Innovation and Dialogue in Contemporary Political Science Preface

Political Science, it seems, is always at a crossroads. Unlike some more established disciplines it is less confident about what makes it distinctive in either method or substance. The core of the discipline is continually contested. There is no agreement on what should be considered as the principles of the discipline, the key methods, or even the core journals. The discipline encompasses everything from the most abstract of relativist philosophy to the application of complex econometric methods. It includes a vast array of sub-disciplines, some of which may think of themselves as disciplines in their own right. As Patrick Dunleavy suggests in this special issue, there is a continuing distinction between ‘political studies’ and ‘political science’. However, this division is just one of the many fissures within the discipline, such as the difference between domestic and international politics, and between theory and empirical research. There is little agreement on what the nature of political science is or what it should be.

The aim of this special issue is to develop dialogue as a mechanism for producing innovation in political science. There is certainly no intention to define what political science should be; rather, the collection of articles here should be viewed as an attempt to start a debate which can turn the fragmentation of the discipline into its strength. One of the current problems of political science is that it is divided into sub-disciplines, areas, methodologies and epistemologies. People working on the same substantive problem frequently fail to communicate because they differ on issues of methodology and/or epistemology. Debates in political science do not cut across social science or across the discipline but usually occur within subfields. The specialisation of the discipline has created artificial but high and impervious barriers. I was particularly struck by the assertion of Stefan Napel and Mika Widgrén (2005: 517–18) that ‘Scientists who study power in political and economic institutions seem divided into two disjoint methodological camps. The first one uses non-cooperative game theory … The second one stands in the tradition of cooperative game theory’. Of course, what they mean is that within their subfield there is a division over the type of game theory that is favoured. They ignore the fact that most studies of power in political and economic institutions use a whole range of approaches and understandings of power, many of which have nothing to do with game theory.

This narrowness, of which we are nearly all guilty, impoverishes the discipline. First, it limits the possibility of discovery. If we continually communicate within sub-disciplines, how will the discipline as a whole innovate? Second, rather than new discoveries, we get increasing specialisation. The debates become more arcane and refined and increasingly impenetrable except to the cognoscenti. As political science focuses more on the refinement of particular approaches — whether in postmodernist theory or formal mathematical modelling — the less relevant and accessible it becomes. Not only do we stop talking to each other but we stop talking to the rest of the world. Whilst there is undoubtedly a need to refine and improve our methods (as several papers in this issue suggest), we also need to remember the substantive issues of political science and remember that the role of social science is to shed light rather than to obfuscate. As Ian Shapiro has argued, ¹ political science should be problem driven — we should be trying to answer questions, explain political events, and not be driven by theory or methods.

Focussing on problems rather than approaches creates a way of resolving the conflicts within disciplines. As one of the papers in this issue by Justin Greaves and Wyn Grant illustrates, the bringing together of distinct disciplines — in this case, biology and political science — is not without difficulties, but it does allow for a unique approach to a particular problem. Whilst politics needs to turn increasingly to other sciences in order to tackle big problems (for example climate change or pandemics) it could first turn to itself. If political philosophers were to talk to econometricians, maybe this would open up the possibilities of new problems and questions, and show new ways of tackling those problems. We could learn by talking to each other. Looking at problems from different perspectives (as Graham Allison [1971] illustrated so well many years ago) reveals new insights. Dialogue within political science is a mechanism for innovation and a means for making politics more relevant to the rest of the world.

The journal Political Studies has never taken a particular philosophical or methodological line. Its aim has been to represent the diversity of the discipline by publishing what is best in any area of politics. This approach undoubtedly produces a diverse journal but it also means that it is a flagship for the variety of political science that is produced worldwide. In June 2008 we held a workshop at the University of Oxford which aimed to celebrate this diversity entitled ‘Dialogue and innovation in contemporary political science’ (it is the papers presented at the workshop with some additional papers which are published in this issue). The goal was to illustrate that innovation in political science will come not through further specialisation but through recognising and celebrating the diversity and pluralism of our discipline. If we have a manifesto it is first to develop respect within the discipline so that we all see the value of work that is carried out in different areas, with different assumptions and different methodologies. Once we respect each other we can begin to engage in ways that will help to develop new approaches to political science that build on our combined strength rather than being undermined by distrust. Political scientists can learn from each other.

This special issue, then, is intended to celebrate diversity and to encourage dialogue both within and beyond the discipline. There is no doubt that the next few years are going to be tough for social science, at least in the UK. One way that we can protect the discipline is by demonstrating its relevance to students and to the rest of society. Politics has relevance when it can help to explain and understand social and political problems, not through internal debates that do little to develop broader understandings of the way polities work. Scientists and politicians are starting to see that real world problems cannot be solved by technological solutions alone; they need social and political adaptation, and a pluralistic, open and innovative political science can make a significant contribution to helping the world resolve the key challenges of this century. We hope that the papers in this special issue, produced as part of the 60^th anniversary celebrations of the Political Studies Association, can contribute to building a new and open discipline of political science.