Current Criticism of APSA Is Nothing New

Over the several decades of my professional career, complaints about APSR and petitions to change the structure of APSA have been perennial features of life among political scientists. To a remarkable extent the agenda of concerns has remained quite constant, focusing on issues of allegedly excessive emphasis on technique and method, the representativeness of the Review, and the APSA's governing structures. Over the years the Association has tired to address these concerns, sometimes with a degree of success, but rarely enough to satisfy or silence the critics. In part, the problem lies in the supposed incompatibility of the ostensible polarities; teaching versus research, technique versus substance, real world politics versus theoretically driven research. Of course, these are not either/or choices but questions of degree, and the appropriate balance may vary considerably across both time and the spectra of subject matter and professional career paths. Moreover, though we may give it more lip service than true commitment, the principle of interdependence really does operate on each of these dimensions of our disputes. As that splendid scholar and wise man, V.O. Key, Jr., said in his presidential address 40-odd years ago, “Method without substance may be sterile, but substance without method is only fortuitously substantial” (1958, 967).

“Nor should we omit in our study [of public administration] the problem of legislative-administrative relations, in view of the increasing role of the public servant in the determination of policy, through either the preparation of legislation or the making of rules under which general legislative policy is given meaning and application” (Gaus 1931, 123).

In the title of his 1993 Gaus Award Lecture, Francis Rourke posed the deceptively simple question, “Whose Bureaucracy Is This, Anyway?” His subtitle was “Congress, the President, and Public Administration.” Rourke, a pioneer in the field of bureaucratic politics, concluded that federal administration was constitutionally and politically under the “joint custody” of Congress and the president. Clearly, Congress has formidable constitutional authority and responsibility for the structure and operation of the executive branch. A great deal of political science research demonstrates that the legislature and its committees are a major political force in federal administration. Even as the older “iron triangle” model gives way to newer approaches, no one (other than misguided reformers) could reasonably answer Rourke's question and exclude Congress. Its oversight, influence, and intervention in agency operations on behalf of policy objectives and incumbency are central features of contemporary federal administration.

As someone who has reported on this Association for two decades, who has profited from what I have learned from you, I am deeply honored to deliver this lecture, following such major figures who have connected political science to the real world as Lee Hamilton, Donna Shalala, Pat Moynihan, and, of course, Dick Cheney. Big time.

This collection of rich, provocative essays heralds a new opportunity for the reinvigoration of political science. Our premise, and the premise of our essayists, is that the term “area studies” is a misnomer. The political scientists whose works have focused on specific world regions have yielded significant theoretical and conceptual contributions for the discipline, both in the past and in the present.

Area studies in the United States is under siege. Government and foundations are turning their attention and funds elsewhere. Although they operate from very diffrent quarters, critics are taking area studies harshly to task for both alleged errors of commission and omission. Yet mine is an optimistic message. These difficulties must be seen within the context of a change in the demographic composition of graduate studies in the U.S. An infusion of intellectual energy from foreign graduate students and post-docs is leading to a reinvention of traditional area studies as global networks of scholarly engagement. Over the longer term these networks, and the scholarship they will create and sustain, bode well for the continued intellectual vitality of this field of scholarship.

I see four areas where the study of postsocialism has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, One is in providing an ideal laboratory for comparison. Here, I refer to three aspects of the region. First, it contains a large number of cases—28 in all and a good deal more, once we take into account “patch-work” politics and economics of the Russian Federation, for example. Second, the “great transformation,” to borrow from Polanyi and to refer in this instance to an even “greater” process involving the construction of economic and political regimes, nations, and states, deals with virtually all the fundamental issues of politics. Finally, the region exhibits enormous variation in political and economic outcomes, whether we focus on economic and political regime types and the institutional details of these regimes; economic performance, levels of economic development, types of economic reforms, and the role of foreign capital; the age and size of the state and its capacity to define and defend borders, command compliance and extract resources; and the national composition of the population. At the same time, causes are limited, largely because of the homogenizing effects of state socialism and the temporal similarities in when these great transformations commenced. This combination of variable outcomes and constrained causes is, of course, precisely what comparativists value.

In this brief overview, I argue that Africanist contributions to the study of politics have not been insignificant. While Africanists, like many other comparativists, have felt uncomfortable about the imperialist aspirations of rational choice, they increasingly see the future as a time when theoretical and methodological pluralism will prevail.

For political scientists studying the Middle East, the invitation to discuss the possible relevance of their work to comparative politics in general is a welcome and rare opportunity. There is, one senses, a gap between the Middle East political science community and the mainstream disciplinary generalists. To the extent that they even care about being part of the field, some Middle East political scientists feel ghettoized—their region and their work are ignored. Some feel as well that mainstream comparative politics theorizing has not offered much toward better understanding to Middle East politics. Such concerns motivated the establishment of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which organizes sessions in conjunction with, yet separate from, the main program at the APSA Annual Meeting. It is noteworthy that some of the most imaginative recent work on Middle East politics draws from anthropology, political economy, social history, and critical cultural and literary theory. “The Middle East political science community” is not populated exclusively by political scientists.

I begin with three general points about the relationship of area studies to political science, before turning to the specific contributions that Asia and China studies have made in advancing knowledge in political science.

It took some gentle prodding from professors Cynthia McClintock and John Harbeson, conveners of this session, to persuade me to participate. The reason for my reluctance may be obvious, considering the composition of this panel. My distinguished colleagues can speak about “them” when referring to the contributions of scholars from the regions on which they specialize. This, I gather, allows them some degree of objectivity when summarizing and assessing the works of their colleagues in the respective regions; instead, when I analyze the contributions of Latin Americans, I analyze “us.”

Census 2000 is over; the debate over adjusting the census is not. In this essay I respond to a number of points from Anderson and Fienberg (2001) and report some of the results from Census 2000.

In late August 2000, at APSA's Annual Meeting, a panel of political scientists offered forecasts for the 2000 presidential election. Although they differed in particulars, most of the forecasters' models incorporated a measure of economic growth plus the president's approval rating. Because the economy was prospering and President Clinton enjoyed phenomenal approval numbers for the eighth year of office, the consensus prediction was a Democratic (Gore) victory by upwards of 6 percentage points. Although political scientists had offered forecasts before previous presidential elections, these political scientists' predictions for 2000 attracted more interest than usual. Their predictions drew exceptional interest both during the campaign, when nobody knew for sure how the election would turn out, and after, when the forecasters had to account for their mistakes.

APSA is pleased to recognize the following political science faculty who received campuswide awards for teaching excellence in the 2000–2001 academic year. APSA and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, annually recognize award winning faculty by inviting them to the APSA Honors Reception, issuing them a certificate noting their accomplishment, and announcing their awards in PS and on the APSA web site. Know someone who should be on this list? Go to <www.apsanet.org/teach/2001awards.cfm> to submit information.

Instructors constantly encourage students to learn and process information. Brock and Cameron assert, “Individuals process information, learn concepts, and solve problems in different ways” (1999, 251). Some students learn by listening, others learn by taking notes, more learn by seeing, and still others learn by doing and saying. Yet in many college class-rooms, the dominant teaching method is the traditional lecture. While lecturing may be a necessary teaching technique, it is often insufficient for teaching a large number of students with varying learning preferences.

Introduction

In recent years, the availability of online source material and online papers has increased instructors' concerns regarding plagiarism in the classroom. Many instructors do not realize, however, that the digital revolution has also created a niche for fast and (at least somewhat) reliable plagiarism-detection software.

In the interest of providing graduate students with information and advice concerning their graduate careers, APSA has begun a series of efforts to identify “good practices” or “best practices” with respect to a number of aspects of graduate education. The thought is that faculty, junior and senior, may serve as sources of useful information that supplements what departments provide to their own students, At a minimum, from these efforts, students would be able to learn of a variety of perspectives, some of which might be different from those to which they had already been exposed by their own advisors and other faculty with whom they have studied.

I am struck by how similar the process of constructing a prospectus is to developing plans for a new house. One starts with a desired plot of land and an uncertain vision of an eventual home. The plot of land is terrain to exploit. The vision is of something to be comfortable with and, ideally, something of which to be proud. Getting there, however, is a very bewildering process. An architectural plan and specifications serve as the blueprint—the prospectus—that provides the basis for approval for moving ahead. The chief concerns on the part of the permit reviewers is whether “it will stand up” and whether it meets appropriate planning and construction criteria. The chief concerns of the prospective owner are: “How much will it cost?” “Can it be built within a reasonable amount of time?” and, “Will it look good enough when done?”

You are feeling relief that your coursework is drawing to a close. You have become somewhat competent at going to class, discussing materials, and passing tests. However, you have a sense of dread that keeps creeping up on you every time you try to think of “the topic” for your dissertation. You look to the senior graduate students and even ask them questions about how they found their topic. Divine revelation seems to have hit them and you wonder when your turn will come. But they seem to be all-knowing, more like budding faculty now than one of you. So you try to fight the notions of self-doubt about whether you can actually find a topic and start the quest of finding someone to help you. You naturally turn to the professor whom you “know the best.” Is this the right choice? No one seems to know; you just have this sense that you want to complete the process as painlessly as possible. As questions swirl inside your head—from how to choose an advisor to what might be the right way to pick a dissertation topic—you may ask yourself what the process of writing your dissertation proposal will really be like.

Student preparing dissertation proposals may benefit from many sorts of interactions with faculty members. Here I consider the different sorts of advice and support that faculty may provide ina variety of different roles and relationships to students.

The central research questions that I wanted to pursue in my dissertation were clear to me early in my graduate school career. I wanted to explore why some groups in the United States were so woefully unrepresented in many of the nation's high-level political offices. In 1991, when I began to think more concretely about my topic, there were only two women serving in the U.S. Senate, and the literature exploring the experiences of women candidates was very limited. Because of the seeming injustice of this situation, I quickly knew I wanted to jump into this area of research to see if I could shed some light on what was causing the enormous discrepancy in the number of men and women being elected to top offices.