Academic Articles & Research Papers

The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology

Whenever a concept is packaged as new, social scientists are apt to be wary, and for good reason. Fads come and go. The enormous number of dissertations, schools of thought, books, and articles based upon prefixes such as post, neo, and whi...

The Growth and Development of Experimental Research in Political Science

Although political scientists have long expressed skepticism about the prospects for experimental science, an analysis of the first hundred volumes of the American Political Science Review reveals that randomized experiments have grown in i...

The Political Science of Political Science

PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped. The same might be said of political science. In...

Political Science and Beyond: Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association

This is the Presidential Address delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 30 to September 2, 2007. The theme is that the discipline of political science has benefited from imports from many...

The History of Political Science

Political science is once again rediscovering its past and retelling its history. In last few years several works have brought an end to an era when our discipline's historical reflections were limited to rather brief presidential addresses...

Scholasticism in Political Science

Criticism of trends in political science centers on specific methodologies—quantitative methods or rational choice. However, the more worrisome development is scholasticism—a tendency for research to become overspecialized and ingrown. I de...

The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review

In November of 1906, the 3-year-old American Political Science Association, boasting a membership of “nearly four hundred” (Shaw 1907, 185), launched a journal devoted to scholarship, reviews, and news of the profession. The fledgling Ameri...

Political Theory and Political Science

The too-often unhappy 'marriage' of political theory and political science has long been a source of anguish for both partners. Should this troubled partnership be dissolved? Or might this marriage yet be saved? Ball answers the former ques...

Experimentation in Political Science

Abstract This article mentions that the number of experiments has increased dramatically in political science in the last thirty-five years because of their power for making causal inferences. It directly confronts the Achilles heel of expe...

Juegos y Cultura de Paz: estrategias de enseñanza para una Educación para la Ciudadanía Global

Este estudio explora cómo los juegos digitales pueden ser utilizados como estrategias de enseñanza para promover la Cultura de Paz y la Educación para la Ciudadanía Global. Utilizando un enfoque cualitativo basado en la revisión bibliográfi...

Deconsolidation of Liberal Democracy in the Baltic States. The Issue of Compliance with the EU Standards at Institutional and Value Levels

This article analyses compliance of the post-Soviet Baltic States with the EU liberal-democratic standards, at both institutional and value levels. The authors prove that fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession did not dete...

Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science

Scholars in comparative politics and international relations routinely evaluate causal hypotheses by referring tocounterfactual caseswhere a hypothesized causal factor is supposed to have been absent. The methodological status and the viabi...

Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm

I provide a narrative of the emergence of an expressly articulated “political science” in the Scottish Enlightenment. Political science was designed by Hume, Smith, and others to advance both a Newtonian method for the study of politics and...

Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science

This article compares two theories of human rationality that have found application in political science: procedural, bounded rationality from contemporary cognitive psychology, and global, substantive rationality from economics. Using exam...

Political Theory, Political Science and the End of Civic Engagement

Within a span of fifteen years civic engagement has become a cottage industry in political science and political theory, but the term has now outlived its usefulness and exemplifies Giovanni Sartori's worry about conceptual “stretching.” Th...

Political Theory and Political Science

Like Rachel, Jacob's beloved but still childless bride, who asked herself and the Lord each morning, “Am I?,” or “Can I?,” so presidents of this Association on these annual occasions intermittently ask, “Are we a science?,” or “Can we becom...

For a More Public Political Science

Introductions designed to furnish brief yet inviting summaries of each issue's contents.Ever since June 2005, when I became Perspectives Book Review Editor, I have written Introductions that do more than summarize.I have sought to highlight...

A New Handbook of Political Science

Abstract Includes contributions from over 40 political scientists from around the world and surveys developments in the discipline over the past 20 years. Discusses each of the main sub‐disciplines: political institutions, political behavio...

Political Science: The Science of Politics

International Encyclopedia of Political Science

With entries from leading international scholars from around the world, the International Encyclopedia of Political Science provides a definitive, comprehensive picture of all aspects of political life, recognizing its theoretical foundatio...