Beyond the usual concern with (and exploration of) fundamental concepts, methods and dilemmas of political science (see the articles by Mesut Yeğen on the dialectic and tragedy of citizenship, and Hiltrud Nassmacher on the dilemma of depth versus breadth in comparative politics), two themes stand out in this issue of EPS: first, reaching out to explore the interstices where political science meets other disciplines; and second, engaging with the external world, in the form of policy-makers and practitioners.
Richard Bellamy's Symposium, ‘Should Europe Adopt the American Way of Law…and Has it Done so?’ springs from a concern that European (in contrast with American) political scientists have paid insufficient attention to the political role of law, too often viewing the development of legal doctrine as ‘part of the internal dynamics of the rule of law, rather than seeing the law as a political institution and the legal profession as just another set of political actors, to be explored in much the same way as other parts of the political system’ (Bellamy, p.4). If the ECPR's workshops and panels are a measure of European political science's interests and concerns, then there can be little doubt that he is right, since there are relatively few proposals in these areas each year, a reflection perhaps of the absence of anything comparable, in Europe, to the American tradition of political jurisprudence despite, in continental Europe at least, the strong influence of law on the development of the political science profession. As Bellamy points out, this shortcoming is becoming ever more noticeable as the European Union (EU), as a system of law, increasingly extends its influence to the regulation exercised by nation-states over its citizens. The Symposium explores whether Europe should adopt American-style judicial review, and whether, in fact, it is already doing so. Aside from the substance of this debate, what these articles all implicitly emphasise is, in Bellamy's words, ‘how the political consequences of law are too important to be left to the lawyers and jurists alone’. Let us hope that the political science profession heeds his call.
If Bellamy's work reaches out in an interdisciplinary way, then the articles by Rose, Peterson, David, Bogason and Brans reach out to policy-makers and practitioners as well as teachers. Rose's article is undoubtedly the most striking because his consultancy was quite simply the most unusual and high profile one can imagine for a political scientist today. Advising President Bush on Iraq would have been unusual enough for a political scientist who has never worked on the region, but to do so in only three minutes and to produce insights from one's research that the President may not have already heard is a tall order. Rose's response as an academic was exemplary and one from which we should all learn. The very consultancy he saw as a natural extension of his life as an academic, and one with a long tradition: ‘A PhD is not a qualification to decide a country's foreign policy, but it should not be a disqualification from communicating with people whose choices are not entirely rational. Founders of the ECPR learned to do this in occupied Europe during the Second World War’. This, he notes, was because their political education came from life as well as books. The three minute requirement he found stimulating rather than frustrating, and the result was to condense knowledge in a parable extracted from his research on Northern Ireland, and one that Rose later realised had been properly understood.
The interview with the President of the EU (José Manuel Barroso) reinforces Rose's general point about academe since Barroso, unlike his American counterpart, is an example of an academic successfully crossing the divide and becoming a policy-maker. It is apparent from John Peterson's interview how Barroso's academic career has influenced his worldview and political career, and this will be heartening to many academics. However, Barroso, by dint of having not, at the same time, lost his academic outlook, is also able to offer advice the other way – back to the academic world – especially as a consequence of the original framework of the interview. On the basis of a poll of EU academics, a list was prepared (a few months in advance of the interview) of the best works published on European integration in the past ten years, for Barroso to read and discuss. Barroso compliments and praises this work, yet at the same time there is a consistent message in his comments that we might be too often researching and writing for ourselves in the terms in which we design our research and convey its results, rather than thinking of how best we might also write for those outside academia: ‘…we political scientists have a tendency to give too much emphasis to what in France is called the scientiste complex: we want to show that we have hard data, statistical correlations and scientific demonstrations. Personally, I would favour more qualitative works in terms of what, for instance, C. Wright Mills called “intellectual craftsmanship”. Take the subject as kind of an art object and look at it from different perspectives and points of view. We have to invest in knowledge, and perhaps be more realistic about the limitations of hard science’.
The article by Bogason and Brans picks up directly on this theme by exploring the challenges confronting the researching and teaching of public administration. More than other sub-fields of the discipline, public administration faces critical challenges in relation to its relevance to practice and practitioners and how it might be best taught in a society and state which are transformed in nature compared with when the field first established itself. The worry is that, without recognising the existence of these challenges and how best to respond to them, the field itself risks irrelevance. The authors argue that there are means by which the field can respond to these challenges and come down from its ivory tower, but it requires better conceptualisation of the social environment of public administration (the ‘individualisation’ of society and the student body), closer integration between the public administration taught in universities and that which exists in practice, and the establishment of a new ‘dissemination’ theory for the field.
Finally, the article by Miriam David is a good example of an area of policy-making where political scientists should be concerned to exercise some influence, simply because it directly concerns their own careers: methods of research assessment, and the relationship between research quality in higher education and the public funding of research. The UK, where research assessment has been in place now for over twenty years, has constituted a form of prototype for other countries, yet it itself has undergone evolution, and has recently been the subject of a major debate over how far and how fast research assessment can be ‘metricated’. While traditionally the political and social sciences have not played a prominent role in what has been an ongoing debate over research assessment, metrication poses a significant dilemma for these subject areas and they have had to respond to this most recent proposed change to maintain some form of peer assessment (no matter how ‘light touch’). Yet, there are indicators and trends suggesting that this discussion is far from over, and that, with constant improvements in technology and the increasing ‘privatisation’ of higher education evaluations, the pressures for metrication will increase everywhere, making this article (which draws comparative insights from the British case) pertinent for social scientists in all countries where research assessment is present.
