Brother, Can You Paradigm?

Extract

Political science, if you haven't noticed, is a highly disjointed discipline. The staggering outpouring of articles and books produced each year testify to the prodigious energy of political scientists, but as we have been reminded over and over again in protest manifestos and addresses by presidents of the APSA, the discipline suffers from a chronic case of theoretical underdevelopment. Research methods have improved, to be sure, or at least more of us are “into” statistics these days, but despite the heroic efforts of functionalists, systems theorists, formal modelers, Marxists, and other more or less global thinkers, most empirical work in political science is either highly descriptive and exploratory, or is based on propositions drawn primarily from common sense speculation.

If political science lacks the kind of intellectual guidance that allegedly would stem from consensus on a macro-political theory a la Keynes, this does not mean that researchers in the discipline are left completely adrift. There may not be any ruling paradigm to shape their efforts, but political scientists still have firm ideas about what ought to be studied and what should be ignored. An inspection of political science journals during the past decade indicates that substantial agreement exists among political scientists about the subjects that demand their attention.