Erkki Berndtson

The Rise and Fall of American Political Science: Personalities, Quotations, Speculations

The article tries to link the development of American political science with a major concern of the discipline, democracy. However, the concrete forms of this development have been molded by different factors (e.g. practical politics, economic interests and cultural variants). Looking at the interplay of these factors, this paper traces the rise of American political science to a hegemonic position in the world, from the founding of the School of Political Science at Columbia University in 1880 to the heyday of behavioralism at the beginning of the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of Americas role as a superpower and with the growth of representative democracy. A possible decline in the position of American political science is envisaged because of changing international power relations, problems of representative democracy and the present diversification of the discipline, which may lead to a situation where there is no American nor any other geographically specific political science, but instead different political discourses depending on locality, situation and politics.

Review Essay: Power of Foundations and the American Ideology

In her book about large private American foundations, Joan Roelofs points out that “I wrote this book primarily to reveal the power that has been largely obscured both in popular accounts of our society and in the more specialized political science literature” (Roelofs, p. 197). Indeed, although foundations have received attention among scholars in recent years,1 their actions have not been analyzed from the power perspective.2 As a political

Introduction: Toward a Study of the Evolution of Political Science

In 1985, only four political science associations were over 50 years of age: the American, the Canadian, the Indian and the Finnish. In that year, on the occasion of its Jubilee, the Finnish Association, in collaboration with IPSA, organized a symposium on ’The Development and Institutionalization of Political Science: Centre-Periphery Relations and Other Crucial Concepts’, in Espoo, Finland, October 2-6, 1985. The theme for the symposium was appropriate for the occasion and linked closely to topical research interests within the IPSA. Furthermore, it reflects current efforts in Finnish political science to understand and explain changes and developments in the discipline both within Finland and elsewhere. Several relevant books and monographs have been published by Finnish authors recently, including a textbook on the history of Finnish political science (Nousiainen and Anckar, 1983), a thorough report on the history of the Finnish Political Science Association (Paakkunainen, 1985) and a historical analysis of conceptions of politics in Germany before World War II (Palonen, 1985). Unfortunately, most of these books are available in the Finnish language only. The 21 papers presented at the symposium fell into three broad categories: some dealt explicitly with centre-periphery relations in political science; others covered the tasks, shortcomings and future of political science; while several papers analyzed factors influencing the development and institutionalization of political science. This issue of the International Political Science Review includes a selection of papers from the third category. Some national case studies are excluded because they overlap with corresponding chapters in the International Handbook of Political Science. The symposium’s Finnish organizers intend to publish a separate proceedings volume, available in 1987.

Global Disciplinary Rankings and Images of Quality: The Case of Political Science

In his book Academic Tribes and Territories, Tony Becher describes how one of the continuing features of academic life is that almost everything is graded in more or less subtle ways. Scholars are ready to designate the leading journals in their discipline, they list institutions and departments in order of intellectual achievements and they rank implicitly and explicitly individual scholars (an outstanding researcher’, a student with the ‘first class mind’ and, often by implication or omission, those who are not so good) (Becher, 1989, pp. 56–7).

Pre-facing power. The study of power in American political science, 1920–1950

Contemporary debates on power usually analyze power through different faces (or dimensions) of power. The first three faces are closely tied to the development of American political science and sociology (Robert A. Dahl; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz; Steven Lukes). However, the perspective neglects the earlier study of power in the 1920s and 1930s. This article focuses on the concept of power in the works of two influential scholars of that period, Charles E. Merriam and Mary Parker Follett. It concludes that if political scientists in the 1950s and 1960s had paid more attention to Merriam’s and Follett’s work, research on power might have advanced in a more balanced and interesting way than has been the case.