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Assumed to be Universal: The Leap from Data to Knowledge in the American Political Science Review

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Polity

Abstract

The language scholars use to describe research findings has potentially enormous implications for how a science of politics develops. Consider the history of marked and unmarked terms in the American Political Science Review. Modifiers that mark reported data as spatially or temporally “different” (versus linguistically leaving the data unmarked and thus implying that the information is universal and “normal”) reflect predominant power relations. Marking, furthermore, can contribute to future power relations. Finally, knowledge claims that are made without acute attention to the marking of data are likely to be faulty. Because the implications for a science of politics are neither politically nor analytically innocent, political scientists should reveal (rather than conceal) and foreground (rather than background) the geographic and temporal origins of their data.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon Stimson, eds., Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  2. We are using the term “American” here in its common usage—that is, to refer to the United States.

  3. In the IR subfield, this tension has been discussed. See, for example, Stanley Hoffman, “An American Social Science: International Relations,” Daedalus 106 (Summer 1977): 41–60; Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, “Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? An Introduction,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7 (September 2007): 287–312.

  4. Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.

  5. Gallie's seminal work on “essentially contested concepts” draws attention to these choices, but we suspect that Gallie's criteria for what constitutes “essential contestedness” may be too restrictive. Much—perhaps all—language embeds assumptions derived from particular places and time. See Walter B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956): 167–98. For a discussion of Gallie's work, see David Collier, Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, and Andra Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (October 2006): 211–46.

  6. Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (June 2009): 137–61.

  7. Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 113.

  8. Ibid.

  9. We leave aside the influence of particular researchers on research findings—something that Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar rightly highlight. See Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar, “Concept Formation in Political Science: An Anti-Naturalist Critique of Qualitative Methodology,” Perspectives on Politics 6 (September 2008): 503–17.

  10. For a broad review of the various ways in which “markedness” is understood and operationalized, see Edwin L. Battistella, The Logic of Markedness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  11. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60.

  12. Ibid., 60.

  13. See Arthur Spirling and David Carter, “Under the Influence? Intellectual Exchange in Political Science,” PS: Political Science and Politics 41 (April 2008): 375–78. Luke offers a decidedly more critical perspective on the APSR's influence. See Timothy W. Luke, “The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research,” New Political Science 21 (September 1999): 345–63.

  14. Lee Sigelman, “The Co-evolution of American Political Science and the ‘American Political Science Review’,” American Political Science Review 100 (November 2006): 463–64.

  15. We excluded the following: APSA Presidential Speeches and Meeting Proceedings, book reviews and notices, news and notes, Doctoral Dissertations in Political Science, bibliographical notes, communications, and editorial comments. Commentaries/comments on other APSR articles were included only if the comment contributed substantially new information or argumentation. Otherwise, such commentaries/comments were omitted from the database.

  16. See Maurice A. Low, “The Usurped Powers of the Senate,” American Political Science Review 1 (November 1906): 1–16.

  17. Henry S. Albinski, “The Canadian Senate: Politics and the Constitution,” American Political Science Review 57 (June 1963): 378–91.

  18. Larry M. Bartels, “Expectations and Preferences in Presidential Nominating Campaigns,” American Political Science Review 79 (September 1985): 804–15.

  19. James E. Campbell, “Presidential Coattails and Midterm Losses in State Legislative Elections,” American Political Science Review 80 (March 1986): 45–63.

  20. We are happy to provide the data on request.

  21. This percentage difference is significant at the 0.01 level, Z-value=16.856.

  22. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 264.

  23. Peter J. Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and Its False Prophets,” Foreign Affairs 79 (November–December 2000): 9–15.

  24. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 406.

  25. For one exploration of how this occurred in the study of African politics, see James S. Coleman and C.R.D. Halisi, “American Political Science and Tropical Africa: Universalism versus Relativism,” African Studies Review 26 (September–December 1983): 25–62.

  26. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, 217.

  27. On the impact of behavioralism across different subfields, see Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, “Political Science,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontainem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–101.

  28. Area-studies work on other world regions often had different conceits and therefore different limitations. For one critique of area-studies work, see Robert H. Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?” PS: Political Science and Politics 30 (June 1997): 166–69.

  29. Kristin Renwick Monroe, Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  30. Rational-choice approaches are a curious case. On the one hand, the models that scholars construct in such approaches are explicitly understood as heuristics. In this sense, rational choice is consistent with a post-positivist recognition of the variety of epistemological challenges involved in doing empirical research. On the other hand, such scholars have typically retained, or even embraced more closely, the assumption of scholarly value-neutrality. If so, these approaches may represent the apotheosis of scientism in the discipline.

  31. Oren, Our Enemies and US, 6.

  32. If the degree of markedness among all articles (U.S.-focused and non-U.S. focused) had changed in the postwar period, we might interpret this as evidence of a disciplinary shift toward assuming the general applicability of findings. Instead, such a change occurs only in the U.S.-focused articles. Therefore, it seems likely that the Cold War naturalized and normalized U.S.-derived categories. What was derived from the U.S. context was assumed to be natural and normal (and therefore unremarkable). This may have been the same in Soviet social-science journals, as a projected companion piece will examine.

  33. Lee Philip Sigelman, “Modernization and Administration: A Cross-Sectional Analysis,” PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1973. Sigelman's full vita may be found as a part of a tribute to (and reflection on) his career at: http://www.themonkeycage.org/sigelman%20vita.pdf (accessed September 2010).

  34. Thanks to Christopher Deering (personal communication) for sharing insights that prompt our understanding of Sigelman's editorship.

  35. For one statement of such an agent-centric, constructivist perspective, see Colin Hay, “Ideas and the Construction of Interests,” in Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, ed. Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65–82.

  36. We redid the analysis using articles through 2008 (rather than excluding those that had not yet seen ten years pass from publication). We separately analyzed the number of times a piece was cited specifically in subsequent APSR articles. Please contact the authors for the data.

  37. Paul J. Quirk, “The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict,” The American Political Science Review 83 (September 1989): 905–21.

  38. Andrew S. McFarland, “Interest Groups and Political Time: Cycles in America,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (July 1991): 257–84.

  39. John G. Peters and Susan Welch, “Political Corruption in America: A Search for Definitions and a Theory, or If Political Corruption is the Mainstream of American Politics, Why is It Not in the Mainstream of American Politics Research?” American Political Science Review 72 (September 1978): 974–84.

  40. Kathryn Firmin-Sellers, “The Politics of Property Rights,” American Political Science Review 89 (December 1995): 867–81.

  41. Robert H. Bates, “Institutions as Investments,” Journal of African Economies 6 (1996): 272–87.

  42. This would involve reading all 19,314 works listed as citing the original 2,316 APSR pieces in our database. Even if some of the 19,314 were duplicates, this would remain a monumental task. To address possible endogeneity, one might want to consider, for example, a variety of journals (e.g., those in different disciplines and with different conceptual and geographic foci) and evaluate a given journal's likelihood of preferring marked versus unmarked citations. One would also, ideally, take on the potentially confounding question of self-selection—that is, who does and who does not submit to which kinds of journals?

  43. For examples, see David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87 (December 1993): 845–55; David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49 (April 1997): 430–51; David Collier and Robert Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices about Concepts,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (July 1999): 537–65.

  44. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18.

  45. Richard M. Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  46. Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64 (December 1970): 1033–53.

  47. For one recent example, see Cheng Chen and Rudra Sil, “Stretching Postcommunism: Diversity, Context, and Comparative Historical Analysis,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23 (October–December 2007): 275–301.

  48. Collier and Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited.”

  49. Goertz, Social Science Concepts.

  50. Consider a definition of the welfare state. Citing Alexander Hicks, Goertz shows that a welfare state can be understood to consist of four elements, only three of which need be present for a state to qualify as such. Similarly, in Charles Ragin's fuzzy-set approach, states that have only two of the four elements might be considered “partially in” the set of welfare states. See Alexander Hicks, Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism: A Century of Income Security Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999); Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 29 and 38; and Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

  51. Bevir and Kedar, “Concept Formation in Political Science.” David Collier may be less inclined to such ontological naturalism than Bevir and Kedar suggest. See, for example, Collier, Hidalgo, and Maciuceanu, “Essentially Contested Concepts”; David Collier and John Gerring, eds., Concepts and Methods in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori (Routledge, 2009).

  52. For recent objections to pursuing such a goal, see Timothy Pachirat, “The Political in Political Ethnography: Reflections from an Industrialized Slaughterhouse on Perspective, Power, and Sight,” in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, ed. Edward Schatz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 143–62; Corey Shdaimah, Roland Stahl, and Sanford F. Schram, “When You Can See the Sky through Your Roof: Policy Analysis from the Bottom Up,” in Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, ed. Schatz, 255–74.

  53. One need not accept notions of an arithmetically cumulative science to believe that precision aids analysis and helps to build communities of knowledge. At a minimum, what advances is the “precision with which we vex each other.” See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 29.

  54. For examples, see Chitoshi Yanaga, “The Military and the Government in Japan,” American Political Science Review 35 (June 1941): 528–39; Alfred V. Boerner, “Foreign Government and Politics: Toward Reichsreform—The Reichsgaue,” American Political Science Review 33 (October 1939): 853–59; Arthur H. Steiner, “Fascist Italy's New Legislative System,” American Political Science Review 33 (June 1939): 456–65; Karl Loewenstein, “Autocracy Versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, I,” American Political Science Review 29 (August 1935): 571–93; Karl Loewenstein, “Autocracy versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, II,” American Political Science Review 29 (October 1935): 755–84; Joseph R. Starr, “The New Constitution of the Soviet Union,” American Political Science Review 30 (December 1936): 1143–52; Frederick L. Schuman, “The Political Theory of German Fascism,” American Political Science Review 28 (April 1934): 210–32; and Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II,” American Political Science Review 31 (August 1937): 638–58.

  55. As Burling noted in 1974, “political rule through heredity has come to an end.” See Robbins Burling, The Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 142.

  56. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951).

  57. Carl Friedrich and Z.K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969).

  58. Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London: The Pall Mall Press, 1972).

  59. See also Barrington Moore, “Foreign Government and Politics: The Influence of Ideas on Policies as Shown in the Collectivization of Agriculture in Russia,” American Political Science Review 41 (August 1947): 733–43; Merle Fainsod, “Controls and Tensions in the Soviet System,” American Political Science Review 44 (June 1950): 266–82; Arthur H. Steiner, “Current ‘Mass Line’ Tactics in Communist China,” American Political Science Review 45 (June 1951): 422–36; and Chao Kuo-Chün, “Mass Organizations in Mainland China,” American Political Science Review 48 (September 1954): 752–65.

  60. The idea that a morally superior idea would generate its own fulfillment would satisfy functionalists, but perhaps few others.

  61. Jason Brownlee, “Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies,” World Politics 59 (July 2007): 595–628. Similar concerns were expressed by Marina Ottaway and Martha Brill Olcott, “The Challenge of Semi-Authoritarianism,” Carnegie Paper No. 7, October 1999; Andreas Schedler, “The Democratic Revelation,” Journal of Democracy 11 (October 2000): 5–19; Ellen Lust-Okar and Amaney Jamal, “Rulers and Rules: Reassessing the Influence of Regime Type on Electoral Law Formation,” Comparative Political Studies 35 (April 2002): 337–66; Larry Jay Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 21–35; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 51–65.

  62. Mauro Calise and Theodore J. Lowi, Hyperpolitics: An Interactive Dictionary of Political Science Concepts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  63. Ibid., 100, emphasis added.

  64. See, for example, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism. Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  65. Calise and Lowi, Hyperpolitics, 172.

  66. Ibid.

  67. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

  68. For a nuanced consideration of how the term “party” has evolved, see Terence Ball, “Party,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 155–76.

  69. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for stimulating this line of thought. See Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).

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The authors thank Robert Adcock and Dvora Yanow for their extensive and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Appendix

Appendix

We compiled a database of all articles published by the APSR between 1906 and 2008. We began by coding the articles into nine categories: American (1), Comparative (2), International Relations (3), Theory (4), Political Thought and Political Philosophy (5), The State of The Discipline (6), Research Methods and Design (7), Teaching (8), and Other (9).

Articles from categories (1) and (2) were further coded, if they predominantly (at least 75 percent of the empirical evidence offered) considered single countries. Such single-country articles were then coded dichotomously, according to whether or not the title clearly identified the country discussed in the article. If the title did not make the country origin clear, we ascertained the point in the article at which the origin did become clear (e.g., page X out of Y total pages).

The general rule was such that if an article fit into several categories, for example American or Comparative and any other category, then preference was given to the American/Comparative categories and the article was coded accordingly. If an article discussed both domestic and international concepts/issues, the coding decision was based on the dependent variable. If the dependent variable was by convention from the IR subfield, we coded the article under category (3). If the dependent variable was by convention related to American or comparative, then this article was coded as either category (1) or (2).

In some cases, it was difficult to determine to what subfield an article belonged. As a general rule, in such cases we looked at examples used in the article. If the majority of examples were from IR, then the article was coded under category (3).

Many article titles did not specify the country of discussion. However, if a title contained some country-specific terms and concepts, we classified such articles as marked (i.e., making clear the country of origin). Titles that contained no country names but mentioned the following country-related concepts—Congress, Senate, primaries, House of Representatives, The Federal Trade Commission, The Department of the Navy, gerrymander, The New Deal, anti-lynching law, the War Industries Board, the War Department, the State Department, the Federal Reserve System, the National Security Council, the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, Appropriations Committee, and so forth for the United States; or House of Lords and House of Commons, and The Parliament Act of 1911 for Britain—were coded as marked. Examples of such articles include “Direct Primaries and the Second Ballot” by A.M. Holcombe (November 1911), “The Congressional Caucus of Today” by Wilder H. Haines (November 1915), “The Federal Trade Commission: The Development of the Law Which Led to Its Establishment” by James A. Fayne (February 1915), “The Historical Approach to the New Deal” by Charles A. Beard (February 1934), and “The Political Structure of the Federal Reserve System” by Michael D. Reagan (March 1961). For Britain, the following examples may be mentioned—“Amendments in House of Commons Procedure Since 1881” by Edward Porritt (November 1908), “Foreign Governments and Politics: Report on House of Lords Reform in Great Britain” by W.A. Rudlin (April 1933), and “The Parliament Act of 1911” by Alfred L.P. Dennis (May 1912).

In other cases, the reference to a particular country was revealed through the cumulative meaning of the title. Titles that contained the following words and concepts as House, the South, State, Presidential, Black, the Supreme Court, Federal Aid were coded as unmarked unless they had more specific indicators of the country discussed in the article. Combinations like House and Democrats, House and Congress, House and midterm elections, House and Senate or House and an election year clearly referred to the U.S. context and thus were coded as marked. Other examples of marked articles based on the cumulative meaning of the article titles include Southern contribution and Democratic coalition, State and Direct Primary, State and Presidential Primary, 1964 Presidential Election, and Black and 1984 and 1988 Presidential Elections. Some examples are “The Direct Primary and Party Structure: A Study of State Legislative Nominations” by V. O. Key, Jr. (March 1954), “Conditions for Party Leadership: The Case of the House Democrats” by Lewis A. Froman, Jr. and Randall B. Ripley (March 1965), “Interpreting House Midterm Elections: Toward A Measurement of the In-Party's ‘Expected’ Loss of Seats” by Barbara Hinckley (September 1967), “Electoral Choice and Popular Control of Public Policy: The Case of the 1966 House Elections” by John L. Sullivan and Robert E. O’Connor (December 1972), “A Test of Downsian Voter Rationality: 1964 Presidential Voting” by Norman Froehlich, Joe A. Oppenheimer, Jeffrey Smith, and Oran R. Young (March 1978), and “Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962–1981” by Jeffrey A. Segal (December 1984).

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Schatz, E., Maltseva, E. Assumed to be Universal: The Leap from Data to Knowledge in the American Political Science Review. Polity 44, 446–472 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.6

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