Political Science: Definitions and Status

• The chapter addresses the identity of political science by questioning what constitutes both "science" and "politics".
• The definition of political science depends on the meanings assigned to "science" and "politics", varies across time periods and contexts.
• It avoids a rigid definition, acknowledging the discipline’s evolving nature.
• The chapter explores political science's status as a discipline and as a social science, including its knowledge, practices, and position within the social sciences.
• The study of what constitutes the "political" is investigated, and how the political became an autonomous dimension, and how to identify what falls within its scope today.

Science politique as a social science discipline

• Political science teaching is divided into five disciplines: law, economics, history, political science and sociology.
• Knowledge transmission is structured, hierarchical, and controlled within disciplines.
• Disciplines embody a community of professionals engaged in teaching, practice, promotion, and regulation.
• Political science is relatively young, less autonomous, and less institutionalized compared to other disciplines at Sciences Po.
• The dynamics of scientific branches cannot be confined to sectorization or knowledge partition.
• Disciplines stabilize via networks of specialists, recognizing common teaching and research practices.
• A discipline’s professional community that teaches, practices, and is regulated by associations and institutions.
• As a new discipline, political science had to establish itself in national academic fields structured differently across countries.
• The study of politics had been taken up by jurists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists.
• The United Kingdom's British Political Studies Association avoids "political science," pointing to structural issues and the competition between Oxford and LSE.
• The name of the association reflects rivalry between Oxford and the London School of Economics.
• Oxford aimed to protect its humanities and philosophy monopoly over politics, while LSE promoted it through the Fabian Society and Harold Haski.
• Harold Haski's death led the Oxford group to impose "political studies".
• British political science retains a strong component of political theory.
• The French case, similar to the British, involves a strong social sciences institution alongside universities: l’École libre des sciences politiques, or Sciences Po.
• Sciences Po was crated in 1872, but the newer school competed with law faculties, particularly for entrance to public service.
• The French political science is taught in IEPs or law faculties that causes tension with law.
• The discipline distanced itself from law after World War II, through institutional autonomy and strategies of distinction, aligning itself with sociology due to sociology not being strong at the time.
• Jurist Maurice Duverger helped found French political science in the 1960s.
• Contemporary French political science textbooks continues to reflect socioligical influences in political behavior, public action, public problems, etc
• In Italy, the creation of the first political science association in 1973 seems late, though Gaetano Mosca detached the study of politics from public law in 1896.
• Mussolini's period halted political science, requiring a difficult post-war reconstitution.
• Norberto Bobbio, Bruno Leoni, and Giovanni Sartori sought autonomy by reviving Mosca's elite analysis and, in Sartori's case, parliamentary elite studies.
• Sartori eventually distanced himself from political sociology in favor of an institutional approach.
• A lot of Italian political sociology is done by sociologists.

Duverger versus Sartori

• Maurice Duverger and Giovanni Sartori were important in founding political science, but Sartori criticized Duverger for wrongly using the label of political sociology.
• Duverger was an expert in constitutional law, while Sartori was a historian of philosophy.
• In 1969, Sartori questioned the concept of political sociology, targeting Duverger's attempt to equate it with political science.
• Duverger published a book called Sociologie politique and was criticized by sartori
• Giovanni criticized that approach as Duverger did not consider a political sociology approach rigorous.
• Sartori, distinguishing political sociology from "sociology of the political", rejected the latter for explaining political phenomena through social structures, which in his opinion sociologists ought to leave alone.
• Sartori's critique focused on Duverger's lack of rigor in defining political sociology.
• Sociology’s attention is split between "conditioning" the "political" and the "social", by the opposite.
• Even if political science is a discipline it is regulated and with common norms, compared to others, like economy.

Institutionnalization

• Instead of believing in homogeneity, it is better to look at national intitutionnalization trajectories.
• These trajectories are marked by disciplinary struggles that have variably reinforced or blurred the boundaries separating political science from other social sciences studying politics.
• State played by US Sciences
• Social scientists in the US benefited from training in Europe and also from European intellectuals who fled nazism.
• Post-1950, European political science was founded (or refounded) using funding from North American foundations and intellectual resources.

Political science as social science

• Political science is part of the social sciences.
• Political science studies systems specific to or created by humans, unlike natural sciences. The most classic objects of political science are not impose like the State, the nation or even democracy.
• It combines theoretical questioning and empirical evidence, unlike formal sciences like mathematics.
• Political science focuses on understanding the social and political reality, interacting with it directly.
• The science is confronted by 4 challenges: comparison, globalization, analysis and relation to values.

The enjeu of comparison

• Social sciences study systems specific to humans or created by him.
• These systems can be economic markets, family structures or political regimes, all shaped historically from social and cultural contexts.
• Conjointly, political science can study the genesis of objects it studies and their different manifestations around the world.
• The point of comparison is also to introduce strangeness and challenge what you know too well
• Comparison allows to separate generalizable and specific results.
• Comparison presents an advantage because it forces complex thinking on explanations.
• Multiplying cases and contextualizing phenomena,mono causal schematism is avoided.
• Political phenomena is rarely explained by an isolated factor.
• The results usually come from the interaction of variables and time and context effects.

Social comparitive varaiables

• Social variables of the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917, and Chinese Revolution of 1911 articulate with political roles, the role of the State, it representatives, the external and internal pressures they are submited to, context effects and situation.
• Conceptions and comparison modes vary- the comparative politics sub-domain spurred multiple publications, that debate the relative methods and dispositives.
• When looking into the transformation of political parties, you can prioritize comparison between left or right parties, or within
• Bi- or multi-partisan comparisons are made with systems, and parliamentary or presidential regimes, watching for comparitive object similarities in historic or regional context.
• Word connotations and nuance translations taken into account.
• Parties can be compared through quantitative methods and by variables to measure the effects of electoral decline on the resources.
• You can also choose to compare few cases, treat them with qualitative values and look at the mechanisms for disintitutionalization linked to electoral decline
• The larget the sample, the more variety in historic trajectories is able to be taken into account.
• If number of cases studied is less, their historic signs are easier to spot, and less is generalized.
• A monographic study doesnt dispense comparing and ask "what this is the case of"
• Units of comparison can vary: comparing nationally, between France, Italy, or on smaller city scales
• The units can be compared between scales such as a country or a local area like a city.

Enjeu of globalisation

• Comparison was for a long time concentrated on political systems, that is now questioned. this leads directly to the second issue
• This refers to that has been called the global shift of social and human sciencs, done by the mondialisation of studies and knowledge production
• Topics are now talked by political science, whetehr it is sovereighnty, regulation of capitalism or political mobalitilzation
• Mondialisation made structural disiquilibrium visible in production and knowledge diffusion
• One the one hand, the criticism accuses methodology of nationalism by pinpointing the predominance and evidence of national comparison and finds cognitive bias with understanding a world by making the State-notion, the only unit of analysation
• On the other hand, social and human sciences ackknowledge the globalisation and intense scientific exchanges have not erased the knowledge production debate- the issue of north and south marked by colonial experience became a hot debate
• The US anglophone variant dominates political size through comunity size and by the paradigms.
• Produced concept and results produce themselves as universal even if coming from local context

Universal concepts?

• Should Western concepts be applied to all countries at the risk of talking about the faults and delays of the countries in the South.
• Should the concepts be abandoned because the comparaison cannot be generalized and we should stick to notions strictly localized.
• A median option: share concepts in exchange of reappropriation or indigenization, and if its yes how to do it.

Enjeu Liee a Analyse

• Political scinece studies institutions, groups, communities etc. who not only act but also speaking.
• The science has two models.
• One model: The objective is to seize, measure behaviors or opinions, and explain them by trying to establish correlations, if not causal ones.
• Other Models: Begin with the idea one can both see actors (ethnographic surveys) and also take in discorsi (interview surveys) and seeks to reinstate what actors do.
• First model nomological: Social sciencs must elaborate laws of explanation with general extent
• Second model hermeneutique: They must concentrate on interpreting under comprehensive logics.
• Positivism focuses the explanation of sociopolitical reality via the study of observable and measurable facts.
• Positivism traits
  • A belief in science- detached to entireties, optimist ability to improve because of the wisdom acquired.
  • A will to assign exclusively to science the observable facts (empiricism) and relations between facts, prioritizing causes

Positivism Methods

• An attachment to means in science labotartories in order to corroborate theories.
• In political science, the behavior isolates this means by carrying out means and by using experiences.
• Constructivism is a philosophy that gives social sicences the job of rebuilding the social and political reality by shining life on categories.
• The study of electoral domains shows those approaches.
• The electors have established the explanations and mobilize an ample varaiety of quantifications.
• They are interested in how the institution of electrons are naturally historical, at the present day entering a vote like it seems an evident gesture.
• This study seiszes how the category of elector becomes element of citizenship.

Controverse du béhavioralisme

• The behaviorisme : the science of behavior, was formed by psychologue John B.
• Watson, who traces a parallel between behavior, proposing that psychology take the natural sciences as a model..
• Watson limited his field of study to external behavior and measured it.
• This paradigm collected succes in teh US

American Political Science

• In the late 19th century, political scientist John William Burgess set up the first political science program in the country, in Columbia, New York.
• Burguess promoted a political sicence that promoted the study of State in his double perspective, historical and theoretical
• Started protests from this, called out the model, that was assimilated with with German Model
• This was istitutionaliste and descriptive.
• The desciples believed that analysis must be centrated on the analisys factuels of behaviors, method empirique and promu scientifice.
• The researcher is assighed and measure and explains through inquiry sondage.
• The behaviors isolates itself in the US then copies across a world and is regurlaly in questions
• David esaton rejects the behaviors.
• Neglecting the social and historical context, too concentrated in technques in the detriment of theory.
• The Movement Perestroika has largely taken crituiqes and launch in order political sicence that is formalized.

Normative Enjeu

• The fourth element deals with statuts and is especially strong in politic sicnemartial.
• Political articulates three dimensions.
• It is estabilishing and analysing the facts and emits with value.
• Within the inside, teory specializes and it reivindiques in mannered assumed a normal position not contanted and has many sensitives subjects.
• They have a tendency towards no politically engages possition, but take complex for politic

Neutrality Axologique

• Max weber doesn't do not that the ologist and politic partgae as like all Max is not that the socioligste that that it reconnait
• Max condemns the confuses genres in