Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T08:14:16.443Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political Science and Its Audience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

Kenneth Prewitt
Kenneth Prewitt
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I start a course on Politics and Policy by asking 100 or so students from several dozen countries to say what comes to mind when they hear the word “science.” Terms mentioned are objectivity, truth-seeking, hypothesis testing, experiments, data, logic, and the like. I write them on the blackboard. I then ask what comes to mind to mind when they hear the word “politics.” Here they mention power, manipulation, ambition, conflict, partisanship, spin, ideology, and, less often, vision and purpose. This list is put on the blackboard. Then, with two word lists before us, I comment that because they have just joined a school of public policy they must have a view of what goes into thinking up, arguing about, designing, and implementing policy. After a bit of discussion it gradually it sinks in. Policy is the meeting ground of science and politics. It is where the two word-lists on the blackboard come together and thrash it out, neither side ever quite vanishing the other.

Type
Symposium
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 781 - 784
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Behavioral and Social Science Research: A National Resource. 1982. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2–3.Google Scholar
Bulmer Martin, and John Bulmer. 1982. “Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1922–29.” Minerva 20 (1–2): 59–82.Google Scholar
Dahl Robert A. 2002. How Democratic is the American Constitution? New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Karl Barry. 1974. Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lacey Michael J., and Mary O. Furner, eds. 1993. The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Prewitt Kenneth. 1995. “Social Science and Private Philanthropy: The Quest for Social Relevance.” In Essays on Philanthropy, No. 15. Bloomington: Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Ross Dorothy. 1991. The Origins of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smelser Neil J., and Dean R. Gerstein, eds. 1986. Behavioral and Social Science: Fifty Years of Discovery. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.Google Scholar
Strother. 1929. Letter from Presidential Assistant to George E. Vincent, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, October 22. Cited in Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics, Barry Karl. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 214.Google Scholar
Walker Francis A. 1960. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Fifth Annual Report. Cited in Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origins of Labor Statistics, James Leiby. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar