An Introduction to Political Science Jonathon York Introduction This project is intended to constitute an Introduction to the formal study of politics and political science, being a variation of what I wish I had when I first entered the discipline. All institutions of higher education tend to focus on a specific subfield or set of subfields, not necessarily intentionally, but over time these institutions produce what can best be described as a disciplinary orthodoxy, distorting the student’s vision of the discipline as a whole such that he or she may conceive of the whole of the discipline as constituting merely what the professors parade in front of their classrooms, in their textbooks, and in their supplemental materials. Knowing this to be the case it is my intention to present as broad a picture of the discipline as I can manage, in order that I may avoid the potential damage of the prejudices ingrained by a too-narrow view of the discipline as a whole. My own exposure to the discipline of political study was largely hampered by the blinders of those self-described students of politics at the University of Dallas who followed in the footsteps of the students of Leo Strauss, who on one hand insisted that in order to understand a thinker one must, if at all possible, closely read everything that thinker ever wrote (a laudable though difficult task for many)1, but on the other openly derided other methodological currents in the discipline, especially those that forsook the political philosophical tradition of the field and instead sought to adapt or emulate the quantitative methods of the natural sciences. This position placed blinders on Strauss’ followers and those intellectual descendants who, in the half-century since this scholar’s death, purport to instruct in the mode of Dr. Strauss, and today call themselves “Straussians.” I know this because I too was once so limited, without even having been fully aware the blinders were there in the first place. Imagine my surprise, nay chagrin, when I would hear in a graduate course in political science methodology from my professor, Dr. Tom Little of the University of Texas at Arlington, that “philosophy is wrong because it is normative; only through the empirical scientific method can we learn the truth.”2 Surely this was not so! Within a semester I withdrew and returned to Irving and the safety of the familiar to complete my professional degree. Looking back on it, I realize that both institutions were blinded by their respective orthodoxies, both of which emerged from what is sometimes called “The Chicago School”: On one hand, the University of Dallas rests squarely on the side of Leo Strauss and his disciples originally from the University of Chicago and now prominent at other institutions such as Claremont-McKenna and Hillsdale College; on the other, the University of Texas at Arlington adheres to the views of another Chicago political scientist, Charles E. Merriam, whose efforts to define political science as an empirical study of political behavior alone would dominate the discipline in the United States throughout much of the last century. About the same time as my graduate work neared its culmination in a thesis on Montesquieu’s view of the concept of liberty, the American Political Science Association was wracked with division, in the form of a revolt against the empiricists and statisticians in the discipline, especially by the students of political theory, the foundations of political philosophy and those who focused on both normative and contextual analysis of political phenomena. This division, from my perspective as a newly minted would- be scholar in the field, threatened to split in twain the Association I had just joined, especially when I first attended the annual conference in Philadelphia in 2003 and saw the publishers’ booths split between two separate floors in the convention space: one floor dominated by empirical, quantitative and statistical publishers, the other by normative, theoretical and philosophical publishers.3 Neither side appeared aware of the other’s existence; never the twain should meet it so seemed. Having noted this division, I resolved to attend as wide a variety of presentations and panel discussions as I had time for over the next three days, and in subsequent annual conferences I would repeat the same exercise. What I found in that first conference of my professional existence was a clear division with clearly ludicrous expectations on the part of the convention planners concerning which panels would draw the largest numbers. I saw that the quantitative and statistical analytic panels that year were assigned the largest conference rooms in the convention center, with row upon row of neatly arranged pink padded chairs and high ceilings to accommodate the expected crush of warm bodies hearing the latest advances in empirical political science. The normative, the theoretical, philosophical and text-based panels were relegated to much smaller venues, presumably a judgement on the planners’ part of the paltry interest these other, lesser historical relics of a bygone prescientific era in the discipline would elicit. However, when I attended these panels a consistent pattern would emerge: the large venues were nearly empty, the panelists at times outnumbering the audience in those yawning chasms, while the smaller ones were so crowded as to leave standing room only. For too long, it seemed, political scholars had been left “in the wilderness” in the United States by what appeared in the wake of the Second World War to be the triumph of quantitative empiricists over all other methodological approaches to political phenomena. The War effort had demanded commitment from every discipline in order to defeat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan, and while many were indeed up to the task, arcane fields such as political science could allegedly only provide institutional analysis and philosophical underpinnings for the justice of the Allied cause, neither of which were directly useful on the road to victory. Consequently, in an effort to secure support from the federal government through categorical research grant money, the entire discipline apparently retooled itself along the lines of the empirical and quantitative approaches pioneered by Merriam and others, leaving other research methods in scholarly exile. What I did not know at the time, and what I was only beginning to learn from having spoken with fellow conference attendees, was that a movement had formed in a prior APSA conference in San Francisco seeking to reform the methodological orientation of the discipline as a whole.4 A counter-conference panel was called across the street from the main venue more or less by word-of-mouth and, from what I have been told, had to be moved to a much larger conference room when the organizers, believing they would only attract a dozen or so dissidents from the Empire of the Empiricists, suddenly faced a crowd of around three hundred. In the twenty years or so since this reform movement, dubbed the “Perestroika” movement thanks to an anonymous eleven-point email sent by an individual calling himself “Mr. Perestroika” to the editors of the American Political Science Review on 17 October 2000, and calling for “a dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in APSA”,5 I witnessed a change in the manner in which the discipline represented itself at the APSA annual conference, with greater attention to methodological diversity evident in the conference’s offerings, and what seemed to me a more balanced representation of different approaches among its members, and in particular, its leadership. However, as an instructor of government and political science at a community college in Dallas, when I started my search for a fitting introductory text for the political science discipline, I found that on the whole, this reform had nearly completely failed to extend to the available offerings. By and large, these texts broadly fell into one of two distinct emphases: Scope of observables and Methods of research. In the first camp I found one text (Rosskin/Cord) 6 that presented the breadth of observables well enough, but since it lacked a unifying sense of a theory of political inquiry, a student could be forgiven for having learned next to nothing about how to approach the observables and view political science as a form of “civics for grown-ups”. Furthermore, I noted an implicit bias in this text toward the empirical quantitative method of political inquiry, disconnecting the reader and future scholar from the axiological and epistemological roots of the study of politics. In the second camp I found a greater myopia: one text (Shively)7 emphasized only empirical research methods, another (Colomer)8 emphasized Rational Choice Game Theory, a third (Danziger)9 attempted to contextualize political science in a comparative framework and thus present either comparative politics or the broader discipline only poorly. What’s more, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had prescribed five distinct outcomes for the introductory political science course which no text currently in print appears to address explicitly: 1) Define and apply political terms and concepts, 2) Define political science and identify the subfields, 3) Compare and contrast different political systems and institutions, 4) Apply the methods used to study politics, and 5) Critically interpret and analyze contemporary political issues and problems.10 In order to open up my students’ eyes to the breadth, depth and relevance of this discipline, as well as meet the outcomes defined in the state’s Lower Division Academic Course Guide Manual, I would either have to assign multiple texts, a stack whose total price would preclude its purchase, given the economic realities of an undergraduate student enrolled in a community college, or else I would have to develop my own resources.