Civil War in the Social Sciences: A Survey of Recent Articles

Leafing through the pages of the American Political Science Review, a reader might be forgiven for thinking he had stumbled upon an engineering journal, so thick are the pages with abstruse mathematics. Many political scientists have had the same reaction themselves. Indeed, there's now a civil war raging over the question, Is there too much "science" in contemporary political science--or, as those who would remove the quotation marks say, too little? In economics, a similar struggle over the meaning and role of science in the discipline has been underway for years.

Gathered trader the inclusive (if, to outsiders, less than stirring) banner of "methodological pluralism," hundreds of political scientists have recently formed a "perestroika" movement to resist the ascendancy of the advocates of "hard science"--"rational choice" theorists, game theorists, and devotees of statistical analysis.

"These quantitative types, say perestroikans, exert hegemonic tendencies, ignoring or dismissing research that they don't consider 'scientific'--for example, interpretative research by area …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Civil War in the Social Sciences: A Survey of Recent Articles. Contributors: Not available. Magazine title: The Wilson Quarterly. Volume: 27. Issue: 4 Publication date: Autumn 2003. Page number: 85+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.