Henry’s post today in response to David Glenn’s piece in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education put me in mind of some reactions I had while reading the piece yesterday. My reactions don’t speak to Henry’s point. Indeed, they’re peripheral to Glenn’s point, too, which I take to be that political science would be in a better place if more of us did intensive fieldwork. I note them here nonetheless.
First, Glenn begins by introducing Timothy Pachirat, who did fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation on the “politics of sight” by working for five and a half months in a slaughterhouse (yecch). Glenn continues:
In plunging into the slaughterhouse, Pachirat was acting more like Margaret Mead than Larry Sabato—that is, more like an anthropologist than a typical number-crunching political scientist.
I understand what Glenn is trying to say here, but I’m afraid that he’s shot himself in the foot. Larry Sabato simply doesn’t qualify as “a typical number-crunching political scientist” because he isn’t a quantitatively-oriented political scientist and doesn’t profess to be. I don’t say this to defame Sabato, who is quite proficient at what he does. But he just doesn’t do quantitative political science. He does cite survey results (e.g., “54% for the Republican, 46% for the Democrat,” but that’s as far as he goes. I suspect he would laugh at the very idea that he’s being held up as the poster boy for political science number-crunchers. I also suspect that if a war were to break out between the political science quantoids and the anti-quantoids, he would be in the trenches for the antis.
This, I grant, is just a quibble. But I must say that when I read that passage in Glenn’s article, my immediate reaction was “Does David Glenn know much about political science?” Maybe he does, but my confidence wasn’t bolstered by that particular sentence.
A few paragraphs later, Glenn says:
Most political science departments remain dominated by formal modeling and quantitative analysis …
To that, my reaction was “Really?” If he had said “Many leading political science graduate programs are dominated by formal modeling and quantitative analysis,” I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But “most political science departments” cuts a wide swath—so wide, I’m confident, that the statement as given just isn’t true. More accurate, I think, would be “Most political science departments have never been dominated by formal and quantitative approaches, but those approaches do play a much greater role than they did prior to the 1970s.”
Third, I would remind Glenn—and for that matter many of my political science colleagues—that in at least one very sizable sector of our far-flung discipline, comparative politics, fieldwork-based research was long dominant and I strongly suspect that it still is. Yes, the quantitative and formal approaches have made headway there, but I’m willing to bet that if we were to line up recent doctoral dissertations in comparative politics or recent books published by comparativists, we’d find that at least a plurality and maybe a majority of them have a strong fieldwork component. Anybody aware of evidence on this point?
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I’m not sure if “dominated” is the right word, but you’re still living in the 1970s if you think that quantitative political science doesn’t dominate the discipline. Look no further than hiring at top-50 schools over the last 6-8 years. And then exclude political theorists. And yes, his holds for comparative where “mixed methods” dominate and the kind of ethnography being discussed in the Chronicle article rarely gets people top jobs.
Formal modeling, on the other hand, looks to have plateaued some time ago.
LS:
But you’re not engaging with the sentence that Glenn wrote: “Most political science departments…”
I [it:am} living in the ’70s in some respects (I liked the music back then much better), but you’re living in rarefied atmosphere of the leading graduate programs if you really think that “most political science departments” are dominated by quantoids and formalists.
Haven’t read the piece, but if the takeaway is that political scientists should do more ‘intensive’ fieldwork, isn’t that really a claim that we should ask very different questions than we have been doing for (at least) a long time? Because for many of the questions the discipline ‘asks,’ fieldwork would be useless, at best, no?
If we avoid sweeping generalizations about “political science” or “the discipline” in the aggregate we can instead raise some interesting questions about contrasts within it. Why, for example, is fieldwork so much more common in the subfield of comparative politics than in the subfield of American politics? Is it that extended fieldwork is crucial for Americans studying other countries so that they can gain a kind of broad familiarity with the dynamics of political life and its relation to the local media, culture etc that American scholars of American politics can take for granted since they live in the country they study? Or is that members of the subfield of American politics are concerned with what they can do (by way of asking certain kinds of questions and using certain kinds of skills) that cannot be done via journalists and commentators? I’m not sure if either of these hypotheses is any good — any one got rivals? Any one got evidence to help answer the question? I think that only with some sense for the distinctive dynamics driving scholarship in different subfields could we begin to parse how the room for, and potential contributions (or cons) of, immersion vary across the subfields (and sub sub-fields!) of our diverse and fragmented discipline.
Speaking as a ‘quantitative’ political scientist, I agree, we definitely need more fieldwork.
Research that is now one-sidedly quantitative (in American politics or elsewhere) would be greatly improved by more participant observation. Moreover, I think many of my quantitatively-oriented colleagues would share this view.
Lee: chalk some of this up to bad comment crafting. In a different world, I would have written:
“I’m not sure that “dominate” is the right word for describing what faculty do at political science departments, but you’re still living in the 1970s if you think that quantitative work isn’t on is way to taking over the discipline.”
And I don’t mean that as some sort of an insult. I know full well how under siege quantitative methods were in the 1970s; even in the 1990s it could be difficult to publish quantitative work in some (non-American) subfield journals. But I think it is time to recognize the way the wind blows (which, at least in comparative and IR, is straight toward a mixed-methods equilibrium trap); certainly, despite Glenn’s clumsy wording, he’s right that the kind of deep ethnography he’s talking about is not a ticket to success for current-generation graduate students.
When was the last time GWU hired a junior candidate (outside of PT) who did exclusively qualitative work? I think my Department is something like 1 for 8 in terms of qualitative junior scholars over the last 6 years. What about Harvard? MIT? Yale? Heck, name for me the last “hot” job candidate in AP who was basically a qualitative scholar, let alone an ethnographer?
So, yeah, if you look at the population in any given Department, you may even find 50%+ who don’t do quantitative work. But that doesn’t tell you very much about the state of the discipline at this moment.
And you might note that I did not extend my comments to formal modeling.
LS:
I think we’re talking past one another. The point I made in my post was about the accuracy of a very specific claim: that “most departments” are dominated by quants and formal modelers. Your counterpoint has to do with broader issues about the discipline. I don’t think Glenn’s specific claim is accurate. I didn’t weigh in on broader issues of the role of quantification and/or formal modeling in setting research agendas, shaping the job market, etc. There are a lot of political science departments, not just the Ph.D.-producers, and I just don’t think it’s true that _most_ of them are dominated by quants and formal modelers (or by quants alone, if you want to leave the formal modelers out of it).
I’m not unaware of broader trends in the discipline; I’ve seen them at work in my years at the APSR and I’ve been writing about them for the past few years. And as it happens, I agree with almost all of your characterization of these trends. But they’re neither here nor there with respect to the specific point I was making in my post.
On an even more specific point, you ask “When was the last time GWU hired a junior candidate (outside of PT) who did exclusively qualitative work?” The answer is that in the two decades that I’ve been in this department, we’ve hired _a lot_ of exclusively non-quantitative junior faculty, and we continue to do so. Of the three juniors we hired last year (not in political theory), two don’t seem to use quantitative methods at all. That doesn’t undermine your broader point; it just means that one of the ways you tried to document it didn’t turn out the way you assumed it would.
Yeah, I think we are talking past one another. I’m not sure I disagree with anything you’ve written in the last comment. Perhaps I should have left off after saying that I hadn’t written my comment very well…
“Quantitative”/”qualitative” is, IMHO, a red herring. It blinds us to the actual issue, which is that the discipline has long labored under the dominance of statistical-comparative models of explanation that privilege nomothetic generalization (with appropriate scope conditions, of course). “Fieldwork” in such a context becomes, all too easily, just another way to measure a variable of interest — and this in turn misses the more important methodological issues at stake.
I’d rephrase LS’s question: “When was the last time GWU hired a junior candidate (outside of PT) who constructed explanations that were not reducible to some form of qualified nomothetic generalization?” For that matter, when was the last time that any political science department did so? Apparently the New School did this when it hired Tim Pachirat; anyone else?
And Lee is quite right, the music was better in the 1970s.
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