Blogging the Annual Review of Political Science

Over at BHL, I'm blogging my way through a round of reading the 2013 and 2014 Annual Reviews of Political Science this summer.

Come to Montreal: IPSA, July 2014 International Political science Association World Congress, Montreal, July 19-24 2014 Congress theme: Challenges of Contemporary Governance Political scientists are often seen not merely as analysts of political matters, but as something akin to engineers sculpting the organisation of power. Globalisation has profoundly altered the work of political scientists, intensifying communication and exchange on issues pertaining to the way in which communities, societies, nations and the world itself are governed. The ambition of this international political science congress, to be held in Montreal, is to reflect upon contemporary evolutions in governance in the face of numerous challenges: Political, economic and social systems have become increasingly fragmented, rendering global strategic initiatives ever more complex The variety of values, attitudes and behaviours exhibited by individuals and groups makes for a greater and more diverse demand for inclusion and participation As the structures through which these interests are represented continue to expand, systems of governance become increasingly complex, more difficult to interpret and understand and less responsive to the uninitiated citizen There is a growing risk that the democratic quality of our political systems will deteriorate as a result of the rising influence and decision-making capacity of technical-administrative and technocratic experts For a given sector or type of organisation, comparative analysis and an experimental methodological approach should help better evaluate the performance of different forms of governance It may also be fruitful to focus on the various competitive strategies and means by which models of governance are promoted, or even imposed (in the name of ‘good governance’ demanded by international institutions, for example) Faced with these challenges, the multi-faceted phenomenon of governance requires a global, comprehensive and multi-tiered approach: from the local association or political party up to the international community, via regional integration or the national regulation of an economic sector. Adopting an approach to political science which is resolutely open to the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary collaborations, we must also support the circulation of theoretical frameworks and empirical approaches which are applicable in the northern and southern hemispheres, to the most developed nations and the panoply of emerging and developing countries. The main focus of this congress will be to generate the greatest possible number of concrete, innovative answers to the questions of citizens, their political, associative and socio-economic representatives and the policy makers who are working constantly to improve the quality of governance. The principal themes covered by this congress will be: International Political Economy International Relations Public Policy Analysis and Administrative Science Comparative Politics and Institutions Political Theory, Gender and Politics Urban and Regional Politics and Policies Political Attitudes and Behaviour Deadline for open panel proposals: July 1, 2014 Deadline for paper proposals (and closed panel proposals): October 7, 2014

Visiting Fulbright Chair, 2014-15

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University, 2014-15. 

The Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University in the Department of Political Science and the Research Group on Constitutional Studies is open to established or emerging scholars in political theory and political science, and open with respect to methodology. The Chair will pursue research in constitutionalism broadly construed; an interest in federalism in particular is desirable but not necessary. The ability to engage with scholars and students across methodologies—normative, empirical, intellectual-historical, jurisprudential, and formal, for example— is more important that particular areas of emphasis. The Visiting Fulbright Chair takes an active part in the intellectual life of RGCS and normally delivers one public lecture as well as one research paper to a works-in-progress workshop.

The stipend is $US 25,000 for a one-semester or one-year stay in 2014-15. Open to US citizens who do not reside in Canada. Application deadline is August 1, 2013; application information is here: http://www.fulbright.ca/programs/american-scholars/visiting-chairs-program.html Those interested in applying are welcome to contact Jacob Levy jtlevy@gmail.com and Caitlin McNamara CMcNamara@iie.org .

Add it to your calendar: IPSA, Montreal, 19-24 July 2014

No CFP yet, but information is here.

RIP Allan Calhamer

RIP Allan Calhamer, inventor of the greatest of polisci-gamer games, Diplomacy. http://www.suntimes.com/news/obituaries/18566253-418/lagrange-park-mailman-who-invented-board-game-diplomacy-is-dead-at-81.html …

CFA for editorship of JOP

Southern Political Science Association Invites Nominations and Applications for Editor of the Journal of Politics

Larry Dodd, President of the Southern Political Science Association, has appointed a Search Committee to select a new Editor for the Journal of Politics.  The incoming Editor will succeed Jan Leighley and Bill Mishler, whose editorial term will end on December 31, 2014. The new Editor will serve an initial four-year term, from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2018.

The members of the Search Committee are: Carol S. Weissert, Florida State University (chair); Jon Bond, Texas A&M University; Josh Clinton, Vanderbilt University; John Geer, Vanderbilt University; Bill Jacoby, Michigan State University; Jan Leighley, American University; Cherie Maestas, Florida State University; Jim Johnson, University of Rochester; Adam Sheingate, Johns Hopkins University, and Lee Walker, University of South Carolina.

The Search Committee seeks nominations and applications for the Editorship. Both individual and group candidates are equally welcome for consideration. Nominations and applications for the Editorship of the Journal of Politics should be sent to Carol S. Weissert, cweissert@fsu.edu.

Recommended reading: Carole Pateman's Skytte Lecture

Questions, Evidence and Political Theory   

Perspective

Two days ago I sent a grumpy note to a Canadian granting agency about some isues in the grant adjudication process. Yesterday I griped all day about FQRSC/ SSHRC/ Common CV forms. Nothing quite like having the US House of Representatives vote to defund NSF funding to one's whole discipline to put the Canadian annoyances into perspective.

Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism

Applications now being accepted for 2013-14. $US 25,000 stipend for a semester of research in residence at RGCS at McGill. (US citizens only, post-PhD.) See full description here.

What I bought at APSA

Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, George Klosko ed., OUP

Flanagan, Alcantra, and Le Dressay, Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights, MQUP

Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, OUP

Avigail Eisenberg, Reasons of Identity, OUP (new in paperback)

Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization:
Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations, OUP

Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, OUP

Catherine Zuckert. Political Philosophy in the 20th Century, CUP

Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, CUP

Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason CUP

Stedman-Jones ed, Cambridge History of 19th century political thought, CUP

Floyd and Stears, Political Philosophy vs History?, CUP

Andrei Marmor, Philosophy of Law, PUP

Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, PUP

Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte, PUP

Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty, PUP

Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and thre Republic, OUP

Chad Rector, Federations, Cornell UP

(OUP= Oxford, CUP=Cambridge, PUP=Princeton)

Poli sci rankings

Last week Kieran Healey made use of a clever online setup to solicit pairwise comparisons of sociology departments to yield a set of rankings. He then set one up for philosophy, too. The latter now has more than 100,000 votes and yields these rankings . Soc has more than 65,000 and yields these rankings.

He kindly went and set up a political science rankings widget. Go vote. here are the results. Let's test out the Condorcetian wisdom of crowds-- and, as noted in the other two cases, see whether we can't improve on the NRC rankings. Added advantage: not restricted to the U.S.

Update: The PSJR trolls managed to deliberately wreck this, just to show that they could.

What I've been reading: A promissory note

Once grant/fellowship/job application/recommendation season is over, I owe posts on three excellent books, one each from political theory, political philosophy, and political science:

Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment
Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory
James Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Garsten's and Kolers' books are immediate additions to my list for graduate students: "You want to aspire to write a dissertation that could, after a few years of post-PhD work, turn into something like that." In addition to their many substantive merits, they're each in very different ways exemplary in size and scope. They show how much can be accomplished with a well-defined project. They're each big and ambitious projects, going after fundamental questions in novel ways; and they each articulate and defend a sufficiently clear and interesting position that they can make real progress on those big questions within a few hundred pages.

Scott's book is of a different order of magnitude. It will take further reflection to feel confident of this, but I think it's the most important political science book of the 2000s of which I'm aware. I think political theorists aren't rushing to it the way we did to his earlier Seeing Like A State, but I recommend it to all those who appreciated that book-- or, for that matter, to those who appreciated Rousseau's Second Discourse, or Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, or Ferguson's Civil Society.

There are others to whom I'll be recommending it in a more antagonistic spirit-- not, "here, you'll appreciate this!" but rather, "here, you really need to read and understand this because it will correct your errors!" But that will have to wait for the real post.

What I've been reading: Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals

What if Max Weber had written like Isaiah Berlin?

I thought I'd read this book in grad school, but having seriously read it this summer I now suspect that I just skimmed a few chapters. The alternative is that by second year in graduate school I just knew so little social theory and so little history that my brain didn't have receptors for the ideas in this idea-rich book to latch on to-- which is, I admit, possible.

The book is deceptive: published by Penguin and written in a light, breezy, sometimes chatty, and lucid style, it looks like it should be a popular book on the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of the idea of civil society. In fact, there are books packed into most paragraphs-- many books read and, usually, books to be written. Like Weber, Gellner tosses out three-sentence ideas that make you (or at least me) stop and say-- "wow, if that's right it's hugely important, and I can see how it might be right, but figuring out whether it actually is right would take years."

In one respect the book has dated badly; there's a bit too much immediate-post-Cold-War smugness in putting down Marxists and Marxisms of all stripes. Which is not to say I think he's wrong on the merits-- but it gives the book a certain ugliness, not mitigated by his swipes and jabs at what we would now call neoliberalism.

But in other respects just the opposite is true. Certainly, the idea that Islam represented a world-historical idea, a great and important set of rival ideas and social organizations to liberalism, Marxism, and traditionalism, would probably interest a lot more people now than it did in 1994. Gellner is not loved by scholars of the Islamic world (any more than he is by anthropologists or analytic philosophers), but compared with most large-scale social theorists, he took the Islamic world seriously, and treated it as importantly normal and central rather than exotic and inexplicable. Crucially, he also treats it as changing over time, and as participating in modernization.

I probably would have preferred a book that was more about civil society and less about its rivals (Marxism, Islam, and pre-modern systems). I found his history and theory of Europe through the 19th century much more interesting than his mini-book about Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, useful though it is to try to offer a general account of the relationship between productive power and coercion that includes the Communist case.

But I think Gellner was in a mood to write something big and sweeping, and this certainly is that. It's more sweeping a theory of politics, economics, language, society, and religion than a 200-page book has any business being. And I wish that we were now 15 years into an era when people wrote books trying to understand whether the ideas in this book were right or not. Maybe we would be, if this book and Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History had been combined into one book. In any case I find them fascinating and provocative big ideas. Now that I've properly read it, I expect to return to this book many times.

In the short term, I'll be doing follow-up writing. Gellner treats civil society as dependent on the linguistically-unified nation-state in the sense and for the reasons he laid out in Nations and Nationalism, and on the "modular man" also developed in that book. Modular man can not only switch from job to job, from one sector of the economy to another, he can also switch from one local, religious, cultural, or associational attachment to another, with only national identity not being malleable in this way. And civil society depends on the existence of a state that is Weberian in function (it expropriates private holders of coercive power and subsequently monopolizes that power) and yet limited enough to allow for private and decentralized market and associational life.

My own view is that keeping the state limited in that way depends in some part on there being associations and groups in the social order that are not filled with modular men. If the only real loyalty is to the nation-state and loyalties are not separated among other social groups, the equilibrium Gellner praises is likely to be unstable. I think he's [very] broadly right about the forces that tend undermine social loyalties and transfer them to the nation-state, but he's entirely too sanguine that the result will just happen to be, and to remain, a stable outcome. He's also only broadly right about those forces, and social (religious, cultural, associational, federal) ties, organizations, and institutions have always been somewhat stronger, man always somewhat less modular, than he allows-- and I think this has been important for the development and stability of (in his sense) civil society.

I wish that I had read this book six or seven years ago, whether that would have been a first-real-reading or a first-serious-rereading.

FN: I had started to re-read this before this Crooked Timber thread alerted me that my colleague John Hall has published a new intellectual biography of Gellner, and prompted reflection on why Gellner isn't better appreciated, but the thread (and Scott McLemee's review of the Hall book) may well have shaped the way I thought about the book as I went.

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12; application deadline August 2

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12.

Open to US citizens (who are not also Canadian citizens or permanent residents). The Research Chair awards provide a fixed sum of US$25,000 for stays of 4 to 9 months (one semester or the full academic year). Click here to apply.

Specializations: Normative, jurisprudential, comparative, historical, or analytic/formal studies of constitutional theory and practice, with preference for studies that encompass some aspect of constitutional federalism. Methodologically open within political theory and political science, including intellectual and institutional history.

Additional Grant Activity: Candidates would be invited to take part in a faculty and graduate seminar, with respondents, focused on the chair’s work in progress.
Comments: The McGill University Department of Political Science is an internationally recognized Ph.D. granting department with 29 faculty members with interests spanning Canadian Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. Normative, comparative, Canadian, and jurisprudential research programs on constitutionalism and federalism are all represented within the department. The Research Group on Constitutional Studies, of which the visiting scholar will be a member during his or her visit, encompasses researchers from the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy and the Faculty of Law studying constitutional theory and its antecedents, jurisprudential pluralism and federalism, legal theory, and empirical constitutional politics.

Contact: Olga Naiberguer, Associate Director, International Programs, olga.naiberguer@mcgill.ca or
Jacob Levy, Department of Political Science, jacob.levy@mcgill.ca
www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience

Note: French language ability commensurate with the requirements of the project and the host institution is required. Facility with French not required but an asset.

Reading recommendation

I recommend very highly this Robert Goodin essay on the state and history of political science as a discipline via), from a new supplemetary volume to the Oxford Handbooks in Political Science.

While political theory is the least integrated field with the rest of the discipline (read the chapter for explanation of the measure), I'm struck by Table A1.4, the integrators of the discipline. John Rawls appears in the top category (the only person in that group who was never a member of a political science department). The next rank includes Barry, Elster, Hardin, Shapiro, and Przeworski; the next, Goodin, Habermas, and Sen. Walzer, Taylor, Mansbridge, Berlin, Lukes, Holmes, Adorno, Ackerman, Bordieu, Held, Sunstein... The theorists on the list are, I think, generationally set apart from the others on the list, overall. There are reasons for this, though I'd still wish it were otherwise. But theorists (and part-theorists, which is part of the point) are hardly so absent from the list as the most persecuted-feeling among my colleagues might have predicted.

Anyway: go read the whole thing! (Those charts at the back seem to me like a plausible resource for comps prep, for those who are into that kind of thing....)

No great surprise, but noteworthy:

Senate defeats Coburn amendment on NSF funding of political science.

Jeff Isaac in the Chronicle on political science

Jeffrey Isaac takes to the pages of the Chronicle to discuss political science, the NSF, and the Coburn amendment. Jeff has recently assumed the editorship of Perspectives on Politics, a journal in part meant to bridge the gap between peer-reviewed social science and public accessibility and relevance, and he urges the discipline to take the occasion of the NSF fight to reflect on that gap-- not to so emphasize our science-ness as to lose sight of our public-ness.

Elinor Ostrom

In 2008, political scientist Elinor Ostrom was awarded an honorary degree from McGill University. In 2009, she was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Coincidence? Well, yeah.

I've only met Professor Ostrom once, when her husband Vincent Ostrom guest-lectured in my class in... 2002, I guess. But I certainly know, admire, and draw on her work, and am delighted with this outcome!

See discussions from Henry Farrell, Sean Safford, Alex Tabarrok, Arnold Kling, and Mike Munger (and for giggles, click through Munger's link to the anonymous econ grad students blowing gaskets), among people who (unlike Paul Krugman and Steven Levitt) had heard of Ostrom before today.

Update: On Henry's post, be sure to read down the comments thread far enough to see the illuminating exchange between him and Pete Boettke.

Le fédéralisme multinational en perspective : un modèle viable ?

Colloque organisé par Michel Seymour à l’Université du Québec à Montréal

25-26-27 septembre 2009, salle D-R200 de l’UQAM (Pavillon Athanase-David, 1430 Saint-Denis)

Qu’est-ce que le fédéralisme multinational ? Quels sont les enjeux soulevés par la présence de plusieurs peuples au sein d’un État fédéral ? Est-ce que le fédéralisme apparaît tout indiqué pour gérer la diversité nationale ? Ces questions se posent au Canada depuis toujours, mais elles se posent aussi dans plusieurs autres sociétés. Des États fédéraux multinationaux tels que l’URSS, la Yougoslavie et la Tchécoslovaquie n’existent plus. La Belgique vacille face au défi d’accommoder la diversité nationale en son sein. Aussi, même si d’autres États multinationaux fédéraux ou quasi-fédéraux tels que l’Inde, l’Espagne et le Canada existent encore, la question de la viabilité de l’État fédéral multinational doit être soulevée.

Des questions plus spécifiques peuvent aussi être posées qui mettent en relation les expériences de sociétés particulières avec la problématique générale du fédéralisme multinational. Quelles sont les promesses du fédéralisme multinational canadien ? Que penser de la reconnaissance du Québec comme nation, de la résolution possible du déséquilibre fiscal, de la limitation du « pouvoir fédéral de dépenser », du rôle international que joue ou que pourrait jouer le Québec et du fédéralisme asymétrique ? S’agit-il d’éléments qui composent le fédéralisme multinational ?


More information is here.

Sigh.

I've complained before about the APSA online service for annual meeting papers, PROceedings, which until this year used the terrible, terrible allacademic.com interface.

Now PROceedings is gone, so that's good. APSA's now using SSRN, which has numerous advantages-- conference papers will automatically show up on an author's page of other SSRN working papers, for example. And SSRN generates a stable URL for each paper, which PROceedings didn't do.

But... look at this mess. SSRN is ideal for searches by paper title or author. And its specialized subject-matter journals allow for browsing. But dumping hundreds of APSA papers into an unsorted pile means that browsing in this context is impossible. The APSA annual meeting is very usefully sorted into lots of divisions and organized sections, and for that matter into individual panels, to help people find the papers they want to attend. None of that categorization is carried over to SSRN.

Compare the interface with the online meeting program, which is better than ever this year. You can browse by division, or browse by tme, or search by keyword, or...

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to browse through the program and, when you reach a paper or panel listing, click right on a hotlink to go to the paper?

Instead it seems that the idea is: browse the APSA program, find a paper you're interested in, click over to SSRN, search for just that paper by author name. You can neither get to the papers from the program, nor see the program categories when you're looking through the papers.

(The other problem with SSRN, of course, is that it lacks full-text searches, for no reason I understand. But that's a chronic problem with them, not distinctive to the conference site.)