This issue completes the one-hundredth volume of the Review, the inaugural issue of which was published in November 1906. To mark this occasion, two years ago we began planning a centennial observance on the theme of “the evolution of political science.” My collaborator in this project, as the Co-Editor of what evolved into an entire issue of the Review, has been Editorial Board member M. Elizabeth Sanders, who joined me in overseeing the review and selection processes.

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 American Political Science Review was not the first political science journal, having been preceded by Political Science Quarterly (founded in 1886) and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1890). Nor, at first, was it even the foremost political science journal. Its founding editor, W. W. Willoughby of Johns Hopkins (1906–1916), and his immediate successor, John A. Fairlie of the University of Illinois (1917–1925), faced numerous challenges, not least that of finding enough papers to fill each issue; even after two decades the Review was still publishing “nearly all of the papers which have come to the editor…as well as articles from other sources” (Fairlie 1926, 182). For some time thereafter, Fairlie's successor, Frederic A. Ogg of the University of Wisconsin, handled just three dozen or so manuscripts per year (Patterson 1994, 6).

In the evolution of the social sciences, disciplines (forms of research, training, and instruction) preceded professions (distinct occupational identities). Although professionalism has often been viewed as a conservative force, what was arguably the most prominent transformation in the history of political science was the result of a professional challenge to the discipline. The founding of the American Political Science Association represented not only an ideological break with some of the principal voices in the discipline but a reformulation of the reigning vision of the relationship between political science and politics. Despite the markedly different circumstances, the dissenting claims emanating from the subfield of political theory during the behavioral era reflected, in many respects, a similar form of confrontation.

American political science is a congenitally unsettled discipline, witnessing a number of movements designed to reorient its fundamental character. Four prominent movements are compared here: the statism accompanying the discipline's early professionalization, the pluralism of the late 1910s and early 1920s, behavioralism, and the Caucus for a New Political Science (with a brief glance at the more recent Perestroika). Of these movements, only the first and third clearly succeeded. The discipline has proven very hard to shift. Despite the rhetoric that accompanied behavioralism, both it and statism were revolutions without enemies within the discipline (other than those appearing after they succeeded), and therein lies the key to their success.

I argue that comparative politics has been shaped by two “Great Punctuations” that, on each occasion, transformed our conceptions of what the subfield is and what we do. Just before a punctuation occurs, the subfield seems especially coherent, united by a set of common assumptions, methods, theories, and so on, which are then punctuated by a series of events that destroys faith in them. The subfield then reconstitutes itself around new assumptions, until, just as coherence is achieved, the next punctuation occurs. To demonstrate why the sub-field has evolved in this way, I draw on probability theory to argue that the desire to be a predictive science causes us to imagine the world to be far more predictable than it actually is. This results in the development of theories that are surprised by events; hence the peculiar trajectory of the subfield.

This essay sketches the strictures put on political scholarship from the early days of patrician amateurs to modern academic professionals, with special attention given to the emergence of political science and the methodological and ideological issues that developed within that discipline. It is argued herein that although some degree of ethno-class variety was eventually achieved in academia, there has been a lag in ideological diversity. Political heterodoxy often has been discouraged and suppressed. Nevertheless some modest democratic advances have been made in academia in the last half-century.

Political science has mirrored the political culture even as it has explained it, and at critical times the gendering of political science has left it unprepared to explain notable changes in political life. Here, we examine political science as a gendered institution across three critical time periods: the founding era of the discipline, the 1970s and 1980s, and the present. For each period, we assess the presence, position, and experiences of women in the profession; the norms of gender within the discipline; and the way political science deals with women and gender as subject matter. In general, the position of women in the discipline has improved dramatically over the course of the discipline's first century, and gender-related research has become more institutionalized. Nevertheless, political science has not yet developed a full appreciation of gender as an analytical construct.

Since the 1970s, Latino politics research has evolved, alternately responding to real-world political events and demographic changes, embracing new and emerging trends in the broader discipline, and offering new insights of its own that contribute to the development of political science. In so doing, there have emerged both an intellectual foundation and a growing body of empirical results, each of which challenges long-held theories and findings in the discipline more broadly. Thus, Latino politics research is central in refining and broadening our understanding of American politics. Immigration, social marginality, and their uncertain status as a racial or ethnic minority make this population unique and raise important obstacles in applying existing interpretations and orthodoxies from the discipline's other traditions to this emerging and rapidly growing segment of American society. The major contributions of this line of inquiry are identified in five key areas: pluralism, group identity and mobilization, political participation, institutions and representation, and assimilation. We conclude with some thoughts regarding how the evolution of American society and its Latino population will pose important questions for future generations of political scientists.

To judge by the absence of religion from the pages of the American Political Science Review in its first century, most political scientists have embraced a secular understanding of the political world. We explore the evolving status of religion in the discipline by examining patterns of scholarly inquiry in the discipline's flagship journal. After finding religion an (at best) marginal topic and rejecting some plausible hypotheses for this outcome, we examine the major reasons religion has received so little attention—the intellectual origins of the discipline, the social background of practitioners, the complexity of religious measurements, and the event-driven agenda of political science. Despite the resurgence of scholarly interest in religion during the 1980s, the status of the subfield remains tenuous because of the intellectual isolation of research on the topic.

Despite the postwar rise of behavioralism in political science, the Review gave surprising prominence to traditional political theory during Harvey C. Mansfield's ten-year term as editor (1956–1965), all the more striking for the prominence of Leo Strauss and his students during the first half of this period. This article considers several factors that help explain the surprising recognition given this subfield and its unexpected bargaining power.

Political theory's relationship with political science over the last 60 years has been fraught with ambiguity and weighed down by epistemological tensions in a manner that suggests an old and extremely prickly marriage. To some, political theory has been nothing less than the theoretical foundation of political science as a discipline—the conceptual and epistemological ground for each and every subfield, cherished and nurtured by tolerant, even ecumenical political science departments. To others, it has been merely a distraction, a needless normative diversion from the empirical responsibilities of hard social science by those who do not understand its rigors. As was perhaps more common in the first half of the twentieth century, some have continued to see in political science and political theory complementary perspectives that need and entail one another, two sides of how we establish and balance the human sciences, doing empirical science even as we assess its epistemological standards and methods. But others have regarded the two as preternaturally antagonistic. At the height of the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, a few self-styled “hardboiled” scientists dismissed theory altogether as little more than mythology: moralizing fairy tales dressed up as a kind of prescriptive philosophy that confounded facts and values. But the real crux of the debate between political theory and political science has been the relationship of political science to politics, as exemplified in historian Alfred A. Cobban's scathing comment excoriating political science as mostly a device for avoiding politics without achieving science“The political scientist, in so far as he wishes to remain a scientist, is limited to the study of techniques. A good deal of what is called political science, I must confess, seems, to me a device, invented by academic persons, avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science” (Cobban 1960, 240).. Cobban's challenge was taken up by many theorists, including Leo Strauss, whose blunt rebuke to the “new” political science suggesting that it was doing little more than fiddling while Rome was burning inaugurated a debate that in 1962 set this mostly fire-proof journal aflame“One may say (of the new political science),” wrote Strauss, “that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns”(Strauss 1962, 327)..

This article revisits the critique of political science outlined in Bernard Crick's (1959) The American Science of Politics. Although this work inspired a number of subsequent critics of the discipline and survives in the footnotes of many historical accounts of political science, its contents are now largely overlooked or forgotten. Having reconstructed its main arguments, I explore the mixed critical response this work elicited on publication, and then seek to explain why its influence was so short-lived. An important reason for its inability to deflect the discipline from its chosen course lies in the very distinctive republican–liberal project that guided Crick's thinking in these years. A critical reengagement with this text is worthwhile, I argue, both because it illustrates the importance of the migration of ideas and thinkers to the tradition of political science critique, and because Crick provides a strikingly different kind of argument for methodological pluralism and political relevance than that which is offered today by critics of political science.

Now largely forgotten, Lindsay Rogers addressed public and scholarly audiences, crossed intradisciplinary boundaries, and wrote about developments in political science. His career illuminates key changes in American political science, including a turn away from traditional institutionalism and engagement as a public intellectual and toward quantification and the academy, and a separation of political theory from empirical research. Understanding why his work was left behind reveals important events and mechanisms that produced disciplinary change. Rogers's work was lost from the canon because of political and institutional developments in political science, including academic survey researchers' efforts to maintain polling's legitimacy after the 1948 election; efforts by proponents of the behavioral revolution that oriented the discipline toward hypothesis-testing but also made it more internally segmented; and the scholarly entrepreneurs' creation and cultivation of institutions, curricula, and networks of scholars, which developed and promulgated empirically oriented quantitative approaches.

In its evolution over the past century, mainstream political science has failed to take account of changes in the development of interpretive approaches to politics. Adherents of the dominant approaches to political inquiry have misunderstood the nature of meaning of social and political action and the import of that meaning for the explanation of political life. Or, to put it more sharply, its understanding of the nature and importance the meaning of political life and of interpretive political inquiry have stagnated, not evolved. As a consequence, although conventional empirical and rationalist modes of explanation capture many aspects of political life, they misunderstand or ignore other important political phenomena or important dimensions to politics. Hermeneutic modes of interpretative theory offer the prospect of a competing and/or complementary perspective on the explanation of politics. The prospects for a modern version of practical reason that would allow for a more engaged political science are available but not widely recognizedIt is appropriate here to make several points concerning terminology. The literal English translation of the German word “hermeneutics” is interpretation. In the modern world, the term was first applied in the human sciences in attempts to offer explanations of ambiguous and allegorical passages of the Bible and the Torah. In the twentieth century, the term has come to mean something more than that. The German term has been widely adopted for English use and refers to a specific approach to understanding and explaining in the social sciences and humanities. For present purposes, it refers to the attempt to explain social and political life in terms of the language and complex meaning of that political action for social and political actors. I elaborate on the nature of hermeneutic-interpretive explanation later in this essay. For the remainder of the essay, I use hermeneutic-interpretation to refer to those modes of interpretation that see distinctively human behavior and understanding as linguistically mediated. I use interpretation and interpretive theory in a more general sense, referring to any form of social science that emphasizes understanding the meaning that social behavior has for actors, whether or not that perspective emphasizes the centrality of language. I hope to make these distinctions clear in my account of the evolution of this perspective. The term “practical reason” borrows from, but is not identical with, Aristotle's discussion of phronesis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle distinguishes between theoria, knowledge about those things that are not open to deliberation and human decision (e.g., the structure of the solar system) and phronesis, knowledge about those things that are subject to deliberation and intersubjective agreement, for example, how ought one to live one's life or what kind of constitution a society ought to have. In this respect, interpretive accounts, and hermeneutic interpretation in particular, emphasize the importance of public engagement with the political life under examination. For an argument from a somewhat different perspective that political science needs to become more publicly engaged, see Putnam (2003). The German term verstehen also found its way into Anglo-American social science lexicon. It refers to the interpretive understanding of the intended meaning and significance that an action has for an actor performing it..

Woodrow Wilson sought to establish a new kind of statesmanship for the American regime and a new science of politics. He intended the latter to support the former, so that the practicing politician and the studious academic would not talk past one another. His efforts to redirect the discipline away from a natural science orthodoxy and subdisciplinary fragmentation were largely ignored during his time because he failed to resolve the core disciplinary tension between political science and political power. Efforts similar to Wilson's have resurfaced periodically as a result, generating an ongoing contentiousness about the character of the discipline. We predict that the struggle over such fundamental matters will continue unabated, for that struggle is rooted in the very object of our studies.

The “policy scientist of democracy” was a model for engaged scholarship invented and embodied by Harold D. Lasswell. This disciplinary persona emerged in Lasswell's writings and wartime consultancies during the 1940s, well before he announced in his APSA presidential address, printed in the Review precisely 50 years ago, that political science was “the policy science par excellence.” The policy scientist of democracy knew all about the process of elite decision making, and he put his knowledge into practice by advising those in power, sharing in important decisions, and furthering the cause of dignity. Although Lasswell formulated this ambitious vision near the zenith of his influence, the discipline accorded the ideal—and Lasswell—a mixed reception. Some heralded the policy scientist of democracy; others observed a contradictory figure, at once positivist and value-laden, elitist and democratic, heroic and implausible. The conflicted response exemplifies Lasswell's legacy. The policy scientist of democracy was—and is—too demanding and too contradictory a hero. But the vital questions Lasswell grappled with still must be asked a century into the discipline's development: what is the role of the political scientist in a democratic society? Do political scientists have any obligation to inform or shape policy? Are there democratic values that political science should serve, and if so, what are they? Lasswell never satisfactorily answered these questions. But in asking and trying to answer them—in his writings and in his own career—he was guided by a profound and inspiring conviction: Political science has a unique ability, and even perhaps a special obligation, to engage with issues of democratic choice that fundamentally affect the life circumstances of citizens.

The Chicago School of Political Science, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, is widely known for its reconception of the study of politics as a scientific endeavor on the model of the natural sciences. Less attention has been devoted to the genesis of the school itself. In this article, we examine the scientific vision, faculty, curriculum, and supporting institutions of the Chicago School. The creation of the Chicago School, we find, required the construction of a faculty committed to its vision of the science of politics, the muster of resources to support efforts in research and education, and the formation of curriculum to educate students in its precepts and methods. Its success as an intellectual endeavor, we argue, depended not only on the articulation of the intellectual goals but also, crucially, on the confluence of disciplinary receptiveness, institutional opportunity, and entrepreneurial talent in support of a science of politics.

Among European émigré intellectuals who came to the United States between 1925 and 1940, a small group of prolific, influential scholars who received appointments at major colleges and universities helped to restore the comparative approach to the study of political systems. That approach had been dominant in the early years of the discipline but had been lost during its Americanization in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The teaching and writing of these scholars contributed to the formulation of theoretical frameworks designed to facilitate cross-national comparison. When the purview of comparative politics expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to include the developing areas, the advantages of multination comparisons became even more evident.

Roughly two decades after the first issue of the American Political Science Review, sampling theory emerged to encourage learning about the many from the few. Once social scientists had worked out the selection procedures to deal with large and far-flung human populations, the stage was set for the scientific study of citizen behavior in national elections, as initially demonstrated by George Gallup in predicting the 1936 presidential race. This development unleashed a growing torrent of literature, which by now is simply overwhelming. The many high points in this literature could scarcely be listed, much less abstracted, in the brief compass allowed this essay. So I must invoke some severe selection principles in order to proceed.

A review of party-related articles in major political science journals over the past century reveals an increase in the incidence of such articles during the behavioral revolution and a decline in the proportion of studies that view parties holistically or in their organizational aspects and an increase in research on mass and legislative behavior. The essay calls for scholars of American parties to merge empirical findings with the generalist and normative concerns of an earlier age, to assess the recent advent of parties as ideologically focused instruments of policymaking.