches and the Development of Political Science Methodology in China

The restoration and development of political science as a discipline in China since 1980 benefits from its methodological improvements that were made largely by introducing research approaches from western academia. The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of the introduction based on articles published in Chinese academic journals since 1990. There exists a wide diversity in research approaches in political science, and the authors try to explain why each approach has a different impact on Chinese political studies and how the introduction of such knowledge has changed the way Chinese political researchers understand the methodology and political science as a discipline.

Western Political Science Theories and the Development of Political Theories in China

This article outlines the recent development of Chinese political studies spawned by the transformation of Chinese politics in the post-Mao era, with its focus mainly on contributions from the Chinese scholarship. After a close examination of the applicability of the western theories on the transforming politics in China, it reviews the indigenous methodologies, the theorizations on the Chinese Communist Party, the state-society relationship analysis, and research on the central-local relationship. Referring to the original works in different periods, the article generally portrays the indigenous contributions of the Chinese academia, and illustrates the essential connections between real politics and theoretical progress.

学科视野中的历史政治学:以历史社会学、政治史、比较政治学为参照

历史政治学是中国学者提出的研究政治学之全新范式,但当然不是从零开始,而有众多可资利用之知识资源,本文探讨其与历史政治学之关系。历史政治学与历史社会学均致力于带回历史、带回国家,并共享众多方法;但后者有西方中心论偏见,奉行价值无涉原则,止于理解或解释;历史政治学则破除西方中心论,公正对待中国等非西方国家、文明丰富的政治实践,且有明确价值追求,致力于从历史中探究善治之道。历史政治学呼吁历史学再度重视政治史,并使之有政治学想象力。历史政治学可为比较政治学带入大历史视野,以矫正其以西式政治制度为标准的偏失。     

Political Science as a Broad Church: The Search for a Pluralist Discipline

In 1996 Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann published an edited collection of essays, A New Handbook of Political Science , that provides probably the best overview of the discipline of political science, at least as seen through the eyes of the mainstream of the profession. Goodin is an American working at the Australian National University, while Klingemann is a German working in Berlin. Nevertheless, their overview represents an American view of political science, which is hardly surprising as more than 75 per cent of living political scientists are American. Overall, they present a picture of the discipline as professional, pluralistic and improving rapidly. Here, we take issue with that view, not as an ambition, but as a reality. In contrast, we argue that political science, particularly US political science, is still dominated by a positivist epistemology and, particularly, by behaviouralist and rational choice approaches that are underpinned by that positivism. We begin by outlining Goodin and Klingemann's argument and critiquing it. Subsequently, we take issue with them empirically, using evidence drawn both from their own edited collection and an analysis of the contents of the two foremost US and UK journals; in the US the American Political Science Review , the American Political Science Association's main journal, and the American Journal of Political Science , and in the UK the British Journal of Political Science and Political Studies , the Political Studies Association's main journal. The methodology adopted is discussed below. In the last section, we consider the consequence of our findings for the future of political science in Britain.     

The “Role” of Nationalism in Chinese Foreign Policy: A Reactive Model of Nationalism & Conflict

A growing literature has sought to address the question of Chinese nationalism, and particularly whether or not its rise over the last decade could make China more prone to international conflict. Yet these discussions have often not been well grounded in either theories of nationalism or international relations (IR) theory. This paper will seek to fill this gap by using a constructivist approach to examine how nationalism is constituted by the interaction of states. By doing so, it will be argued that Chinese nationalism can best be understood as a reactive response to international events rather than domestic political manipulation. Michael Alan Brittingham is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at McDaniel College. He has previously taught at the University of Louisville. In 2005, he completed his dissertation entitled, “Reactive Nationalism and Its Prospects for Conflict: The Taiwan Issue, Sino-US Relations, & the ‘Role’ of Nationalism in Chinese Foreign Policy” in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests include international relations theory, Chinese foreign policy, and nationalism.     

Shiwei Zhang,The Logical Deduction of Chinese Traditional Political Philosophy

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Daniel C. Mattingly. The Art of Political Control in China

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

C. Wright Mills,Power Structure Research,and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science

“Power Reconsidered” was the theme of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2006. In a steady stream of analytically focused and empirically rich books and articles over the last 40 years, G. William Domhoff had made a unique and challenging contribution to the study of power and politics in the United States. In this commentary, based on a presentation at an APSA panel sponsored by the New Political Science section, Domhoff criticizes the narrow and misleading ways in which the concept of power has been used by pluralist, state autonomy, and historical institutionalism approaches in political science. Drawing on the path-breaking work of C. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter in the 1950s, Domhoff restates and develops his class and organizational interpretation of the American power structure. As a progressive and scholarly journal, New Political Science encourages authors to submit research articles that engage with the theoretical questions raised by Domhoff.     

Gendering women and politics in contemporary China

This article suggests moving beyond "state-society" models of Chinese politics in order to more effectively integrate "gender" as a category of analysis. The article examines a number of empirical examples of women’s activism in Hong Kong prior to the 1997 handover to China as a way of gaining insights into which variables might more effectively nuance "state-society" models so as to highlight the gendered aspects of women and politics. In the Hong Kong case, such variables include ethnicity, class, race, nationalism, and feminism. The article finds 1)that a number of these variables also apply equally well to research on women and politics in Hong Kong and to gender studies focusing on the contemporary People’s Republic of China; and 2)that disaggregating concepts like "state" and “society” using variables like gender, race, and class provides a more complex understanding of the process of politics in Chinese societies. She received her Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught in both Hong Kong and the United States. Her work on the women’ movement in pre-1997 Hong Kong will soon be published in an edited volume from University of British Columbia Press.     

Jiwei Qian,The Political Economy of Making and Implementing Social Policy in China

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

The Search for Comparability: Response to Binder

Lawrence S. Rothenberg Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 e-mail: lrot{at}mail.rochester.edu (corresponding author) Binder (n.d., Taking the measure of Congress: Reply to Chiouand Rothenberg. Political Analysis. Forthcoming) highlightsareas of agreement and disagreement with our discussion of preferencemeasurement and legislative gridlock. We now both agree thatW-NOMINATE scores—employed in Binder (1999, The dynamicsof legislative gridlock. American Political Science Review 9:519–33)to measure key independent variables, including bicameral differences—shouldnot be used when examining multichamber legislatures over time.We continue to disagree over whether Common Space scores orBinder's conference vote measure is superior. In this response,we show that, although several of the theoretical and statisticalobjections that Binder (n.d.) raises to our Common Space measuredo not apply, they are all relevant for her conference voteanalog. Additionally, we detail how, despite protests to thecontrary, the conference vote measure is plagued by insufficientdata. Finally, we demonstrate how new efforts to show that Binder's (1999)results continue to hold are not robust.     

Two Diasporas: Overseas Chinese and Non-resident Indians in Their Homelands’ Political Economy

This paper, through a comparative study of the roles Chinese and Indian diasporas in the United States play in the political economy of their respective homelands, explores the relationship between the diaspora and homeland development and how this dynamic relationship contributes to economic growth and foreign relations of the homelands. The author argues that the roles of Indian and Chinese diasporas in their respective homelands’ development consistently reflect, and are heavily influenced by, their homelands’ economic development strategies as well as political history and culture. The author also argues that the impact of the diaspora on the foreign relations of their homelands is conditional upon the state of bilateral relations between their homeland and the country of residence. This study raises issues for future research, such as the relationship between the diaspora and regime type of the homeland. The author concludes by suggesting that since activities of overseas Chinese and non-resident Indians provide a unique perspective in the comparative study of Chinese and Indian political economy, the two diasporas warrant more scholarly and policy attention. Zhiqun Zhu, Ph.D. is currently Assistant Professor and Chair of International Political Economy and Diplomacy at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of US-China Relations in the 21 ^st Century: Power Transition and Peace (Routledge, 2006). His research and teaching interests include international political economy, East Asian politics, and US-China relations. He wishes to thank panelists at the 102^nd annual conference of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia for their helpful comments. He also wants to acknowledge Dr. Dave Benjamin’s useful suggestions and editorial assistance.     

Sleeping Beauties of Political Science: The Case of AF Bentley

Recognition is what makes science move forward. Yet, late recognition has been an existing phenomenon in the scientific community for centuries. Does this phenomenon of “Sleeping Beauties”, as these works are sometimes called in academic literature, exist in Political Science? The bibliometric analysis we applied showed a positive answer. Our paper is the first case study of “Sleeping Beauty” that is not an article but a book. The book by A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, serves as an example of “Sleeping Beauty” in the Political Science domain. What put this work to “sleep”? And why, at some point, it has been suddenly “awakened” by a large number of citations? Although it has been discussed previously as a neglected classic, no bibliometric analysis has been applied to examine it and assumptions for its neglect and rediscovery presented by previous authors differ from our bibliometric findings.     

Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Precedents at the U.S. Supreme Court

Timothy R. Johnson Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55455 e-mail: trj{at}umn.edu James F. Spriggs, II Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: jspriggs{at}artsci.wustl.edu Sangick Jeon Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford, CA 94305-6044 e-mail: sjeon{at}stanford.edu Paul J. Wahlbeck Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 1922 F Street, N.W. Suite 401, Washington, DC 20052 e-mail: wahlbeck{at}gwu.edu e-mail: jhfowler{at}ucsd.edu (corresponding author) We construct the complete network of 26,681 majority opinionswritten by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases that cite themfrom 1791 to 2005. We describe a method for using the patternsin citations within and across cases to create importance scoresthat identify the most legally relevant precedents in the networkof Supreme Court law at any given point in time. Our measuresare superior to existing network-based alternatives and, forexample, offer information regarding case importance not evidentin simple citation counts. We also demonstrate the validityof our measures by showing that they are strongly correlatedwith the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S.Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing,we show that network analysis is a viable way of measuring howcentral a case is to law at the Court and suggest that it canbe used to measure other legal concepts. Authors' note: We appreciate the suggestions of Randy Calvert,Frank Cross, Pauline Kim, Andrew Martin, Richard Pacelle, JimRogers, Margo Schlanger, Amy Steigerwalt, and participants inthe Workshop on Empirical Research in the Law at WashingtonUniversity in St Louis School of Law. We presented former versionsof this article at the 2006 meeting of the Midwest PoliticalScience Association, Chicago, April 20–23; the 2006 meetingof the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA,January 5–7; and the 2006 Empirical Legal Studies Conference,Austin, TX, October 27–28.     

The Effect of Political Participation and Village Support on Farmers Happiness

Journal of Chinese Political Science - This paper explores the internal transmission mechanism and influence of political participation and village support on farmers’ happiness based on an...     

Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal

Michael H. Crespin Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, 303 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824 e-mail: e-mail: crespinm{at}msu.edu Jeffery A. Jenkins Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 e-mail: e-mail: j-jenkins3{at}northwestern.edu Ryan J. Vander Wielen Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1027, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: e-mail: rjvander{at}artsci.wustl.edu This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article"Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the ContemporaryCongress," published in the American Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and MitchellSanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary toall previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirkingin the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustnessof their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specificfixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Nevil Johnson: The Limits of Political Science.
Adrian Leftwich (ed.): New Developments in Political Science. An International Review of Achievements and Prospects.
Hans Mouritzen: Finlandization: Towards a General Theory of Adaptive Politics.
Nielsen, K. & Pedersen, O. K. (eds.): Forhandlingsøkanomi i Norden.
Clarence N. Stone: Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988.     

Using Active-Learning Pedagogy to Develop Essay-Writing Skills in Introductory Political Theory Tutorials

Building on prior research into active learning pedagogy in political science, I discuss the development of a new active learning strategy called the “thesis-building carousel,” designed for use in political theory tutorials. This use of active learning pedagogy in a graduate student-led political theory tutorial represents the overlap of several currents of political science education research. First, the graduate teaching assistant-led tutorial is a common complement to large lecture-based introductory courses in political theory. Second, where International Relations has led the expansion of active learning in political science, political theory has lagged behind other subfields (Archer &; Miller 2011 Archer, Candace C. and Melissa K. Miller. 2011. “Prioritizing Active Learning: An Exploration of Gateway Courses in Political Science.” PS: Political Science &; Politics 44(2): 429–434.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The thesis-building carousel is designed to develop skills necessary for political theory classes—essay writing and peer review. The article concludes with a discussion of how active learning activities designed for specialized spaces can be modified for use in traditional classroom settings, with the example of three forms of “summary carousels.”