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It’s All Political
Riding on a decade-long boom in undergraduate enrollments, the political science department is trying to make the most of its popularity.
May 2003
by James McElroy ’95
James McElroy is a freelance writer living in New Haven. His feature about the Yale Entrepreneurial Society appeared in the December issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
Never mind that since 1996 the number of Yale College seniors majoring in political science has jumped from 71 to 177, making it the second most popular undergraduate concentration at Yale—after history. Never mind that the poli sci department has created six new faculty positions and hired 17 new professors since 1999.
What you really need to know about Yale’s political science boom is that students have started to apply nicknames to the department’s increasingly popular courses—a sure sign of undergraduate esteem. Among this year’s offerings are “Mo-Fo-Po” (“The Moral Foundations of Politics,” taught by Ian Shapiro), “Cameron” (“The New Europe,” David Cameron), and “C & P” (“Crime and Punishment,” Gregory Huber, Ian Shapiro). At the beginning of this semester, Arthur Galston’s new class, “Leading Issues in Bioethics,” proved so popular that it had to relocate twice before ending up in the Law School auditorium.
At Yale College, a department has become truly influential once students outside of the major regularly choose to take one or more of its classes as part of their undergraduate education. And in the last five years, it seems that poli sci has entered the pantheon of such inescapable Yale departments as English, history, and American studies. Undergrads cannot stay away.
There has been an increased interest in politics around the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and particularly since the late 1990s, as the concept of a united world economy and polity known as “globalization” has taken hold. In the last 15 years, as the planet has adjusted to this “new world order,” all things political have become more complicated. Every year, governments around the world are rising, falling, or being divided. And at the same time, the world seems to get smaller and smaller. As our own citizens develop greater and greater ties outside of our borders—of the educational, economic, military, as well as political variety—the machinations of foreign governments seem to touch us here in the U.S. more than ever before. So, on the one hand, it seems only natural that there would be a surge of interest in political science.
However, Ian Shapiro, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science and chairman of the department, points out that other universities have not seen the same steep increases that Yale has in the past five years. “So the other part of it,” he says, “is having charismatic faculty who have gained a reputation for being good teachers. Then the students come flocking.”
In the late 1990s, the surge in political science majors and a cap on faculty made it difficult to provide enough of the seminars required by the major. What’s more, there was no room in the seminars for non-majors. By adding more faculty positions, Shapiro hopes that more non-majors will be able to enroll in the department’s seminars. But even after netting six new positions over the last four years, this goal has still not been realized. “The growth in the major has outpaced the growth in the faculty, so we’re still strapped,” says Shapiro. He says he expects to net another six to eight more faculty members over the next year or two.
The department’s growth has been fueled by more than undergraduate demand, though. In recent years, top departments throughout the country have all grown, compelling Yale to keep up. “Yale’s poli sci department has always been one of the very best in the country,” says Shapiro, “and the competition was expanding. Harvard has grown their government department to 70 people, Princeton is close to 60, and Michigan is close to 60. So, at fewer than 40, we’re still small.”
Shapiro emphasizes, however, that size is not everything. “A lot of big departments don’t have as many high-quality people as they should,” he says. “The reason we’re competitive is that all of our people are very high-quality.”
However, the definition of what makes a “high-quality” political science professor has become a bit loaded over the past decade. A struggle between differing political science methodologies that had been simmering throughout the 1990s boiled over on October 15, 2000, when an American poli sci professor wrote an anonymous mass e-mail attacking the preeminence in the discipline of scientific modeling based on “rational choice” theory at the expense of more philosophical approaches that emphasize cultural, psychological, and historical trends. This anonymous professor—who, one assumes, had read his Machiavelli—called himself “Mr. Perestroika” and succeeded in mobilizing many poli sci professors to rally to his cause.
Rational choice theory is based on a number of assertions, namely that human beings are goal-oriented, that we rank our goals according to their importance to us, and that we rationally choose what to do in order to accomplish our goals. If you accept this explanation of human behavior, you can then use statistics about people’s choices to produce mathematical models to predict how people will respond to future political and economic events.
No one, including Mr. Perestroika and his followers, disputes the usefulness of rational choice theory, data collection, and mathematical modeling in political science. However, it seems to the dissenters that some American political science professors believe that this methodology is the only legitimate mode of study in the field. This rigid attitude, they say, has influenced decisions regarding the hiring and promoting of faculty in departments around the country, as well as editorial decisions in academic journals.
A formal call for reform was addressed to the American Political Science Association by Rogers Smith—then a Yale professor and now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania—and signed by 222 tenured professors throughout the country. And the controversy rages on, both on the national level within organizations like the APSA and on a more localized level within individual departments.
The Yale department, however, has avoided such squabbling. Political scientists devoted to both philosophical and scientific approaches are well represented in the Yale department, and there does not seem to be any desire by either group to dominate the other, or even to identify themselves according to their methodologies.
“We’re wide open with respect to method,” says Shapiro. “We’ve been hiring quantitative people, qualitative people, theorists, empirical people, people who do big statistical work on huge numbers of countries, people who have an immense expertise on one country, and everything in between.”
In contrast to other political science departments around the country in which the battles highlighted by Mr. Perestroika are still being fought, Shapiro says, “This is a department in which there is not animosity among the faculty. There’s a culture of tolerance. That is the legacy of Bob Dahl—he set the tone.”
Robert Dahl, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, earned his PhD from Yale’s newly formed government department in 1940. After a brief stint as a federal employee in Washington, D.C., followed by three years of military service in Europe during World War II, Dahl returned to Yale in 1946 to teach. During the 1950s, he helped lead a minor revolution in the discipline by introducing scientifically based behavioral analysis into the field. However, as chairman of what became Yale’s political science department, from 1957 to 1962, Dahl pushed for a broad approach to the study of politics and seems to have foreseen the methodological struggle brought to light 40 years later by Mr. Perestroika.
Beginning in the late 1950s, even as he was emerging as one of the leading practitioners of the new scientific approach to the study of politics, Dahl made a point of pushing his colleagues not to dismiss other research methods, including the more abstract and philosophical. In 1960, he presented a paper during an international political science conference in Rome entitled “Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest.” The “successful protest” in question could be interpreted as the work by Dahl and others to establish scientific behavioral analysis as an important tool of political science. And as his title implied, Dahl hoped to bury any pride felt by the leaders of this “successful protest,” to put aside any desire they might have to dominate the discipline.
This attitude profoundly affected Dahl’s administration of Yale’s department. “We became eclectic in a good sense,” he says. “We looked for good people who were producing good work.” The department has striven to maintain Dahl’s brand of eclecticism, as can be seen in two recent hires at different ends of the tenure ladder: assistant professor Gregory Huber and Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy. Both were hired in 2000.
Huber, who finished his PhD at Princeton just prior to receiving his Yale appointment, focuses on American politics and tends to use data collection, statistical analysis, and other scientific methods to answer questions like, “Does how we elect or prepare trial court judges affect their behavior?” and, “How do American voters react to claims of race-baiting?”
A well-known political theorist, Benhabib had taught for eight years at Harvard before she was lured to Yale. She has built her reputation by analyzing, for example, the concept of citizenship, posing questions like, “What defines one as a 'citizen'?” and “How has the recent emergence of a kind of international 'state' through globalization affected our notions of citizenship and statelessness?”
As Huber explains, the important difference between the work of two political science scholars—like Huber and Benhabib—is not their methodology, their use of theory, or their use of scientific modeling. Rather, the truly important difference lies in the sorts of questions they seek to answer.
For example, because he is asking about specific trends in American politics, Huber can produce reliable answers by collecting data and analyzing statistics. Benhabib, who is asking questions about somewhat abstract concepts, must resort to philosophical argument to come up with convincing answers.
It is not surprising that a top-notch department would want to make room for both Huber and Benhabib. It helps, of course, that in their brief time here they have already established themselves as engaging teachers. Benhabib is currently serving as the director of undergraduate studies for ethics, politics, and economics, the rigorous and selective major spun off from the political science department. And Huber has team-taught, with Shapiro, the very popular “Crime and Punishment,” as well as “Introduction to U.S. Government” and “American Political Economy,” among others.
The range of scholarship demonstrated by the work of Huber and Benhabib illustrates how far the field of political science has come in the last 50 years. Dahl can remember, from his days as a Yale graduate student in the 1930s, just how limited the study of political science once was. At that time, the only scholars studying politics were American, British, and French, and they tended to focus almost entirely on the political systems of America, Britain, France, and occasionally Germany and Russia. Now that the field has caught fire in universities throughout the world, there are so many political scientists studying so many different ways that humanity has managed to organize itself that the amount of compelling scholarship churned out under the heading of political science can be, as Dahl says, “almost overwhelming.”
Dahl believes that the fantastic growth of the field presents a “formidable challenge” to Yale and to other leading universities around the world that are committed to the discipline. “The study of political science must find a way to deal with all this complexity,” says Dahl. “You have to simplify. You just have to. If you don’t, you’ll just restate the complexity and you don’t get anywhere. A general theory for how politics works is an absurdity. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t generalize, that you shouldn’t search for generalities.”
As Yale’s political science department continues to grow, as it continues to gain popularity and influence among Yale undergraduates, and as it helps guide its discipline into the future, those will be words to learn by.  |
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