Gary King - The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives

Any project involving so many authors, especially one involving 102 academics, is bound to be complicated. We are grateful to them for (mostly!) having eased the job by answering our repeated communications, following our rules, honoring the deadlines and, most importantly, producing thoughtful and stimulating essays. We thank Beverly MacMillen for superb assistance in keeping in touch with the authors, following who owed what when, and tracking various parts of the manuscript in bringing this book to fruition. We also thank our students, including Justin Grimmer at Harvard, who assisted in the development of our automated text analysis routines, Daniel Geary and Kathryn Smith of Boston College for assistance in copy-editing and specifying links between individual essays, and Curtiss L. Cobb and Daniel Butler at Stanford for helping make an initial hand-categorization of the essays into rubrics familiar to political scientists. Finally, our thanks go to Michael Kerns, our editor at Routledge who immediately saw the potential in our unconventional book proposal, and to his expert team, including Felisa Salvago-Keyes, Sin Findlay, and Heidi Cormode.

GK
KLS
NHN
July, 2008

This book highlights many new ideas about possible future research directions in the discipline of political science. Unlike most books, the ideas presented here are intended to be at the earliest, most formative stage before sustained research backs them up or knocks them down. Some may be completely wrong, but all are worth considering. To identify and evaluate ideas like these is crucial to our enterpriseto scholars considering promising directions for their next research projects, graduate students searching for dissertation topics, undergraduates seeking a subject for an honors thesis, teachers looking for innovative courses to add to the curriculum, colleagues proposing faculty slots, deans evaluating those proposals, and anyone seeking a differentiated, expansive, and thoughtful view of where the discipline of political science is headed. In that rare moment when your routine academic responsibilities are not consuming every waking moment, you are alone at your desk, and you have a moment to consider your future intellectual direction, perhaps you will find something in these 100 essays to move your agenda along.

The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives presents brand new or insufficiently appreciated ideas about some aspect of the discipline. Many of these ideas represent what at least one author thinks other political scientists should know but may not: because it derives from another subfield, has gotten lost in the publication onslaught, has not before appeared in print, or has been published but overlooked. Some of the ideas represent what at least one author thinks nonpolitical scientists should know, that is, something that is well known, at least to some political scientists, of which policymakers, journalists, or the public at large would do well to take note and that, in turn, should also cause other political scientists to pay attention.

More specifically, we posed the following two questions and asked a group of political scientists each to choose one of them to answer in a brief essay:

• To what as-yet-unanswered question should your area of political science devote more effort?
• What is one finding, substantive or methodological, from political science (or a specified subfield within political science) that you wish were more widely knownby, for example, the media, public officials, voters, academics in another discipline, or other political scientists?

We encouraged each contributor to write a brief, informal, risky speculation instead of a formal, documented analysis, and we limited each contribution to about 1000 words. Our goal is to present and spark new thinking and inquiry, not to summarize the discipline as it is today. The authors we selected represent biased views of the discipline, both individually and collectively, but it is precisely these biases about the future that we hope to convey. Other authors would certainly focus on a different set of ideas. Since the point of this book is to incubate and discover emerging ideas in political science, we did not dictate the agenda by choosing a series of topics and, then, selecting authors to expound on our pre-conceived themes. Instead, we selected the authors first and they generated the essays, which constitute one group of answers to the questions we posed to them.