Political Science is bullshit, Part II: When we learned what we learned

 In Part I of "biting the hand that fed me," I described the current state of Political Science as something closer to Philosophy than Physics, in the following way.  Philosophy is not so much a discipline of discovery as one of revisiting and reinterpreting the canon.  That canon began, depending on a particular scholar's emphasis, in Greece, hit a stride with some continental writers in the 17th through the 19th Centuries, and trailed off ignominiously with postmodern navel-gazing bullshit in the mid-20 Century, unless you have the misfortune of dealing with a postmodernist philosopher who actually likes that shit, in which case... run.  Run away, run far, run fast, but whatever you do, run.  Regardless, do philosophers do anything new?  Occasionally.  Rarely.  Mostly, they offer new, post-27th wave intersectional feminist interpretations of Kierkegaard, or something.  Intellectually speaking, the discipline is deader'n Cleese's parrot.

Physics?  Physics periodically stalls on the hardest of problems, yet they make progress.  Every once in a while, they do things like measure gravitational waves.  Does that count as living in Einstein's shadow?  Well, then every quirk of a quark exists outside his shadow.  The physical sciences make progress.

Where does Political Science fit?  In Part I, I claimed that Political Science, despite the fact that many of us have sought to operate in a methodological manner closer to Physics, is more akin to Philosophy.  Nailed to the perch, but perhaps with better plumage than Philosophy.

If so, then if I am to construct a syllabus, how old could I go?  In Philosophy classes, you read Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, yadda, yadda, yadda.  To hell with Foucault and Derrida.  Do you need to read anything after the early 20th Century?  Not really.  How about Political Science?  Let's see what kind of syllabus I can construct.

Game theory and the mathematics of democracy

Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951).  At 71 years young, this is by far the most important work on the topic, unsurpassed, and basically, it makes everything else in the field only marginally relevant at best.  Why?  This is the book in which Arrow derived "the impossibility theorem," demonstrating that democracy, by any coherent definition, is mathematically impossible.

Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957).  Just a tad younger than Arrow, but anyone attempting to work in the field works mainly with Downs, because if you admit Arrow's correctness, there's no point.  Downs says, yeah, Arrow was right, but fuck it.  Let's assume otherwise, because without such assumptions, there would be no point.  All of spatial theory basically follows from Downs (who was really just extrapolating from a 1929 paper by Hotelling).  Read Downs, and you know more than the people publishing today, who cite him without having read him.

James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962).  We can almost end here, at a 60 year old book.  This is a system-level, constitution-level understanding of democracy, policy, and collective agreements.  Lefties in particular need to read it, as the foundational work in public choice Economics, so that they understand that yes, there is another side.

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965).  But that's why we don't end with Buchanan & Tullock.  You need to understand "the collective action problem."  Once you understand that, you can extrapolate to damn-near anything.

OK, we're done here.  The newest book was still older than I am.

Empirical analysis of public opinion and voting behavior

Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes, The American Voter (1960).  Party ID.  That's it.  You're done.  Our statistical models have gotten more complicated, but Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes nailed it in '60.  As in, they nailed its feet to the perch so that you don't notice that the topic has been dead for 60 years.  Funnel of causality.  Done.

Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," (1964).  This is actually an article, by the same "Converse" as above, but this is the most important article ever written in studies of American politics.  People don't know shit about ideology, their beliefs across issues are unconnected, there are issue publics... Converse got it in '64.

John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, (1992).  This is the third-newest work on my syllabus, at 30 years old, and hence, still older than all of my students, and when it was written, I didn't even own a computer.  I was writing my assignments on an actual fucking typewriter.  Anyway, a full-blown model of public opinion/elite dynamics that worked before polarization and changes to the media, and still works today.  Fuckin' awesome.

Done, and the newest book is still older than all of my students and my first computer.

Congress

Do you still need to read Mayhew '74/Fenno '73?  Yes.  This is the most boring question ever, but in 1974, David Mayhew published Congress: The Electoral Connection, positing the notion of single-minded reelection seekers in order to see how much explanatory power the idea had, and in '73, Richard Fenno published Congressmen in Committees, describing the three goals that Members of Congress had in varying degrees.  Yeah, you still need to read them.  Closin' in on half a century!

Keith Krehbiel, Pivotal Politics (1998).  Closing in on when my students were alive!  No, we aren't there yet, but we're getting close!  This is a great, and controversial book which still drives scholarship.  What if there were no parties?  How much explanatory power would you have, just using legislators' ideologies?  Very cool.  Wrong?  Yeah, but very cool.

One more, and I may be biased given that Eric Schickler was chair of my dissertation committee, but Disjointed Pluralism (2001).  This is the newest book on the syllabus anywhere, and some of my students were alive!  This book is fuckin' amazing.  It is a system-level analysis of how Congress changes over time, how reforms happen, and then those structures continue as relics of a past era, creating a weird, rolling series of rules from different eras that cannot make sense together unless broken apart by the historical sequence that created them.  As institutional analysis, this is as good as it gets.

Done.  I don't even know what comes next, after Eric's book.  Everything since then is minor and petty.  Eric did not exactly kill the field, but the magnitude of what he accomplished in that book makes the next steps just... I dunno.

The President

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power (1960).  This one has gone through many editions, but the first edition was in '60.  Basically, FDR knew the deal [ducks and covers] because it's all about informal power.  There.  Done.  Also, you can't do much more than study presidents one at a time because a) small samples, and b) they're too idiosyncratic, so social science is kind of hard.

That means a lot of the field is either minor or shoddy.  Move on with your life and don't torture yourself with Skowronek.  (I forgive you, Eric.)

________________________

I put a breaking point here, because this is the kind of material that I would either assign directly, or perhaps have to put on some comp, and the exercise is to construct minimalist versions.  Now, let's extend a bit.  What else would I insist that you read, and why?

Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960).  If you want to understand the concept of deterrence, this is the book.  That makes it arguably the central text in certain schools of thought for international relations, but also bargaining theory, hence relevant to large areas of study in any country's internal, domestic politics.  That's why I reference it so frequently.  62 years young.

And at this point, I am struggling a bit.  There are very good books I could recommend on specific topics.  More narrow empirical questions, theoretical questions, big topics of the day (today or a past day), but as I have attempted to construct this list, the idea in my head has been something more universal.  While I can recommend a book like Riker's Liberalism Against Populism, can you get enough of the core ideas from Buchanan & Tullock?  Perhaps, so let's keep it concise.  As an example of clear, well-constructed empirical analysis, did Wolfinger & Rosenstone nail voter turnout in Who Votes?  Yes, but that is a more narrow question.  I was going for breadth.  There are always books about the topic of the day, some of which will be outstanding (amid many that are less so).  My goal has been to see what I can do to write something that is a) broadly relevant, and b) as old as possible that still covers what one would really want.

This list still covers a lot.  And the newest book is 2001.

One might pose at least two explanations.  It is possible that I am right, and that Political Science has stalled.  It answered the big questions, or at least, has not made much progress for a long time on many questions.  Relatedly, it may just not have made as much progress on the areas I have studied, although my observation last week was that I can look at the journals, and even glancing at the other subfields, they still look picayune to me.

Another possibility, though, is the "crotchety, old bastard" phenomenon.  Consider a person whom I shall not name, but whom I once knew, and fortunately no longer have in my life.  As in, the lazy motherfucker is dead.  Lazy Motherfucker came from a generation in which the scholarly theory known as "realignment" was particularly important.  The theory dates back originally to an article by V.O. Key, and then flourished through the works of other scholars, such that many decades later, I even had a "realignment" question on my comps.  But then David Mayhew came along a bit after my comps and wrote a book debunking the whole thing.  Great book, but the problem with that kind of book is that nobody cites it.  There's no need, when you kill the field.

The problem with someone like Lazy MotherStudentfucker* (yup) was that he was lazy.  He read about realignment, and ain't no way he was changin' his mind.  So, I always had to assign Mayhew to counter his lazy bullshit.

If you are sufficiently old, you get stuck in your ways, and as Max Planck said, science progresses one funeral at a time.  And hey, I don't have to assign Mayhew's realignment book anymore, nor address realignment in any way!  Science!

So am I now that guy?  The one saying, oh fuck it, you don't need to read anything new?

Hmmm....

What's the newest thing on my syllabi this semester?  July, 2022.  That's right, the newest thing I am teaching this semester is a whole three months old, added to my syllabus the month before classes started.

I teach a course on debunkery called "Interrogating Bullshit."  The big news on the debunkery front this past summer was that everything you have ever been told or read about "depression" is bullshit.  Nature published the new meta-analysis by Moncrieff et al., showing that the seratonin theory of depression has essentially zero empirical support.  Depression is not a neuro-chemical imbalance.

Yeah, I read.  I keep up.  Moncrieff et al.'s paper?  That's big.  Of course, it's big because it is the debunking of a core tenet of Psychology, which is more religion than science, but it is big.  Moncrieff-level bigness happens all the time in Psychology.  Why?  Because there is so much bullshit to debunk.  A whole discipline's worth!

Do I read?  Yes.  Can I recognize when something is big and new?  Yup.

I'm just not really seeing it in Political Science.  The books I recommended above?  Those were big.  The physical sciences are still tackling big problems.  Even Psychology is incrementally tackling the big task of tearing down its own bullshit amid the replication crisis.

What the hell is Political Science doing?

Hmmm... let's see what kinds of answers I can pull out of somewhere.

Tampa Red & Big Maceo, "Can't You Read."

*To be fair, I have no idea how much energy he had in the act of fucking his student.  His known laziness was in his professional conduct.  Perhaps he was more energetic in his unprofessional conduct.