American Politics Today: An Interview with Frances Fox Piven

Readers of New Political Science know Frances Fox Piven as the author or co-author of a series of path-breaking articles and books on the development of American social policies, political mobilization and voter turnout, and the attack on the welfare state. She is also a supporter of long standing of this journal and its sponsor, the Caucus for a New Political Science. In the last year Piven has come under attack by FOX News host Glenn Beck and other right-wing activists for ideas she developed in the 1960s with the late Richard Cloward. Beck and others have been keen to link Piven and Cloward's analysis in far-fetched ways to the economic policies of the Obama administration. In this interview Piven interprets the meaning of the right-wing attacks and discusses the state of contemporary American politics more broadly. She comments on the Obama administration's major policies and the prospects for political mobilization and offers advice for progressive scholars in the early stages of their careers.     

Calling Out the Persistence of Racism

In this issue New Political Science begins a new tradition, printing an extended review essay of the book that received the Michael Harrington Book Award at the most recent American Political Science Association Meeting. The Michael Harrington Award is given for an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarships can be used in the struggle for a better world. In 2011, the award went to Michelle Alexander for her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color-Blindness. Sanford Schram, a member of the award committee, has contributed the below review.     

Terror,War, and Democracy: An Interview with Stephen Eric Bronner

Stephen Eric Bronner is a Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University. The Senior Editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary internet journal, Bronner is also a member of the Editorial Board of New Political Science and a longtime contributor to this journal. In an interview conducted by Antonia Werbell, Bronner elaborates on themes in his most recent book Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (University of Kentucky Press, 2005) and offers a critical analysis of US democracy in the context of the Bush administration's “war on terror.”     

The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the “Critical” Journal

Michel Foucault in his lecture “What is Critique?” argues that criticism offered a response to the state's developing art of governing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Instead of accepting the state's way of governing, critics presented alternative visions of not being quite so governed or of not being governed thusly. Similarly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, factions within academic disciplines also rejected their disciplines' mode of governing and created alternatives. In response to the desire to make political science more relevant and visible, the Caucus for a New Political Science formed as an alternative to the American Political Science Association. A similar trend occurred in other disciplines. Over the next few decades a number of academic journals were founded that included the word “critical” in their titles or explicitly stated a “critical” aim or approach. However, even dissenting academic groups, like the Caucus for a New Political Science, began to be reabsorbed within their disciplinary homes. With time, many of these groups succumbed to a degree of professionalization that perhaps inhibited their larger aspirations. As Foucault argues, the critical attitude does not reject governing altogether; it is not a call for anarchy. Rather, it demands an alternative to the current governance. The question becomes how to maintain the critical attitude while also building alternative institutions. Does institution building attenuate critique? And what then is critique? This article reflects on these questions by providing a brief study of “critical” disciplinary reorganizations, with greater attention to the Caucus for a New Political Science and its journal, New Political Science.     

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.     

Commentary: The Third Wave of McCarthyism: Co-opting the Language of Inclusivity

In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. In recent years, political scientists have authored numerous commentaries on “the tragedy” of political science, “the crisis” in political science, and “the flight from reality in political science,” while in 2000 these discontents resurfaced in the “perestroika” rebellion, which again denounced the American Political Science Association as an organization that promotes a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches.” This paper reviews the intellectual origins of New Political Science by examining some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s purporting to establish the foundations of a new political science. It concludes that new political science offers a methodological critique of behaviorialism and a sociological critique of the relationship between political science and political power, but there is no consensus on what constitutes a new political science beyond its critical stance toward the existing discipline.     

Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science: A Readers’ Guide

The use of instrumental variables regression in political science has evolved from an obscure technique to a staple of the political science tool kit. Yet the surge of interest in the instrumental variables method has led to implementation of uneven quality. After providing a brief overview of the method and the assumptions on which it rests, we chart the ways in which these assumptions are invoked in practice in political science. We review more than 100 articles published in the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, and World Politics over a 24‐year span. We discuss in detail two noteworthy applications of instrumental variables regression, calling attention to the statistical assumptions that each invokes. The concluding section proposes reporting standards and provides a checklist for readers to consider as they evaluate applications of this method.     

Clinton,the courts,and social policy

He is author of numerous articles and Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: A Jurisprudential History;and coeditor (with Peter W. Schramm) of American Political Parties and Constitutional Government;and the forthcoming Separation of Powers and Good Government.     

Direct-broadcast satellites and cultural integrity

Electronic and mass media create counterweights to established authorities. Ithiel de Sola Pool is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also a member of the following: American Political Science Association; Council on Foreign Relations; American Association for Public Opinion Research and American Sociological Association. He is the author of Satellite Generalsand editor of Handbook of Communications. [Deceased]     

Blaming the jews

His most recent publication is Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: The Challenge of Pluralism,a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science.He is author of Mainstreams and Margins: Jews, Blacks, and Other Americans,published by Transaction.     

Rational Choice and Interpretive Evidence: Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place?

Following Green and Shapiro's critique, debate about the value of rational choice theory has focused upon the question of its relationship to what we call 'external', largely quantitative, empirical evidence. We argue that what is most striking about rational choice theory is, however, its neglect of interpretive evidence. Our survey of 570 articles, published in the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science between 1984 and 2005 employing rational choice theory, revealed that only 139 made even the most cursory use of interpretive evidence. Does this matter? We argue that the absence of interpretive evidence undermines rational choice's explanatory credentials. However, we also argue that the admission of interpretive evidence risks rendering redundant the rational choice element of any explanation. This is the rock and the hard place between which rational choice is caught. In the final part of the article we distinguish those cases where rational choice may prove useful, namely those circumstances in which interpretive evidence either cannot be relied upon or does not subsume that which an explanation is intended to achieve.     

Reconsidering The Counter-Mobilization Hypothesis: Health Policy Lobbying In The American States

Despite its widespread use since the concept was introduced by David Truman (1951. The Governmental Process. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), counter-mobilization by organized interests has remained theoretically ambiguous and rarely studied empirically. We more fully develop the concept of short-term counter-mobilization, distinguish it from long-term counter-mobilization, specify the conditions under which we might observe short-term counter-mobilization, and test the resulting hypotheses with data on health care lobby registrations in the American states during the late 1990s. We find little evidence of short-term counter-mobilization among health interest organizations, which leads us to more fully consider several null hypotheses about the limits of strategic behavior on the part of organized interests.An earlier version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 2004. This research was supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research (ID#047727).     

Leadership transition and Chinese foreign polic

This essay examines the nature of China’s leadership transition, contending perspectives on Chinese foreign policy, and new foreign policy orientation. By examining leadership transition and new policy development, this essay demonstrates change and continuity in Chinese foreign policy. For analyzing new policy orientation, the following points require special attention. First, the fundamental goal of Chinese foreign policy is to create a peaceful environment for socioeconomic development. Second, “do not seek enemy” has become an essential part of China’s foreign policy. Third, pragmatism and professionalism are becoming key features of Beijing’s diplomacy. Finally, China’s new leaders are facing enormous domestic and international challenges. They must learn to balance domestic and international concerns in order to achieve peace and development. He is the author ofStates and Markets: Comparing Japan and Russia, co-author ofAmerican Foreign Policy and U.S.-China Relations, and co-editor ofNew Directions in Chinese Politics for the New Millennium. He has recently editedChinese Foreign Policy in Transition (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, forthcoming). The author would like to express his appreciation to William Dorrill, He Li, Lucian W. Pye, Wei Tang, Zhiqun Zhu, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association in August 2003.     

Graduate Curricula in Budgeting and Financial Management: Recommendations for Reform

This is an abridged version of the final report of the American Society for Public Administration's (ASPA) Section on Budgeting and Financial Management's Task Force on Curriculum Reform. The report was produced by the Section on Budgeting and Financial Management's Executive Committee. The complete final report is available from Robert Berne, Graduate School of Public Administration, New York University, 4 Washington Square North, New York, NY 1003, or James Alexander, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Johnstown, PA 15904.     

National image of North Korea in South Korean news media

This study aims to identify how American major newspapers frame the BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis in 2 major daily newspapers, The New York Times and USA Today. In addition, this study exams what kinds of themes are used in conjunction with news frames for covering the BP oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. 489 articles were analyzed, 353 articles for The New York Times and 136 articles for USA Today. In a pretest, this study identified 6 main frames and 9 themes used by the collected news articles, and these 6 frames and 9 themes were used to analyze the collected news articles. Among 6 frames, the most common primary frame in the New York Times was attribution of responsibility, as compared to the most common primary theme in USA Today, solution. On the other hand, the most common theme in The New York Times was stopping the oil, as opposed to the most common theme found in USA Today, politics.     

Electoral change and the floating voter: The reagan elections

This paper presents two perspectives on a fundamental issue of elections as mechanisms of democratic accountability. One is the interelection floating voter hypothesis, which implies that it is the least informed segment of the electorate that contributes most to electoral change. The second perspective is from V. O. Key's argument that vote switching is rooted in rational policy concerns. A direct test of Key's formulation of the problem on the Reagan election victories of 1980 and 1984 adds to the evidence supporting Key's perspective. The reasons why some voters hold firm to particular parties and candidates while others switch support is well explained by their different positions on matters of party, policies, and judgments of the candidates. Vote switching is not simply the by-product of an ill-informed segment of the electorate responding to its meager grasp of the short-term stimuli of a campaign. Vote switchers appear to judge the policies and the performance of an incumbent against their best estimates of these qualities in the competing candidate. The data are from the 1980 and 1984 CBS/New York Times exit polls.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1985 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans.     

The failure of federal enforcement of civil rights regulations in public housing, 1963–1971: The co-optation of a federal agency by its local constituency

This paper reports on research regarding the federal role with respect to racially discriminatory practices in public housing. It is a case study of federal efforts to deal with inadequate housing for low-income Americans, based on Public Housing in Chicago from 1963 through June 1971.Prepared for delivery at the 1972 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 8, 1972. Copyright, 1972, The American Political Science Association.     

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。