By Professor Richard Rose University of Strathclyde, Glasgow & Guest
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P 90-006 Instituti onali zi ng Political Science in Europe: A Dynamic Model by Professor Richard Rose University of Strathclyde, Glasgow & Guest Professor, Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin November 1990 ABSTRACT A dynamic model is set out o f the h is to ric a l process by which p o litic a l science in Europe has developed from the sporadic writings of insightful and cosmopolitan individuals, often more or less isolated within their own country, into a profession with well defined standards for training and employment; in s titu tio n a lly based in national u n iv e rs ity systems; and with substantial trans-national links between individuals and institutions throughout Europe. The paper concludes with a review o f dynamic trends within political science and in the world of politics that may affect political science up to the year 2000. A paper for "Approaches to the Study of Political Science As a Discipline", Workshop of the IPSA Committee on the Study of P o litic a l Science as a D isc ip lin e , Paris, 21-22 May 1990. INSTITUTIONALIZING PROFESSIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE IN EUROPE: A Dynamic Model by Professor Richard Rose Centre for the Study of Public Policy Abstract A dynamic model is set out of the historical process by which political science in Europe has developed from the sporadic writings of insightful and cosmopolitan individuals, often more or less isolated within their own country, into a profession with well defined standards for training and employment; institutionally based in national university systems; and with substantial trans-national links between individuals and institutions throughout Europe. The paper concludes with a review of dynamic trends within political science and in the world of politics that may affect political science up to the year 2000. A paper for "Approaches to the Study of Political Science As a Discipline", Workshop of the IPSA Committee on the Study of Political Science as a Discipline, Paris, 21-22 May 1990. Comparative research has become a collective enterprise; it is no longer a matter of individual information-gathering and synthesis. Stein Rokkan (1970: 2) The study of politics originated in comparative analysis: 'For the Greeks and the Romans, as for us, all political science was in a sense comparative politics. Political science has its beginning when an observer notes that another people is not governed as we are. Why?' (Mackenzie, 1971: 293). The pioneers of modern political science and sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century used comparison as an integral part of their efforts to develop and test generalizations that would apply across the whole of Europe, and beyond. They were cosmopolitans, at home in several countries and languages. But they were necessarily amateurs, untrained as political scientists, for the subject did not exist in the syllabus of most universities. Often they were free-lancers, living by writing or from a private income, rather than by a university salary. The twentieth century has seen the institutionalization of political science; the subject is no longer a reflection of the intellectual interests of isolated individuals. The shift from amateur interest to professional commitment (Politische Wissenschaft als Beruf, to paraphrase Weber) has required the creation of institutions for collective enterprise at every level from a University department through national associations to trans-national organizations. Today, political science is a collective enterprise within every democratic country, and increasingly it is a collective enterprise that crosses national boundaries, particularly within Europe. The purpose of this paper is to set out a dynamic model of the historical process by which political science in Europe has developed from the sporadic writings of insightful and cosmopolitan individuals, often more or less isolated within their own country, into a profession with well defined standards for training and employment, based institutionally in national university systems, and with substantial trans-national links between individuals and institutions throughout Europe. I DEFINING TERMS A professional political scientist is an individual who is: i) trained to undertake an occupation according to widely recognized standards; ii) possesses a certificate of competence (e.g. a PhD in political science) iii) belongs to the relevant professional association; and iv) is employed in the practice of the profession. Insofar as political science is a free profession in which its members are judged as individual scholars rather than by their organizational status, then professionalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a good political scientist. An amateur is untrained, is not formally certified as competent, is not a member of a professional association, nor employed in a professional capacity. Although the term professional is now used as a term of pride and amateur has negative connotations, here the words are meant to be analytic rather than evaluative. After all, Tocqueville and 2 Bagehot were amateurs rather than trained political scientists. The earliest writers had to be amateurs, for there was no institution to train them and certify that they were political scientists. They were participant-observers with a reflective cast of mind. The political science profession consists of individuals conducting original research within the field of political science broadly defined. Professionals can thus be differentiated from other groups that are concerned with the subject of politics, e.g. journalists describing contemporary events; public officials administering government, or others, who are professionals in their fields. To practice a profession, a political scientist needs an economic base, and this normally requires a job in an institution. The existence of institutions hiring political scientists is thus a condition of the creation of national or international associations of professional political scientists. A university or a division of a national academy normally provides the institutional base for professional political scientists. Institutionalization in a university is also necessary to train successor generations in the same profession, and to certify these individuals as competent. Non-professionals interested in politics require an economic base too, but this is usually outside the university, as an employee of a government agency, political party, or media organization. Europe can be distinguished from the nations that constitute the Continent by invoking the classic Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) distinction between locals and cosmopolitans. Locals are interested in what happens around them, and this narrowly defines their research and sources of ideas. Locals consider that a concept that is not invented here, not published in their national language, or not applied to their country, is to be ignored. From such a perspective, the important thing about French or German or American public administration is that it is French or German or American, rather than about conditions common to bureaucratic processes in many lands. Whilst it is understandable that most scholars will want to study what they know best, their own country, it does not follow that they should only be interested in ideas discussed or discovered within their own country. This is not true in such professions as medicine. Cosmopolitans are interested in ideas pertaining to political science wherever they may be found. This does not imply a pure indifference curve between countries; more ideas will be found in the literature of a country with a lot of political scientists (e.g. the United States) than in one with a small number (e.g. New Zealand, also an Anglophone country). It can be argued that the scholarship of professionals in a big country tends to be confined by the richness of materials there; compare the scope of the work of V.O. Key, a great scholar of American political parties, with Stein Rokkan, a Norwegian who saw his country as one among many in the field of comparative politics. Cosmopolitan researchers see their own country differently than locals because they are aware that other countries exist-and are relevant to their own. They thus contrast with students of exotic cultures, such as anthropologists, who confine their work to Africa. Cosmopolitans also differ from "expatriate localists", that is individuals who study a foreign country and so immerse themselves in what they see as an alien land that they have no intellectual interest in generalizing to other places, 3 such as the country in which they live. Cosmopolitans are also different from "landless" theorists who write about an assumed world in which separate countries do not exist or are assumed to share the same attributes, a trait found in the public choice literature as well as in more traditional political theories. Cosmopolitans start from the assumption that the experience of several countries is relevant to their own research, because of the existence of more or less comparable functional problems. This assumption does not imply a common response. Explaining differences is invariably an important part of the work of cosmopolitan comparison. Whereas a scholar who only knows England may explain the development of the welfare state as an English phenomenon, a cosmopolitan scholar seeks a general explanation for a general European phenomenon. Likewise, a cosmopolitan student of electoral systems would not think the Presidential system or the first-past-the-post