Abstract
On October 15, 2000, an anonymous political scientist (or group of them) sent an email over the signature “Mr. Perestroika.” Mr. Perestroika’s message was addressed to a handful of political scientists, and it invited the recipients to forward it to others. Within a few days, the message had spread throughout the community of political scientists in the US. Two weeks later, 125 scholars – including several of America’s best-known political scientists – signed a letter drafted by Yale professor Rogers Smith. They said the discipline was “in danger of alienating a larger and larger number of those who should be its active members, and contributing less and less to the kinds of understanding of politics that it is our responsibility to advance” (Eakin 2000).
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Notes
- 1.
The original text of the Perestroika email is available on the Internet, including on a website maintained by the University of North Texas: http://www.psci.unt.edu/enterline/mrperestroika.pdf. The complete text is also available in Jennifer S. Holmes, Approaches to Comparative Politics: Insights from Political Theory(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008):145–146.
- 2.
Dorian T. Warren, “Will the Perestroikniks Please Stand Up?” in Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed. Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005):223.
- 3.
Ibid. My own favorite example of this phenomenon was a paper presented at an APSA annual meeting which combined a rich, detailed analysis of election results with a game theoretical framework that could be made to conform to the facts only by applying far-fetched assumptions. Adding game theory to the paper’s title made it sound rigorous and up-to-date, but it added nothing to the paper’s explanatory power – quite to the contrary.
- 4.
Michael Coppedge, “Thickening Thin Concepts and Theories: Combining Large N and Small in Comparative Politics” Comparative Politics31:4, 1999, 467.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Schram’s views can be found in Sanford F. Schram, “Below: Should we be seeking explanation, or understanding? Political Science Research: From Theory to Practice,” Forthcoming as a “Core Essay” in the International Encyclopedia of Political Science; and Schram, “A Return to Politics: Perestroika, Pronesis and Postparadigmatic Political Science,” Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed. Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005):103–114.
- 7.
Gregory Kaska. “Perestroika: For an Ecumenical Science of Politics, post-autistic economics review, available at: http://www.btinternet.com/∼pae_news/Perestroika/Kaska.htm
- 8.
Kaska, op.cit.
- 9.
Kaska, op.cit.
- 10.
Rogers M. Smith, “Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More About Politics?” PS Online: 199. Available at: PSOnline www.apsanet.org
- 11.
Ibid., 201.
References
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Rigger, S. (2013). The Perestroika Movement in American Political Science and Its Lessons for Chinese Political Studies. In: Guo, S. (eds) Political Science and Chinese Political Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29590-4_10
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