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The Division of Political Science Into American and Non-American Politics: The Case of Legislatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

Gerhard Loewenberg
Gerhard Loewenberg*
Affiliation:
The University of Iowa
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Extract

When undergraduates want to study legislatures, more often than not their choice is limited to a course on Congress, although they may find a course on the legislative process which includes attention to state legislatures. This is hardly a cause for student discontent. The first, and often the only, ambition of political science students is to learn about the American system of government. That is why the introductory course in the discipline is usually a course in American government, why courses on state and local politics are entirely concerned with the United States, why courses on political parties are really about the Democratic and Republican parties, and why there are hardly any courses on the executive at all since the only subject in that area which is taught is the American presidency.

It was not always so. A century ago, as curricula in political science developed in American universities, a general, theoretical concept of politics, derived from continental and particularly German approaches to the subject predominated. The focus on American politics came a full generation later, inspired by a concern for citizenship training and by the prospect of large captive audiences in classrooms of students fulfilling teacher certification requirements.

America First was consistent with the mood of the United States in the 1920s, but less so in the 1930s and 1940s. In those decades student interest in non-American politics revived in response to the nation's involvement in world affairs, and this interest was expressed in the curriculum by separate courses, often misnamed “comparative government.” These were frequently courses in a series of major foreign governments, shaped by the writing and teaching of a new cohort of emigré faculty who revived the European influence on American political science. In this form the study of what was called “comparative government” gained a larger place in the curricula of departments of political science. But as a subfield of the discipline, comparative government remained too small, and the approach was too country-specific, to permit sub-specialization except by geographic areas. There was no place in it for courses on non-American legislatures, or executives, or political parties.

Type
Political Science: Bridging the Fields
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Summer 1984 , pp. 561 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1984

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References

1 Maisel, L. Sandy, “Teaching the Congressional (Legislative) Process, A Background Paper,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Denver, Colorado, September 2–5, 1982.Google Scholar

2 Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph, The Development of Political Science (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), p. 18.Google Scholar

3 The Teaching of Government, report by its Committee on Instruction (Charles Grove Haines, chairman) to the American Political Science Association, New York, NY, 1916, quoted in Somit and Tanenhaus, op. cit., p. 62.

4 Loewenberg, Gerhard, “New Directions in Comparative Political Research: A Review Essay,” Midwest Journal of Political Science XV (1971), 741–756.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For example, Jewell, Malcolm E. and Patterson, Samuel C., The Legislative Process in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Random House, in press)Google Scholar; Keefe, William J. and Ogul, Morris S., The American Legislative Process; Congress and the States, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977).Google Scholar

6 The state of scholarship on non-American legislatures will be apparent In the articles which Jewell, Malcolm E., Patterson, Samuel C. and I are editing for the Handbook of Legislative Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; cf. Pedersen, Mogens N., “Research on European Parliaments: A Review Article on Scholarly and Institutional Variety,” Legislative Studies Quarterly IX (1984), 505–529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 This might be regarded as a particular application of the ideas expressed by Miller, Warren E. In his presidential address entitled “The Role of Research in the Unification of a Discipline,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981), 9–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar