Political Science is bullshit, Part 1: Old questions, new questions

 Political Science is bullshit.  There.  I said it.  This has been a long time coming, and I am not the only professor in the field giving the discipline the ole' stinkeye.  Let's do this thing.

Some disciplines move forward in fits and starts, trying to tackle the next big question.  Consider Physics.  Physics is a real-deal discipline.  They tackle hard problems, and make progress.  Sometimes the progress is incremental, and sometimes dramatic.  Thomas Kuhn's model in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides a lens for interpreting Physics, Chemistry and the other real sciences.  Once upon a time, I would have tried to defend Political Science as a real science, and I will still assert that the scientific method can be applied to discrete questions about politics, but as a discipline?  No.  Regardless, for those who have not read Kuhn, go read Kuhn.  Here, though, is the short, short version.  Within a discipline, a paradigm is established, which scientists use to generate and test hypotheses.  Operating within a paradigm is normal science, but within a paradigm, anomalies will start to accumulate-- anomalies which cannot be explained within the existing paradigm.  Eventually, the weight of those anomalies will become too great.  A new paradigm will be proposed that addresses the anomalies, while also maintaining the predictive power of the old paradigm, the old paradigm is replaced, and normal science can proceed within the new paradigm.  It is messier than that, for many reasons, but that's why you need to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Regardless, though, these disciplines follow the process of herky-jerky progress, after a fashion.  Progress, though.  What kind of progress does Political Science follow?  Diminishing marginal returns.  I cannot say that we learn nothing more, but while a Physics textbook newly printed today will be more useful than a 30 year old text, at least past a certain basic level, I look back at what Political Science could say 30 years ago, what we can say today, and the progress is so marginal as to be of minimal value except inasmuch as it addresses events themselves.

So consider some alternative fields.  Classics.  Read Homer, Sophocles, Ovid, Plato, Aristotle, and so forth.  The field hasn't changed because they are... the classics of a certain time and place.  Philosophy is essentially hero worship, not merely of a few Greeks, but of Kant, Heidegger, and a handful of others.  Read those, and you're done.  Does the field progress?  Not much.  Why not?  Because Kant finished A Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.  If all you are doing is blathering on about Kant, you have nothing of importance to say because Kant was the one who said it.  Are there a handful of philosophers working on more interesting, new work?  Sure, but on a scale, it is smaller.  Hence, the disciplinary problem.  Diminishing marginal returns.

To which is Political Science closer?  There are those within the discipline who do not even aspire to science, preferring touchy-feely bullshit and anti-scientific blather, which is as useful as Deepak Chopra, which is to say, a total scam.  Let's ignore them, to the degree that we can.  What about the Political Scientists who aspire to something higher?  Are they/we closer to the operation of modern Physics, or bound by the problems that beset modern Philosophy?

I must say, the latter.

Within my realm of game theory and social choice theory, we all live in the shadow of Kenneth Arrow and Anthony Downs.  Mostly, really Arrow.  Read Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, and everything else will appear to be either a minor extrapolation from Arrow, or a futile attempt to escape his "impossibility theorem."

We have had voting behavior explained, empirically, for half a century.  Oh, did you know Congress is polarized?  Should I keep going with the banal observations?  Pick up the American Political Science Review sometime.  It is supposed to be the flagship journal, but regardless of subdiscipline, the articles are tinkering around the edges.

Is it because we have anomalies that are hard to solve, and which require new scientific paradigms?  To be sure, there is much we do not know.  But perhaps we have reached the limits of the discipline, and what can be explored has been explored.  Perhaps the big stuff is just done, which is why what is being done ranges from picayune to bullshit.

Kuhn poses the following quandary.  If you are operating within one scientific paradigm, you cannot necessarily distinguish between a puzzle that can be solved within that paradigm using normal science, and an anomaly that requires a new paradigm.  So, hypothetically, if I am just stuck in my paradigm(s), I might look at things that I do not understand but see as relatively minor, in principle solvable using existing tools, but I might be wrong.  Those things I see as unexplained but minor might actually be demonstrations that my paradigm is, itself, in need of replacement.  That's not to say, "wrong," because Kuhn doesn't write about science in those terms.  Rather, one paradigm is replaced by another with more explanatory power.  Perhaps I see some glitch, which I interpret as a minor puzzle, but it actually shows that my whole way of looking at the discipline requires a new approach that I cannot yet conceive, like the replacement of Newtonian with Einsteinian models.

Maybe.  Of course, you cannot know until you see that new paradigm, and what you should do is try to remain open-minded.

The other things you can do are as follows.  You can ask yourself how much explanatory power your models have now, how much analytic power the older works of theory have, and you can observe where the discipline is.

And you can ask, is anyone even really fucking trying?  Take a look at the American Political Science Review, or the American Journal of Political Science sometime.  How petty are the ideas?

I'm going to continue this series.  Up next, where did the discipline stall?

Keller Williams, "Stupid Questions," live.  He uses looping in his live performances, and there are several recorded versions.  My favorite studio version is from Breathe.