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The Politics of American Political Scientists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

Everett Carll Ladd Jr.  and
Seymour Martin Lipset
Everett Carll Ladd Jr.
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Seymour Martin Lipset
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

At the heart of the debates which have resounded around political science these past few years are charges and countercharges as to the “politics” of the contenders. Terms like conservative, liberal and radical are no longer reserved for analysis of positions in the larger society; they have become part of the regular vocabulary with which political scientists evaluate their colleagues. This increase in visible and self-conscious political dissensus extends, of course, throughout the university, but it has left a special mark on political science and the other social sciences where the issues and objects of political disagreement are so enmeshed with the regular subject matter of the discipline.

In spite of all of the discussion, and the now seemingly general recognition that the politics of members of the profession has a lot to do with its development and contributions, we still don't have very much firm information on the distribution of political views among the approximately 6,000 faculty members regularly engaged in the teaching of political science in the United States. There have been a number of studies, of course, of party identification and voting behavior, showing political science to be one of the most Democratic fields in academe.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Spring 1971 , pp. 135 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1971

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References

1 Spaulding, Charles B. and Turner, Henry A., “Political Orientation and Field of Specialization Among College Professors,” Sociology of Education, 47 (Summer 1968), p. 253.Google Scholar Other studies showing essentially the same distribution, include Yee, Robert, “Faculty Participation in the 1960 Presidential Election,” Western Political Quarterly, 16 (March 1963), pp. 213–220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stanley Eitzen, D. and Maranell, Gary M., “The Political Affiliations of College Professors, Social Forces, 47 (December 1968), pp. 145–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Spaulding and Turner, loc. cit.

3 One useful, although limited, investigation of the opinions of political scientists on the war was reported by Almond, Gabriel, et al., in the Communications section of the American Political Science Review, 64 (June 1970), pp. 589–590.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 One modest body of data is provided by Ladd, , “American University Teachers and Opposition to the Vietnam War,” Minerva, 8 (October 1970), pp. 553–555.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For example, Alan Wolfe has written that “political science Is one of those professions in which radical organizing does not make sense. Something seems to happen to people when they become political scientists, or maybe people who become political scientists were strange to begin with. But whatever the causal relationship, this profession is one of the least movable there is. (Economics may be worse.) Allied disciplines such as sociology and history have recognizable subgroups of scholars whose dissents from the prevailing orthodoxies were well-known to incipent radicals…. Radicals, in a few words, do not really exist in the discipline of political science.” “The Professional Mystique,” in Wolfe, Alan and Surkin, Marvin (eds.), An End to Political Science (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 304–305.Google Scholar

6 These surveys were conducted with the financial support of the Carnegie Commission and the United States Office of Education, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The interpretations expressed in this publication are, of course, solely the responsibility of the authors.

7 A disproportionate random sampling procedure was used to select colleges and universities, in order to obtain adequate numbers of Institutions of various types and characteristics. The 303 schools thus chosen include 57 junior colleges, 168 four-year colleges and 78 universities. Next, a six in seven random sample of faculty was drawn from the rosters of the included institutions, yielding a sample of 100,315. A very high return of 60,028 completed questionnaires (60%) was achieved as a result of the standing of the sponsors (The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the American Council on Education), the careful administration of the survey, and the systematic follow-up with faculty not initially responding. The returned questionnaires, finally, were differentially weighted, adjusting the data for the disproportionate sampling of Institutions and for the unequal rates of response. Tabulations from the weighted data of this survey, then, may be taken as reasonably representative of the entire population of teaching faculty at colleges and universities In the United States.

8 See Rosenberg, Morris, Occupations and Values (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Davis, James A., Undergraduate Career Decisions (Chicago, Illinois: Aldine, 1965).Google Scholar

9 A factor analysis and orthogonal rotation was performed on the data.

10 Space does not permit us to provide the text of all of the questions in the four scales or to describe precisely the construction of each scale. This information is available upon request.

11 We are using ideology in the sense Converse, Philip has (“The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Apter, David, ed., Ideology and Discontent [New York: The Free Press, 1964], pp. 215–216)Google Scholar, as the imposition of “a relatively abstract and far-reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting policy significance over time [are] evaluated.” The four scales are very highly intercorrelated (Pearson rs):

12 The survey question was: “In what religion were you raised?”