A New Handbook of Political Science - Chapter 1

1. Political Science: The Discipline
pp 3 - 49
Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann

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The New Handbook (TNH) provides striking evidence of the professional maturation of political science as a discipline. This involves increasing differentiation with more subdiscipline sophistication, and more sub-specialities. And increasing integration across the separate subdisciplines.

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The nature of a discpline - defining the word
OED - a branch of instruction, system of rules for conduct etc.
To boil down this chapter's approach: a branch of instruction (subject) with a system of rules or methodological consistencies. Involves a sense of standards of good conduct within the discipline.
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Other imagery, an art, a craft, a calling, a vocation (Weber, 1919)
A discipline's traditions provide/create a framework that focusses research and facilitates corroboration
A "discipline is a classic instance of a useful self-binding mechanism" and an organisation with its chiefs, indians, Young Turks and greybeards.
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The term profession indicates a certain attitude towards one's work. "A profession is a self-organising community, oriented toward certain well-defined tasks or functions. A professional community is characterised by certain self-imposed standards and norms".
Professions involve notions of roles and responsibilities and professional codes of ethics - all professionals are expected to adhere to them faithfully (APSA 1991)

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Disciplines are differentiated from one another in their substantive concerns, and by the methodologies they use. In chapter 35 Alker notes that political science does not have a single big methodological device all its own, the way many other disciplines do. [therefore] Political science is a discipline defined by its substantive concerns.

What is politics?
Politics is best characterised as the "constrained use of social power". The study of politics is the nature and source of those constraints and the techniques for the use of social power within those constraints.
Power, according to Dahl's (1957) old neo-Weberian definition is where: X has power over Y insofar as: (i) X is able to get Y to do something (ii) this is more to X's liking and (iii) which Y would not otherwise have done.
The important distinctions of polical power are that it is the constrained use of social power. It is not through use of physical force.
Lasswell (1950) had a purely distributional approach to politics as "who gets what, when, and how". This view is limiting because it is not super-temporal.

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The several sciences of politics
Minimalist definition of science as "systematic enquiry, building toward an ever more highly-differentiated set of ordered propositions about the empirical world"
A logical positivist might assert science's function is to find a set of "covering laws" so strong that even a single counter example would suffice to falsify them.
The truths of political science are inevitably destined to remain probabilistic in form.
Why couldn't a covering law include a stochastic element?

The subjects of study in politics have an ontological status different from billiard balls, which makes the logical positivists covering law model inappropriate for them.
Two points - those in the rationalist school might try to reduce human behaviour/reaction to a billiard-ball like simplicity/determinism. Secondly, human beings and billard balls may be more similar than at first glance - both have idiosyncracies it is a question of degree and precision. To model the position of a billiard ball after x (7?) bounces, one needs to know the exact location of every particle in the universe... (Not a profound or sincere criticism.)

(Political) conventions and circumstances can change, (in a way that physical laws can not) so the truths uncovered are less universal than those of Newtonian physics. It is necessary to (re)model the circumstances and conventions, in order to make the propositions more ordered and more precise (though not covering law status).

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The maturation of the profession
The behavioural revolution took place in the 60s, and early behavioural revolutionaries were devoted to dismissing the formalisms of politics - institutions, organisational charts, constitutional myths and legal fictions - as pure sham.
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A generation later, Rational Choice modellers sought initially to reduce all politics to the interplay of narrow material self interest, squeezing out principles and values, and history and institutions.
(An example of a famous victory of the rational choice school - Popkin et al, 1976)
We are now in a period of rapprochement led by the rise of the "new-institutionalism". Political scientists no longer think in the eith/or term of agency or structure, interests or institutions as the driving forces: now, virtually all serious students of the discipline woud say it is a matter of a judicious blend of both (see chapters 5, 6, 26, 28, 29).
Now it is about analysing behaviour in the contexts of institutional factors and opportunity structures (see chapters 9 and 10).
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More examples of how rapprochement has been reached on page 12. Basically it's a compromise between science and history.
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There is no false consensus on foundational issues.
"A diverse and dispersed community of scholars" - specialisation suggests a loose collection of sub-disciplines rather than a single unified discipline
Easier to have a consensus on foundational issues in sciences that are governed by the "one true theory of science (logical positivism or its many alternatives), than in terms of the one true theory of society (structural-functionalism, systems theory, rational choice or whatever)"
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It is the simple sharing of nuts and bolts - the building blocks of science - that helps consolidate a shared sense of the discipline (Elster 1989).
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Classic texts
A list of most of the usual suspects on page 15.
Footnote referencing Marshall's (1990) In Praise of Sociology which defines the discipline in terms of 10 post war classic texts
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Recurring themes
The contraints in politics (as in - the constrained use of social power) are an important running theme.
There is a renewed recognition of the importance of institutional factors in political life. A renewed appreciation of history and happenstance, rules and regimes as constraining forces in political life. It has long been commonplace in some quarters that "history matters", e.g. Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) notions of "frozen cleavages", Moore's (1966) developmental methods of communism, fascism or parliamentary democracy, Burnham's (1970) theories of critical realignments.
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"Political scientists are once again according a central role to people's beliefs and what lies behind them" (pp. 19). Page 18 has some examples of how this happens. The more deeply nested aspects of social organisation ... socio-economic forces... rational choice scholars relaxing heroic assumptions of complete information and perfect rationality.. "constitution writers do not enjoy an entirely free hand - even those "highest" laws are embedded in some higher-order principles, rules and procedures, albeit of an extra-legal sort"

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New Voices
Postmodernism has made modest inroads in part because its central precepts are cast on such a high theoretical plane (White 1991 - Political Theory and Postmodernism CUP).
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Contemporary political science is decidedly post-positivist. Subjective factors are taken into account.

Bibliometric analysis of the discipline pages 23 - 44
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Parliamentary and Electoral Reform

Looking at ways to reform parliament (both houses).

Article (on BBC.co.uk 21/09/09) about comments Greg Dyke made, claiming a 'conspiracy' exists to prevent radical change of the political system. His suggestions include looking at 'ideas such as moving the seat of democracy out of Westminster, a fully elected upper chamber with no whipping system, proportional representation, cutting the number of MPs by half, and reforming their pay and expenses, he added.' (more)