As understood by most APSA members, Political Science is a localism, a shorthand for the study of "American Politics". However, any social science discipline can only be a "science" if it is based on the comparative study of different social systems. Consequently, for Political Science to be a science, it has to be grounded in the comparative analysis of many political systems including, of course, the U.S. No doubt comparative studies based on different local government systems in the U.S. can produce valid generalizations, provided it is clearly stated that they relate only to politics in America. However, so long as American political scientists refuse to make relevant comparisons between the U.S. and other countries, they cannot really understand the American system of government, nor can they tell what is truly unique and what is typical of many or all political systems. Consequently the parochialism of American Political Science is not only insular -- it is also self-defeating and obscurantist. ⁽¹⁾ By contrast, in the context of the International Political Science Association, Political Science refers to a science of politics based on comparative studies in many countries.

Science of Politics vs. American Political Science

No doubt Political Science in most of the world is a precise synonym for what I will call the SCIENCE OF POLITICS. Since, for most members of APSA, Political Sciencerefers primarily to the study of American Politics, the use of Science of Politics permits us to overcome ambiguity by using different terms for two different, though overlapping, concepts. Put more formally, I shall distinguish between them as follows:

• PS1: the development and testing by comparative analysis of theories describing and explaining politics and governance: SCIENCE OF POLITICS, aka 'Political Science'

• PS2: the development and testing by the study of politics and governance in America of theories intended to describe and explain politics and governance not only in America but also elsewhere: AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE, aka "Political Science"

This distinction permits us to say that, in the U.S., Political Science may be used, ambiguously, either to mean the Science of Politics, or American Political Science. Actually, I am also queasy about using American in this phrase since there are many Americans in the Americas (North and South) who do not identify with the US(N)A, as Guillermo O'Donnell-- a past president of IPSA and recent vice-president of APSA -- has reminded me. ⁽³⁾

No doubt many American political scientists will see this as an unjustifiable move. However, for evidence take a look at the program for the recent APSA conference. Here one will find that the term Comparative Politics is used exclusively for the study of "foreign" polities -- i.e., politics outside the U.S. Does this not imply that Political Science in America is not inherently and necessarily comparative? Indeed, it clearly suggests that the study of American politics is essentially non-comparative. Yet surely the greatest value of comparative politics for Americans would be to use it to explain the truly exceptional features of the U.S. political system. Unfortunatley, most American political scientists are unaware of that fact. If they were, would they not want to bring cross-national comparisons into their study of American politics?

By contrast, non-American political scientists -- using Political Science to mean Science of Politics -- readily understand that our discipline is necessarily comparative. They will easily identify the study of any particular system of government by its geographic name: e.g., Middle Eastern Politics, African Politics, European Politics and, of course, American Politics. Or they may focus on a state: Japan, Egypt, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States. Most of them, I believe, will realize that, without making comparisons with other polities, they cannot fully understand what is typical and what is exceptional in their own country's politics, nor understand the causal links between its parts.

Comparativism as a Subdiscipline? However, members of the APSA attending its Washington conference, had to assume that the study of American politics is not comparative. At least, was this not implied by treating "Comparative Politics" as a "subdiscipline"? The point was made explicitly in a paper presented by David Laitin of Stanford University: it was called, "Comparative Politics: The State of the Subdiscipline." The actual "subdiscipline" Laitin had in mind was the study of countries outside the U.S., especially in the third world. It was certainly not comparative analysis used to understand the American system.

No doubt the Comparative sections at APSA conferences are numerous and atttract much interest. Moreover, some of the best analyses of politics outside the U.S. have been done by Americans. However, this only makes it doubly surprising and shocking that few if any of these comparativists have used their skills to examine the U.S. system in a comparative perspective.

Much of the work that is called "Comparative Politics" could be more accurately labeled, "Area Studies." In addition to a general division for "Comparative Studies" there are four more for regions (Developing, Communist and former Communist, Western Europe, and Industrialized societies). Skimming through the titles of papers listed for these section, I am impressed by how many seem to be one-country case studies. A few mention several countries to be compared, and some announce general themes without specifying their geographic location.

The Theory/Narrative contrast. This observation prompts me to make a somewhat technical distinction between nomothetic and idiographic work. The former is oriented to the production and testing of theories, generalizations based on comparisons; the latter takes the form of narratives about individual or unique situations, biography, history, case studies. No doubt these approaches are complementary and each can support the other. In my opinion, truly comparative work needs to focus on the nomothetic, whereas area studies are prevailingly idiographic. The APSA sessions marked "comparative" strike me as largely idiographic in character, especially those devoted to specific regions -- perhaps less so in #11 for Comparative Politics in general. (Quite a few groups in the APSA program had a philosophical or methodological focus -- e.g. #2-10, and 39-44 -- that stresses deductive analysis and general theory more than data, and they often adopt more of a global than a purely American perspective. Consequently, they are not included in the comments that follow.)

Applying these concepts to the rest of the APSA program, it seems clear that many of the panels, especially from divisions 22 to 38, were mainly idiographic in character. To the extent that they were nomothetic, they offered generalizations based on the particularities of the American experience. Would it not be useful to mark these sessions as "American," with a note that generalizations based on American situations might or might not be relevant elsewhere? Would we not expect anyone working in some other country -- France, Sweden, Russia, China, Thailand, Nepal, or Uganda, for example -- to specify their national contexts and avoid broad generalizations based on them. Our propensity to generalize about "parties," "elections," "pluralism," or "justice" based solely on the American experience may seem fair in a purely American context, but as we have become part of an increasingly globalized world, this stance is truly arrogant and misleading. ⁽⁴⁾

More importantly, any analysis of country-specific data can acquire nomothetic significance when used, through comparisons, to develop or test propositions of general relevance. Since political scientists outside the U.S. normally do this, they do not need to say repeatedly that they are making comparisons. However, since American political scientists, exceptionally, rarely use systematic comparisons with non-U.S. data to identify the distinctive (or typical) features of our political system, we need to keep reminding ourselves of the essentially idiographic character of our work. No doubt many useful intra-state, inter-state, and inter-city comparisons are now being made by American political scientists. Although they help us understand domestic politics, they do not shed light on the distinctive features of American government by contrast with those of other countries. My plea is for an expansion of the scope of comparative politics by APSA members so as to strengthen our understanding of the unique as well as the general aspects of politics in America.

Anomalies. As noted above, Political Science, as usually understood by Americans, is not the generic Science of Politics (Politology) but rather it is the largely idiographic study of American Politics. One needs to keep this in mind in order to understand second anomaly: the term Comparative Politics in most of the world is just a synonym for the Science of Politics (or what they mean by Political Science). In the U.S., however, "Comparative Politics" is viewed as a sub-discipline -- or, rather, as two different sub-disciplines that can be distinguished from each other as:

• CP1: the study of any political systems relying on comparative (nomothetic) methods: SCIENCE OF POLITICS, aka "Comparative Politics"
• CP2: the study of "foreign" (i.e. non-U.S.) political systems, normally relying on narrative (idiographic) methods: POLITICS OF FOREIGN AREAS, aka "Comparative Politics"

Clearly CP1 and PS1 (Comparative Politics and the Science of Politics) amount to the same thing. I believe this is what most IPSA members would mean by Political Science. However, most APSA members have CP2 in mind when they speak of Comparative Politics, and they sharply distinguish it from PS2. which is what they mean by Political Science.

To continue this anachronistic double-talk will increasingly discredit American Political Science in the eyes of our colleagues in other countries. How can it be explained? Consider the hegemonic position of American Political Science. There are probably more political scientists in America than in all the rest of the world, and many of the world's political scientists have studied and taught in the U.S. The resulting hubris may explain, though it surely does not justify, the continuing parochialism of American Political Science, and the polite reluctance of non-U.S. scholars to call attention to this fact. Surely this will change -- increasingly political scientists outside the U.S. will begin to ridicule the insularity of their American counterparts.

Because many foreign scholar study and teach in the U.S., we possess a great resource that ought to be used more effectively. They already have a knowledge of one or more foreign polity that can provide a framework for looking at the American system. Unfortunately, I fear, we do not listen to them. If they are graduate students, we encourage them to study their own countries, not ours. When they teach courses for us, we expect them to focus on these countries (perhaps mislabeled as "comparataive politics"). By denying them the opportunity to examine American politics in a comparative perspective, we are missing a great opportunity to help ourselves.

The IPSA Contrast. Observations made at the recent IPSA Congress in Quebec City confirm these impressions. In all of the IPSA research committees, the scope of analysis was broadly comparative, and in all of the sessions, participation included members coming from different countries. Clearly, in this context, Political Science is a theoretically oriented discipline that relies on comparisons between a wide array of political systems to formulate and validate its propositions. IPSA members must be amused or perplexed when they learn that American Political Science is restricted to the non-comparative study of American politics. In all other countries, I think, national Political Science has to be comparative (nomothetic).

A lot of attention was paid during the Quebec congress to the properties of Political Science as a discipline. Most of the research committees offered a special session on the development of Political Science (i.e., Science of Politics) as a discipline -- this was part of a project sponsored by RC33, which focuses, explicitly, on Political Science as a Discipline. Information about this committee and all the other research groups sponsored by IPSA can be found on the IPSA Home Page. In preparation for one of these sessions, a COCTA-sponsored roundtable, I wrote an essay on some of the key political science concepts central to the birth and history of American Political Science. I see now that I failed, in this piece, to underline the essential parochialism of the discipline as it evolved in the U.S. -- see Riggs.

APSA Theme Panels. In this context, it is relevant to note that the theme of the recent APSA conference was Political Science as Discipline? To see what the program planners had in mind, one may examine the 17 Theme Panels they organized. Unfortunately, it is not easy to determine from their titles just what the presenters had in mind. Moreover, to explain the status of Political Science in America one needs to think not only about what is covered in these sessions, but also about what is ignored. When scholars feel that their professional society fails to deal with problems they think important, they peel off to form new associations. The theme panels are significant, therefore, not only for what they do say, but also for what they do not. Here are a few points to illustrate this proposition.

Four panels were marked as comparative, reflecting their focus on experiences outside the U.S., normally without any reference to American politics as a subject for comparison. Moreover, since those who are seriously interested in the politics of a country also want to learn about its history, culture, economics and languages, they tend to find a mono-disciplinary context dysfunctionally restrictive, leading them to hive off and join area studies associations -- links for their home pages (Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American, and Slavic, especially) can be found on my: Sites page. Although many APSA panels on Comparative Politics were presented in Washington, I believe an even larger number of American political scientists were absent, preferring to attend area studies meetings.

Another four sessions were clearly international in focus, a theme that stretches the usual boundaries of American Political Science as an intra-state discipline. This has also led to a major secession by scholars interested in International Studies -- they split from APSA to form the separate and competing International Studies Association.

An even older and deeper split led scholars interested in bureaucracy and public management to create the American Society for Public Administration . Interestingly, although APSA does have a section for Public Administration, no Theme Panel was offered to ask how political decisions are implemented or how public officials (including the military) affect politics, as they obviously do in many countries, even in America.

The remaining nine sessions addressed a range of issues that relate primarily to intra-state politics -- of them, two were clearly marked as referring only to the U.S., but the other seven had topics related to the general themes of the conference: power, choice and the state. However, the paper titles do not clearly show whether the authors had only the U.S. or had other countries in mind when they wrote. My guess is that most of the papers dealt only with domestic politics in the U.S. from a non-comparative point of view, but I would appreciate getting information to refute this supposition.

Although four participants from non-U.S. universities took part in the theme sessions, they were clustered in those dealing with international or comparative politics rather than the core concepts. Thus, the authors of all the papers for the sessions on general themes were written by participants coming from American universities. I cannot tell from the titles of these papers whether they used information from outside the U.S. Examples include: "The state of democratic theory," "State power," "Citizen and state in a global world," "Justice," "Ascription and Social Cleavages," "Institutions and economic policy."

One would need to read such papers to know to what extent they generalized on the basis of American data only, or took into account the experience of other countries. However, my suspicion is that the theories discussed here were largely based on data from only one country, the United States. The guesses offered here could be tested by a more detailed analysis of the abstracts for papers presented at the APSA conference -- they can be searched by categories, but cursory browsing suggests that it is often not clear what countries are included.

I believe APSA conference papers would contribute much more to our understanding of American Politics if those dealing only with U.S. data would be clearly marked as such. If the Program Committee were just to stipulate that all papers should indicate whether they are idiographic one-country studies, or nomothetic analyses based on two or more countries (especially those including the U.S.), this might have a revolutionizing effect on our discipline. Examples of such papers can be found in the IPSA program where virtually all panels have to be comparative.

Multi-Disciplinary Contexts

This roundtable was ambiguously called, "Contributions of Comparative Politics to Political Science: Insights from 'Area Studies.'" By Political Science participants understood the study of American politics, not the Science of Politics. They equated two different contributing factors -- comparative politics and area studies -- each of which could make a significant but different contribution to our understanding of American politics. Comparative politics might illuminate the exceptional features of American politics -- why it's constitutional system and practices are, indeed, so different from those found in all other countries. Area studies would make a different contribution -- through American studies it could help us understand the non-political forces affecting American politics. I shall comment briefly on the first topic, and say more below on the second.

Comparative Studies After the presentations, I stood up to propose that next year APSA sponsor a major roundtable using political scientists rooted in "foreign" polities but immersed also in the study of American Politics to comment on how their perspective could be used to enhance our understanding of American governance (in a comparative framework). One member of the roundtable, Lucian Pye (a former APSA president), explicitly recognized the paradox by proclaiming that Political Science is used in the U.S. as a misnomer for American Politics.

Although most non-U.S. political scientists are too polite to call attention to the insularity of the way American political scientists conceptualize our discipline, Bernard R. Crick (from the U.K.) was not so reticent. In his book, The American science of politics: its origins and conditions, published by the University of California Press in 1959, he offers a devastating critique. In my own work -- see ⁽¹⁾ -- I have tried to deepen our understanding of American politics by means of relevant comparisons with political systems that share our constitutional (separation-of-powers) design. Since my analysis is readily available elsewhere, I shall not say more about it here, but I think it amply demonstrates the relevance of comparative analysis for understanding American politics.

Area Studies. By equating "comparative politics" with "area studies," the panel was unable to clarify how area studies, as distinct from comparative analysis, contributes to our understanding of American politics. More importantly, they could not do this because they failed to include anyone in the panel to speak for American Studies. It would have been the most relevant form of area studies for the purposes of the roundtable. American Studies could have shown how an interdisciplinary framework can broaden our understanding of American politics by shedding light on the many non-political factors that deeply influence politics in the United States. Unfortunately, therefore, the discourse shed no light on the American political system as viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The logic of inter-disciplinary area studies surely relates as much to the United States as to any other country. Moreover, many programs or departments dedicated to American Studies do exist. A list can be found on a page of the American Studies Association that provides curricular information about them. I suspect the omission of American Studies from the panel did not reflect ignorance about their existence, but rather the persistence of a myth that only underdeveloped countries need to be studied in a multi-disciplinary perspective. A notion that evolved in the 1960's equated developed countries with well institutionalized spheres of action that could support separate social science disciplines, whereas in the rest of the world, these institutions were still incubating and could not, therefore, be properly assessed by reference to Western social science institutional categories. By now, that myth seems to have evaporated, and the relevance of our disciplinary distinctions in the West itself has come under serious attack -- see for example the Gulbenkian Commission Report.

Moreover, historically, American Studies had arisen during the inter-war years to distinguish the study of American history, literature, and art from its European progenitors. As originally constituted, therefore, American Studies may have had little to contribute to the understanding of politics, although its emphasis on American History remains a much needed though missing aspect of American Political Science. However, I suspect that most Political Science Departments disdain American Studies progams in their universities because they see them as belonging to the humanities rather than social science. Moreover, since at best they cannot prioritize politics, those who do teach American politics in these programs have to be generalists.

In the face of these limitations, it is important to note that after the War, American Studies expanded its scope to include the social sciences, a move that became especially important when the field was translated to foreign countries. By now, it is a highly relevant sphere of analysis for the multi-disciplinary understanding of American politics. However, one should not expect political scientists in these program to bear the responsibility that should, instead, be carried by non-political scientists able to clarify the non-political factors that influence American politics. Moreove, a good multi-disciplinary analysis of American society (and politics) needs also to be comparative, as much for the benefit of Americans as for that of non-Americans seeking to understand our country better. A good example of a book presenting such an analysis is Seymour Martin Lipset's work, The Continental Divide -- Values and Institutions of the U.S. and Canada (1989).

I do not know how much specialists on American Studies in the U.S. resort to comparisons with other countries to enrich their understandings of America -- I suspect they share the notion that one can understand America without making explicit comparisons such as those offered by Lipset. However, in foreign countries American Studies surely needs to be comparative. The ASA has an extensive list of such American Studies programs outside the U.S. Might it not be illuminating to convene specialists on American politics working in these programs to tell American political scientists how they explain the U.S. system to students outside the U.S.? Presumably they must do so by comparing and explaining the uniqueness of American politics to students who are quite familiar with what happens in their own countries. In these contexts, international and multi-disciplinary analysis has to be combined.

Comparative American Studies. The ASA lists American studies programs in Finland, China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the UK, and other countries. Among them, Mount Allison, in New Brunswick might be the nearest and it could provide a relatively easy-to-understand example based on comparisons between Canadian and American politics. Actually, they offer an introductory course, Political Science 1000, described as: "An introduction to the principal areas of study in political studies. This includes the nature of politics, the government of Canada and American politics and government. This course is normally the prerequisite for all advanced courses in Political Studies." Details can be found at: Mount Allison. The Canadian/U.S. comparison provides an ideal laboratory for assessing the relative influence of parliamentary vs. separation-of-powers constitutional systems, yet American political scientists seem to have paid little attention to it.

Actually, it would be desirable to have more than one APSA roundtable to look at how both area and comparative studies can contribute to our understanding of American Politics. Participants should include non-U.S. political scientists working in the U.S., and American political scientists involved in American studies abroad. Perhaps, if the differences between "comparative" and "area" studies were clearly marked, it would be useful to link them in a couple of roundtables. We would need to find American "political scientists" willing to look at the American system in a truly comparative way. I believe there are a few of them, including Martin Lipset, mentioned above. Others could surely do it if challenged to take up the question. Colin Campbell, although a Canadian, has studied the American system so deeply that he would be an excellent contributor, and I could easily name others. Moreover, we would need to find foreign scholars working in American Studies programs abroad who could also contribute significantly to such an exercise.

The Comparative and Area studies roundtable presented at the Washington conference may have opened the door to a more useful and well designed exercise in the future. Surely we can make better use of multi-disciplinary knowledge to help us broaden the base for developing the generic Science of Politics. We can, perhaps, also use such knowledge, as found in American Studies, to enhance our understanding of American politics.

Normative Considerations

As the APSA program itself reveals at various points, normative emphases have surfaced, marginally, in American Political Science, especially in the negative form of anti-regime rhetoric, and to some degree in work on how to teach undergraduates to be good citizens. These two themes are, of course, linked: the eagerness of reformers to make the American political system more democratic and efficient rested on criicisms of the statuis quo. However, these normative issues seem to have been ignored in the Theme Sessions -- at least, I do not find them there. Neverthelss, one can find value-oriented panels in the main program organized by the divisions for Normative Political Theory (#3), Teaching and Learning in Political Science (#9), Undergraduate Education (#10), and Ecological and Transformational Politics (#43). I shall not quote paper titles sponsored by these groups but most of them reflect an interest in using Political Science to promote democratic values, good citizenship and reform.

Let me just mention two papers sponsored by #10: "Democracy, Universities and Leadership Education," and "Community Service and Citizenship: is Service-Learning Essential?" They suggest that university courses in Political Science should contribute to good citizenship and the consolidation of democracy. Significantly, they also stress undergraduate teaching. For the most part, participants in the APSA conference are graduate students and faculty, all preoccupied with research and the opening of new frontiers of knowledge. Undergraduate education shifts the focus to teaching and, indeed, to what students learn as part of a general education. Although some undergraduates major in Political Science with the intention of going on to a graduate school, the vast majority of those who enroll in an undergraduate course in Political Science have no such intention. No doubt, studying politics is as much a part of a good general education as studying art, mathematics, or history. However, the authors of these papers clearly have something more in mind.

Civics as a Challenge. They hope, I think, that the exposure of undergraduates to Political Science will help them become better citizens, better informed voters, activists involved in public discourse, volunteers for public service and political reform. No doubt this opens many challenges, but let me mention just one because it involves a continuation of the reform initiatives that preceded the birth of American Political Science. These interests persist in Civics, the name given to that component of pre-university schooling that is designed to prepare children for active involvement in the public life of their communities. The flavor of this activity is well expressed in the following text:

We the People... The Citizen and the Constitution is the high school level textbook. We the People... is the title of the books designed for the upper elementary and middle school levels. Teacher's guides for each level contain lesson plans and suggested activities to enrich classroom instruction. See: intro

Further details can be found on the home page of the national Center for Civic Education. It offers many excellent links, but strangely none to any Political Science department or organization. Parallel state-level projects are well illustrated by North Carolina's Civic Education Consortium Although managed from the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, it also has few if any contacts with Political Science or even APSA. Many such groups encourage and support civic education in other countries also, as one may see by going to the home page for CIVITAS.

I will not say more about the extensive efforts of educators to prepare children to understand and participate in public life as citizens. No doubt in America these activities presuppose the existence of a well-designed constitutional democracy within which citizens are expected to play a constructive role -- in many other countries one may wonder if it is possible to help make democracies viable by socializing the masses to become active participants in civil society. If so, should not Civics teachers at the primary and secondary school level be embraced as partners in the broader mission of American Political Science -- or, even globally, in the community of political scientists?

Surely Political Science as a discipline needs to think about how its knowledge can support public education and voluntary associations of all kinds in their efforts to contribute to the socialization of citizens in a democracy -- especially in states that are making a transition from authoritarianism to representative government. My impression is that, for the most part, even the political scientists most interested in undergraduate education do not address this question. One gets the impression that they view undergraduates as novices who have never been exposed to any kind of relevant education before taking Political Science 101, or whatever. Were they to take Civics seriously as a part of the domain of Political Science, they might want to embrace Civics teachers as part of their community and seek to help Schools of Education provide more effective instruction for future school teachers planning to offer Civics courses. Perhaps a roundtable at next year's APSA conference could usefully include some high school Civics teachers invited to explain what they do and what help Political Science might offer them. For those now so much interested in the democratization of authoritarian regimes, this might be a useful supplementary exercise.

Admittedly, this is a large subject about which much more could be written. Here, however, I only want to make a simple point: just as American Political Science has constricted its scope by marginalizing Public Administration and International Relations, so it has also cut itself off from the normative implications of politics as a sphere of civic action, including the preparation of citizens to become informed participants and activists. Above all, American Political Science has hampered its ability to understand government in America by ignoring the contributions comparative analysis can make, and by slighting the contributions that American Studies can also make to our grasp of its multi-disciplinary contexts.

Conclusion.

The real meaning of the Delphic question posed for the APSA roundtable is a double challenge:
1. "Can studying foreign areas help Americans understand their own political system?" and
2. "Can multi-disciplinary American studies also help us understand the American political system.

Perhaps the normative dimension could also be surfaced by inviting some outstanding Civics teachers and representatives of "Teaching and Learning" or "Undegraduate Education" to participate in a third roundtable. However, the answer to the challenge presented by this Humpty Dumpty title cannot be provided by a single roundtable, no matter how shrewdly it may be designed. We need a long-term sustained effort.

Nevertheless, a some roundtables might provide a good start. What we really need, I think, is a long-term strategy for enhancing both American Political Science and the Science of Politics in America by a deep conceptual transformation. It should be rooted in a long-term strategy based on the challenges posed by globalization and the new millennium. Perhaps an APSA research committee or section devoted to the comparative study of Governance in America might be effective.

Help might be obtained from the IPSA Research Committee #33 on the "Study of Political Science as a Discipline." According to its blurb on the IPSA Home Page (cited above), the committee "Promotes theoretical and research studies on the historiography and development of the discipline of political science, working with its permanent sub-committee, the International Committee for the Study of the Development of Political Science (ICSDPS)." Perhaps a new counterpart group in the APSA could make a useful contribution to this international initiative by supporting the critical analysis of "Political Science" in America, and I would hope that IPSA RC33 might help such a project get started.

Anyone interested in pursuing these ideas is invited to get in touch with the author at: Fred W. Riggs

Endnotes

1. The Uniqueness of the U.S. system. This conclusion is based on research over several years in which I have found that many unique features of the American constitutional system of government can be explained only when viewed in the context of other polities which share the separation-of-powers design. The results of this research are reported in several articles. The first was published in 1988 as: "The Survival of Presidentialism in America: Para-Constitutional Practices." International Political Science Review. 9:4. pp. 247-278.

Subsequently, my paper originally entitled "Presidentialism in the U.S.: A Comparativist Perspective," was published in 1994 as "Conceptual Homogenization of a Heterogeneous Field: Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective." Comparing Nations: Concepts, Strategies, Substance. Mattei Dogan and Ali Kazancigil, eds. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp.72-152.

I have also written about the implications of comparative analysis for public administration in the US -- see 1998. "Public Administration in America: Why our Uniqueness is Exceptional and Important." Public Administration Review, 58:1 (1998) pp.22-31. The abstract contains a link to the original un-cut draft.

2. Translating Political Science. As Enid Block explained in her paper for the COCTA Roundtable in Quebec on the key concepts of Political Science, the German conception of The State played a salient role in the origins of American Political Science. Since then, German Political Science has been much influenced by American Political Science. One sign of this shift may be seen in the fact that Der Staat is not the core concept of the discipline in Germany -- instead it is Politische Wissenschaft . Does this term carry the same connotations as Political Science ? In French, Italian, and Spanish this term has been translated literally in the forms of Science Politique, Scienza Politica, and Ciencia Politica.

It would be interesting to learn more about the connotations of terms used in other languages, like Valtiotieteellinen in Finish. I don't know how to transliterate the terms for Political Science used in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Kiswahili, or Albanian, but I assume that in each case they use words that have somewhat different connotations from those found in the English expression. Interestingly, in the UK and Ireland the disciplinary associations use Political Studies in preference to Political Science. It would be interesting to learn why. I suspect that in each linguage special meanings relevant to the local context have been acquired by the term, a reflection of the fact that in all social systems realities change -- we are not dealing with the kinds of omnipresent phenomena that chemists, physicists, astronomers or mathematicians handle.

3. Who is American? One of the most insensitive terms used by APSA members (and, indeed, everyone who identifies with the "United States of North America" (as citizens of other countries in the Americas say) is just the word, American. Can anyone think of a simple way to overcome the insulting arrogance of this word for everyone else in our hemisphere?

At first, I thought we might try to rectify the connotations of Yankee to make it an acceptable name, but for "Southerners," this is still a term for "Northerners" -- and Hawaiians would definitely reject it. It would be easy enough to coin a term like USNAns (or Usnans?), on analogy with Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians, or Peruvians to refer to the people of the United States of North America (USNA). However, I'm afraid it will take a long time to gain acceptance and, insisting on it would detract from any possibility that the main argument of this paper can be accepted. Readers who have a better solution to recommend are invited to contact the author -- I will be most grateful.

4. My Thai Adventure. A personal experience taught me this truth over forty years ago. I received a grant from the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, in New York, to spend a year doing field research in Thailand. Note that this committee had been created on the model of an earlier group established to study "Political Behavior." Despite the labels, the latter was dedicated to research on American politics, and the former on foreign areas -- no comparisons between the U.S. and other countries were even contemplated. Out of context, the names of the two committees might have been synonyms!

The CCP chose comparative politics in preference to comparataive government -- the traditional institutionalist term anchored in the analysis of European regimes -- because these structures were clearly no longer salient in the new states generated by the collapse of the industrial empires. Seeking an alternative mode of analysis, they decided that the notion of pluralism would be more fruitful -- Arthur Bentley's interest group pluralism had been revived in the wake of Talcott Parsons' structural-functionalism.

I was told to look for Thai interest groups and examine their political role on the premise that, regardless of institutions, there would always be such groups and they would always play an important political role, as they do in the U.S. I followed the CCP guidelines and soon learned that, although there were quite a few organized interest groups in Thailand, their political influence was minimal, largely because they were subsidized and controlled by government agencies who, sometimes, exploited them in their own intra-bureaucratic conflicts.

What I did learn in Thailand, a polity then dominated by its bureaucracy under the leadership of military officers, was that when either the traditional institutions of monarchic rule, or the modern structures of representative governant fail to maintain effective control over the public services, organized bureaucrats (led by a military cabal) can seize power and dominate a society, using both traditional and modern structures of government as a facade to legitimize their authority. Although I used the pretense of "interest group pluralism" to study the way government agencies exercised power in Thailand, I had to struggle with my sponsors to defend a notion that inverted the normal paradigms of political power found in American political science.

I rather expected the APSA Strategic Planning Committee chaired by Paul Beck to focus on this question. However, when I read its report, I was disappointed because, although the budgetary and other practical problems of the Association are undoubtedly crucial, I think the substantive issues confronting our discipline are even more urgent and failure to confront them will, ultimately, prove crippling. There was only a small hint about them in the Strategic Plan report, as follows:

"With the development of the discipline in other nations, political science has become more international, which provides both challenges and opportunities for an American Political Science Association."

I wish the report had gone on to discuss these "challenges and opportunities." A broad opening for such a response was provided in the Draft Design for the Strategic Plan which included among three "most pressing issues" the following item:

"Internationalization: Ensuring that international relations and area studies are fully represented in APSA's offerings, promoting COMPARATIVE THINKING in research and teaching, and extending APSA's welcome to the world through partnerships, exchanges, membership and the sharing of resources not only of relevance to the discipline in the U.S. but responsive to needs abroad." See the Draft.

When I read this, my hopes rose because I thought that promoting "Comparative Thinking" could mean changing the way we think about ourselves. However, our hopes for "partnerships" will prove abortive unless we transform our basic understanding of the scope of "Political Science."

AREA STUDIES.

One of the concrete responses by APSA to the global challenge was the formation of the Area Studies Liaison Group, composed of representatives of leading area studies associations -- but not, conspicuously, for American Studies. Although foreign area studies are urgently needed and provide data that help us understand politics in many countries, they fail to help us understand ourselves. Yet we urgently need to understand ourselves better in order to maintain a sound position in global political science. The American Studies community, especially overseas, surely has the most to offer for anyone seeking an interdisciplinary understanding of American politics. I say more about this in my memo cited above. Here let me quote from the ASLG report:

"The ASLG's central strategic focus upon increased recognition within the discipline of the contributions to theory by comparativists and international relations scholars working primarily in one or more world regions has been shaped by various trends within APSA. First, whereas 64% of APSA members choose international relations and comparative politics as one of their fields, in 1999, only 12 of the 43 divisions on the Annual Meeting Program Committee had an explicit comparative or international relations focus and those divisions were responsible for 37% of the panels.' In addition, 18 related groups organized panels for the annual meeting on comparative and international topics." See: ASLG.

Notably absent from this report is a comment on the failure of interdisciplinary comparative analysis to be applied to the study of American politics. All of the comparative and area studies sessions were oriented to foreign areas, ignoring the one area that most APSA members are preoccupied with. The roundtable on how area studies contribute to Political Science also had no member speaking for American Studies, the area that would surely be the most relevant for most APSA members.

GLOBAL OR LOCAL?

Consider now the opening sentence of the Mission Statement proposed in the Strategic Plan:

"The American Political Science Association enables political scientists to join together to create an environment conducive to teaching, research, and practice in all fields of POLITICAL SCIENCE and to ensure the necessary support for the discipline to thrive."

What, exactly, do APSA members have in mind when they talk about "Political Science"? Is it globally relevant, or just valid in the U.S.?

My memo addresses this question. My thoughts on the subject were provoked by the striking contrast between the global perspective on Political Science manifest at the International Political Science Association Congress in Quebec City which preceded the APSA conference in Washington. Since I attended both, I was so impressed by this contrast that I decided to write up the impressions offered in the memo referred to above. Strikingly, although IPSA provides a global context for Political Science as a discipline, there is no mention of it in any of the APSA documents I have referred to -- it's almost as though the APSA were the only political science association in the world. You can find a list of links for the various national Political Science Associations (including APSA) if you go to: IPSA

COMPARATIVISM FOR AMERICAN GOVERNANCE.

I know that your personal interests in international relations and world affairs take you out of the parochial context of many American political scientists, as does the focus on comparative politics of many other members who look mainly at foreign polities. The problem I see involves those members of our Association whose focus on American politics is essentially limited because it is non-comparative. I believe that so long as they do not make relevant comparisons with other governments whose constitutional design parallels our own "separation-of-powers" structures, they cannot understand the important differences that have enabled our system to survive for over two centuries, whereas in virtually every other country where our system has been institutionalized -- mainly in Latin America, but also in Asia and Africa and, now, in the post-Soviet world -- there have been catastrophic breakdowns, normally attributed to military interventions. However, I believe this is an unfair charge against public officials (civil servants as well as military personnel) who have jumped into the vacuum left by the collapse of representative government. Our constitutional system is terribly precarious and especially vulnerable to catastrophic crises -- the American exception needs to be explained.

If our system is so fragile, why have we not suffered the same catastrophes? That is precisely the question that needs to be asked on the basis of genuine comparative analysis. The answers can help us get a deeper insight into our own system. The results will be surprising, I think: they will show that some of the problems that concern us the most rest on practices that have played an important part in the perpetuation of our system. This will include the mass abstention of Americans from voting and the importance of special interest funding in electinos -- both resulting in a strongly oligarchic "democracy" -- but enabling our system to survive. It will include party indiscipline, a two-party system, unwillingness to have multi-member districts and proportional representation, heavy dependence on patronage in the appointment of top officials, extreme delegation of powers to legislative committees.

Many of our members deplore and protest against these practices yet efforts to reform them are not only ineffective but, if they did succeed, they would undermine the viability of our system. We cannot even test the validity of these claims without making relevant comparisons with other countries relying on our constitutional design. We may, indeed, endanger our democracy by making reforms whose untoward consequences could have been predicted -- I am thinking of the switch to nominating political leaders by primaries, for example.

For comparativists interested in foreign areas, analysis of the American "success" will help them understand better why other countries relying on our system have so often collapsed. The explanation can be found in the ways their practices differ from ours. Thus comparisons with the U.S. are as necessary for comparativists looking at other countries as complementary comparisons with these regimes are necessary for Americanists looking at our own system. These are not just off the cuff speculations. I believe I have demonstrated the truth of these claims in my own research and publications -- the most important are cited in endnote #1 of my memo, as referenced above.

WHAT'S TO BE DONE?

I write you to seek your support in an effort to interest APSA in a serious effort to cope with this challenge: i.e. to promote the comparative analysis of American governance.

One of the most obvious ways would be through our annual conferences. I urge the APSA program committee to pay serious attention to these matters in planning next year's APSA conference, and I have have written Edward Mansfield and Richard Sisson with some concrete suggestions for next year's program. I hope they will give them serious consideration. Among other suggestions, I believe they could well emulate an IPSA project which involves getting many of the Association's research committees to help re-think the scope of our discipline through special panels at the Quebec Congress, and follow-up workshops and publications. I'm confident John Trent and Michael Stein would be willing to share their experience.

Moreover, there could be theme sessions in which comparativists from other countries, especially those teaching in the U.S., would focus on the American political system. Moreover, specialists on American Studies teaching abroad could also help us understand our own system. Lucian Pye, a former APSA president and leader of Asian studies, made a strong statement at the roundtable on Area and Comparative Studies at the Washington conference on the serious limitations of American Political Science - perhaps he could help. He also knows my work well and could help you evaluate my rather unconventional views.

Of course, many other steps are also needed. For example, PS could publish stories, taking up the issues presented in my note, which I'd be glad to make available. It might well stimulate readers to think seriously about doing some comparative research on our political system. A series of PS articles on American politics seen in comparative perspective would be most helpful.

I hope the editor of the APSR will also weigh these considerations as they apply to the contents of the Review. Consider, for example, a strange dichotomy that appears in the table of contents of each issue. Ignoring Political Theory and International Relations, the two other major categories are American Politics and Comparative Politics. Reading the titles of the listed books confirms the impression that the books about American politics are, indeed, parochially non-comparative; and the "Comparative" books are always about foreign places, and often not very comparative.

I believe we need comparativism in the study of American politics, a logical gap in this design. If you were to list these titles in a two-by-two table, using American/Foreign on one side, and Comparative/non-Comparative on the other, you would see, I think, that most of the titles cluster on the non-comparative side. The American half is overtly non-comparative. The foreign half is misleadingly called "comparative" even though most of the titles focus on areas, not comparisons. Very few of the titles actually suggest a truly comparative (nomothetic) approach that should include the U.S. -- those that have a foreign area focus are largely non-comparative narratives (idiographic) approach.

I have also skimmed through the abstracts for APSA articles, using the convenient Web site at: Abstracts and they confirm the impression drawn from the titles of the book reviews. A truly comparative methodology would produce many comparative studies of American politics, and would also use American experience as a framework for making comparisons with other countries. The "American/Foreign" dichotomy would remain, but all works would be comparative.

At another level, the APSA Home Page provides a wealth of information that members must find invaluable. However, the same dichotomy between looking at American problems in a parochial way, and viewing the rest of the world as an "Other" to be studied comparatively, pervades the material. Consider, for example, the National Issue Forum materials, and the Syllabi. Just one example from many: there is a "care-of-life" page that offers materials for discussing our policy options -- it has a long list of American resources, but just two internatonal sites. In this field, I suspect that the solutions found in other countries are often better than ours -- or at least, they suggest alternative approaches. This is not just a matter of comparing health care systems -- rather, it has important political implications, especially if one asks why all the modern parliamentary regimes seem to have universal health care whereas in the presidentialist countries, it is so uneven, especially in the U.S., the most wealthy of all these countries. To see what I mean, go to: Sites.

It would be quite easy, I think, to enter links to international resources for virtually all the salient public policy issues that would help Americans understand and weigh our own options more intelligently.

A NEW COMMITTEE?

I'm not sure how best to motivate members to move toward this perspective, but one possibility would be for APSA to appoint a Committee on the Comparative Study of American Politics. I believe it would be possible to find some members interested in this idea. If the committee could be funded, it could subsidize research, offer prizes, sponsor a new Research Committee, and hold seminars or workshops.

I believe the practical results would be extremely important. First of all, political scientists everywhere in the world (and especially in the U.S.) would not only gain a much better understanding of our own political system, but we would also learn more about the limitations and virtues of our system and theories for use abroad. I think there would also be benefits for political theory and international relations -- although not directly involved, these fields would sharpen their tools, but I won't say more about that here. In a world where Political Science is now a global discipline, as best represented by the IPSA, the only way American Political Science can keep abreast -- to say nothing of a leadership role -- is to subject the study of governance in America to the same standards of comparative analysis that we expct for all other polities. To return to the budgetary problems confronting APSA, I believe they will not be easy to solve if American Political Science remains a backwater in global Political Science, but new resources will become available if we study our own system of governance in comparative perspective.

To: Edward Mansfield and Richard: Sisson
Co-Chairs of APSA Program Committee 2001

Congratulations for taking on the great challenge of organizing next year's APSA program. It is, indeed, a formidable task and I wish you all success. I have read your statement on p.218 of the Program for this year and strongly endorse your emphasis on multi-disciplinarity. I consider that politics is only one aspect of a seamless web of social interactions and, by itself, it can scarcely be understood. I also appreciate your endorsement of the role of Political Science as a contribution to the "quality of public life." However, I miss a similar emphasis on comparisons and I want to say something about how important they are, not just as a way of looking at foreign countries but also as a way of understanding ourselves.

IPSA and APSA

These points struck me so forcefully that I decided to write up some thoughts about them and I have posted my reflections on the Web at: If you will take a look at this document, above you will find that in addition to a discussion of the role of comparative analysis, I have also taken up the significance of area studies and multi-disciplinarity, and also commented on normative dimensions of our field, both of which are themes you also recognize. All three themes, of course, have important implications for your program planning and I have pointed to some of them in my essay. However, here I'd like to focus on the comparative dimension because I think it raises the most urgent problems for the future validity and utility of American Political Science. I want to make a concrete proposal that affects you whole program.

Developing Political Science.

Comparative = non-U.S. areas. First, if one looks at the "comparative" sessions (Divisions 11-15), one will see that they carve up the world into regions and are essentially "foreign area" panels. Even #11 is foreign because it excludes the U.S. Yet, what Americans need most of all in order to understand our own political system is to be able to see it in a comparative perspective. Otherwise, our self-understanding is necessarily parochial. I have thought about this a good deal and my own comparisons enable me to see things about our system that are invisible to a non-comparativist. Let me mention just one example well illustrated by the extraordinary sessions in Washington on Political Organizations and Parties, #35 in your list. They talked about the "Responsible Parties Report" and examined "progress" toward a more responsible party system in the U.S. I did not hear any references to other political systems although, clearly, the British model was implicit in the discourse as though having "responsible" parties was always and everywhere a good thing.

In fact, if they had looked at the experience of other separation-of-powers (presidentialist) regimes like ours, they would have seen that strong party discipline, as in Chile, as quite dysfunctional, especially when the president lacks a Congressional majority. With divided government, Congress cannot remove the president and deadlock results unless it is possible for a president to gain enough votes from opposition party members to secure support for some important legislation. At the opposite extreme, as in Brazil, party indiscipline is so prevalent that presidents have to bargain and pay members extravagantly in order to get any legislation approved.

My conclusion is that for a presidentialist regime to survive, it needs to have a moderate (intermediate) level of party discipline, which, fortunately, is what we have ordinarily had. I suspect that the increase of party discipline found in Congress since Gingrich has been dysfunctional for our system. I'm not claiming this as a "truth," but only as a proposition that we need to examine, but it cannot be done unless we are willing to use comparisons to study our own system. Moreover, such comparisons must be relevant: for the U.S. they need to be anchored in other separation-of-powers systems. Almost all conclusions based on comparisons with parliamentary regimes are really irrelevant. I have taken this position in several papers, but you might find the most relevant in COMPARING NATIONS, edited by M. Dogan and A. Kazancigil (Oxford, 1994). A bibliography of my writings on the American system in a comparative perspective can be found at: Check-list

American Institutions. Returning to your program, please think about the divisions from #22 to 38. Almost all of them focus on American institutions exclusively, and only a couple (#34 and #36) even mention the idea that comparisons with other countries would be relevant. However, even these see comparisons as a way of looking at foreign countries to see how they resemble or differ from our own -- they do not see that comparisons are needed to help us understand our own system. My point is that even if the only goal of APSA members was to learn more about governance in America, they could not possibly reach that goal without using comparative analysis to learn about ourselves.

Such comparisons, however, have to be relevant to be useful. My experience is that the few American political scientists who have used comparisons with the U.S. have done so exclusively with parliamentary regimes, especially in Europe. That is a major flaw, in my opinion, yielding only misleading conclusions. The only truly relevant comparisons for understanding our own constitutional democracy require us to look at other systems following the same fundamental rules.

I guess one reason for this blindness is that we look down, condescendingly, on all other presidential systems as backward and therefore not worth studying. That prejudice is highly irrational. The purpose of comparison is not to find examples to emulate -- rather, it is to understand the dynamics of processes and institutions. The fact that all other presidentialist regimes -- not only in Latin America, but also in Africa, Asia, and the post-Soviet world -- have experienced catastrophic breakdowns should tell us that the fundamental design is flawed. It raises the most important questions for us: what have we done differently that has enabled us to maintain our system for more than two centuries? I think there are good answers to that question, and I have written them up, but one can only find them by comparing all the major institutional practices of failed and successful systems.

Wholes vs. Parts. This raises another fundamental point about the program. One often hears that the whole is more than its parts -- but what is the significance of that clich for political science? In my opinion, the real importance of every component of our system, as separately listed in your program for the 20's and 30's divisions, cannot be understood by itself, but makes sense only when seen as part of an interdependent pattern. I do not see in your program design any place for synthesis -- where does one try to grasp the interdependence of all the important parts of the American system of government in order to see how they influence each other. I see the survival of our system as a function of the pattern of interdependence of our institutions, no one of which can be properly understand out of this context.

Because so many APSA divisions focus on parts, not the whole, of our American system, I would say that in order to help create an understanding of that gestalt, you could set up some Thematic Panels on the whole American Political System. Representatives from some of your divisions could participate by explaining how the components they study fit into the whole. You could also use three kinds of outsiders to bring perspective to the program.

• 1. Comparativists. The most important would be Comparativists -- especially from Latin America -- not to explain how their systems work, but rather to help us understand how our own system works. The APSA roundtable on area studies at 3:30 on Friday was most disappointing to me -- it lost a great opportunity to shed light on the American political system. Sad to say, I fear it even failed to add anything to Political Science as a generic discipline. Bu such a panel could work and help us a lot if it were properly focused.
  
  

• 2. Area Specialists. A second theme that requires outsiders involves the inter-disciplinary dimension that you yourselves have stressed. How do you make that point concretely? As mentioned above, I think area specialists have been most successful in welding together interdisciplinary perspectives to gain a holistic understanding of particular countries or regions. The same principle applies to us! I would say that the relevant people are those involved in American Studies, not so much in the U.S. as in foreign countries where they have had to try to explain how our system works to non-Americans. I am persuaded that they will be able to tell us more about how to use multi-disciplinary analysis to understand ourselves than anyone drawn from the different disciplines in the U.S.

• 3. Normative Implications. The third theme is normative and you recognize the importance of trying to grasp the action implications of our work. The area where I think we are probably weakest involves our undergraduate curriculum and pre-university levels where Civics is taught. For students who do not intend to become professionals in Political Science or a closely related discipline, the study of politics at both the pre-university and undergraduate levels can be viewed as an important part of their general education and preparation for citizenship -- how to play an active and intelligent role in a democracy. I have some further thoughts on this in the notes I mentioned above -- but I think you could open the door to a fruitful discourse by inviting both Civics and Undergraduate teachers who have attempted to prepare students for their roles as creative citizens to share their experiences with us.

Since Civics teaching is an international activity -- see Civitas -- it would be especially fruitful to invite some of them to come from new democracies to tell us how they have taken up the challenge of preparing future citizens for life in Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, or Mexico. I think such an exercise would really stretch the envelope for some of our members.

Go to Comparative American Government; Area Interdisciplinary; and Normative Civic Education

To: APSA Council Members:

After studying the report of the Strategic Planning Committee -- with appreciaton for the leadership of Paul Allen Beck -- I came to think that behind the budgetary and other practical reforms that APSA needs to support, there are other substantive issues that we also need to confront, as a discipline, in order to take advantage of opportunities and challenges created both by the birth of a new Millennium, and the accelerating pace of Globalization. I have written up some suggestions that are available in the memo posted above.

These include a letter to APSA President Robert Jarvis and a memo to Program Co-Chairs, Edward Mansfield and Richard Sisson. They are annexed to a text that summarizes conclusions I reached during the recent Washington conference on the basis of contrasts with the Congress of the International Political Science Association, which had attended a month earlier. I invite your attention and solicit your comments on my personal conclusions as a long-term APSA member. They fall under three main headings:

1. Comparative Analysis

2. Inter-Disciplinary Relations

3. Normative Analysis

1. Comparative Analysis provides a basic framework for understanding the Science of Politics, a discipline that we have compartmentalized into two largely unintegrated parts: the non-comparative study of American politics and the study of politics outside the U.S. under the misleading title of "Comparative Politics." To catch up to the more sophisticated perspective evident at the IPSA Congress, we need to make some fundamental changes that will enable us to see American Political Science as a sub-field within the broader domain of a genuinely comparative Science of Politics. This is my most important point and I offer below some concrete suggestions about how to move toward this goal. This is not a proposal for a project or two. I think what is needed is a genuine re-thinking of our discipline in a way that will give real teeth to the goals of our Strategic Plan.

2. Inter-disciplinary relations between politics and other dimensions of our total social context gets a lot of lip-service but little real implementation. As Immanuel Wallerstein and others have emphasized in the Gulbenkian Commission Report, our Social Science Disciplines were created in the context of modern Western institutions during the last century, but in today's world, this context has become totally re-shaped. What may once have made sense, is no longer viable. To see what his international group had in mind, please take a look at: GCR

Without necessarily buying all of the findings and recommendations of this Commission, I think we can at least see that it seriously challenges the boundaries of Political Science as a discipline and compels us to re-think the way to do inter-disciplinary analysis. I think our best efforts at inter-disciplinary thinking occur in the context of area studies, and I welcome APSA's effort to link up with the leading Area Studies programs in the U.S. -- as explained in: ASLG

Frankly, I found the results very disappointing because they have not come into focus on how area studies can provide a model for enhancing the understanding of American Politics. The only field of area study that can hope to do this for us is American Studies, especially as it has evolved overseas, but no representative of this activity was included in the Washington program. Studies of foreign areas are undoubtedly important and interesting with important implications for the study of Political Science outside the U.S. But we cannot afford to ignore the dimension of area studies that can help us the most.

3. Normative aspects of Political Science have received increasing attention in recent years and I applaud them. However, the aspect that seems most relevant to American Political Science appears to have been ignored. I was struck by a conversation with Gordon Whitaker of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina with the seriousness of their efforts to promote civic education at all levels, both in undergraduate courses and pre-university levels. You can find a truly impressive list of educational resources at: CIVICED

Surprisingly, not one of the links contains "political science" in its heading! I have also looked, without success, for evidence on the APSA home page of any efforts to help teachers of Civics and Schools of Education improve their capacity to train young people to be more actively and critically involved as citizens of the United States. This struck me as a bleeding shame that could easily be healed. Our excellent projects for improving the teaching of undergraduate Political Science could surely be enhanced by coordination with the preparation of Civics teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Please consider some of the following activities that could, I think, be sponsored by APSA, with the result that the prosperity, prestige and effectiveness of our Association, at home and abroad, would be greatly enhanced.

A. Develop the Science of Politics in America by extending comparative analysis to all activities that relate to American Political Science.

1. Annual Convention:

a. Require all sessions that focus on American governance without comparisons with other countries to say so in their titles: e.g., "Political Parties (the American experience). Any such panel with comparative analysis should say so: "Political Parties in America (a comparative analysis). Misleading titles that imply a universal scope but deal only with American data should be prohibited.

b. Add to the Theme Sessions some that explicitly focus on American governance in a comparative perspective. Such sessions need a holistic framework, dealing with how the whole system works and how the whole affects all its parts. Moreover, comparisons need to be with relevant foreign polities, mainly those constitutionally based on the separation-of-powers. I believe parliamentary systems face quite different problems and holistic comparisons with them are largely irrelevant, yet almost all comparative work on the U.S. system has been made with parliamentary regimes.

NOTE: Invite foreign scholars to attend APSA conference and participate in these sessions. Thet may come from abroad, but many of them live in the U.S. and are already APSA members.

2. Publications:

a. In the Book Review section of the APSR, add a missing category that falls between "American Politics" and "Comparative Politics". It would focus on books relating to AMERICAN GOVERNANCE IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. They tend to be ignored and, no doubt, there are few of them. By highlighting them, the few that exist would receive more attention, and members would be encouraged to start writing them.

b. Similarly, add to the Articles published in APSR some that look explicitly at the American system of governance as a whole and compare it with other similar (non-parliamentary) systems. They would be exceptionally important and I doubt if any now exist in the Review. Such articles would clarify why the American system is, indeed, exceptional, and why generalizations based on this experience are so often irrelevant elsewhere.

c. Take up the questions raised in my PSCON paper in PS. The editor could solicit articles by American and foreign political scientists, and I'd be glad to help if I can.

3. The APSA Web Site

a. Continue the process launched for the Strategic Plan by encouraging follow-up discourse on the substantive problems faced by American Political Science in a world where its essential parochialism has been superseded by a rapidly growing Science of Politics -- perhaps the "planning@apsanet.org" address could continue to be used and messages to it would be forwarded to all Council members.

b. Provide global links for political science, a useful service that can easily be mounted. Take a look at: IPSA . This is a good page for links managed by the International Political Science Association and just providing a link to it would surely provide a mind-opening experience for our members. Actually, I could not find any link to the IPSA on the APSA home page. It's as though we were not even a member of the international association that best represents the concerns of the world's political scientists! Of course, APSA could also crib links from this page to add to its own resources.

NOTE: The APSA page is now very complex and I'm not sure that I know how to find my way around in it. Perhaps I have missed important links. However, the overall impression is that of a strictly domestic orientation -- international and comparative dimensions are elusive and, in the context of globalization, they surely need to be strengthened.

B. Expand the multi-disciplinary context for Political Scientists by:

1. Bringing American Studies into the picture, especially by creating links to AS programs overseas that seek to put American politics in contexts understandable to non-Americans. They need to make explicit facts that Americans unconsciously take for granted. A good idea would be to invite scholars teaching American politics in American studies program abroad to write for APSA publications and/or participate in APSA conferences, tasked to reveal how they explain links between political and non-political forces in American politics. A starting point can be found at: ASA global links. Of course, some good leads could also be found at American Studies programs in the U.S. -- for links go to: ASA graduate programs. I see this as an important addition to the APSA program for linking up with area studies via APSA's Area Studies Liaison Group mentioned above.

2. Invite political scientists actively thinking about the cross-disciplinary problems and implications for our discipline to contribute to the annual program and APSA publications. I do not know of any general resource to identify them, but one starting point could be the Gulbenkian Commission Report, using its home page at: GCR

C. Strengthen the context of normative issues and activities for Political Science

1. ASPA has already taken a giant step forward by co-sponsoring the National Aliance for Civic Education NACE and taking leadership by organizing a Task Force on Civic Education. An overview of activities is offered by the Civic Education Network CEN which has an extensive list of sites for relevant organizations. Almost all of them American, but there are a few international sites, notably CIVITAS which also has its own Web Site and an extensive list of related activities in other countries.

Is it not time to expand APSA's role internationally, recognizing that the problems involved in civic education are universal, and they are especially important in countries making the transition from despotism to democracy. The CIVITAS list provides many leads for follow-up activities. A project that focuses on democratization in a global context is explained at DEMOGLO -- it needs to be linked with civic education. A relevant step forward would involve inviting leaders in some international civic education activities to participate in APSA conferences, to write articles for APSA publications, and to become involved in INTERNET discourses sponsored by the APSA Task Force on Civic Education. The goal would be not only to close the chasm that now separates Political Science from Civics, but to expand our field of vision globally.

2. To move from generalities to specifics, I call attention to the work of the Center for Civic Education, CCE. It is a national program, with headquarters in California, and an office in Washington. The Center is sponsoring development of a project on Democratic Citizenship that has international implications. Perhaps the APSA Task Force could sponsor some joint meetings with leaders from other countries to focus on this document and its implications for America as well as other countries. It could use e-mail lists, meetings, and home sites to encourage continuous dialogue between political scientists and exponents of education for citizenship that would be applicable in many countries. At a time when democratization is an increasingly salient theme on the world stage, helping transform subjects into citizens has surely become an increasingly important theme.

NOTE: For an excellent example of what is already being done in one state, read about the ELP Institute for Economic, Legal and Political systems sponsored by the N.C. Civic Education Consortium. By drawing some foreign students and leaders into exercises like these, I believe the content could be enriched and we could more toward universalizing our own experience and thinking. Further details about this N.C. program can be secured from Gordon P. Whitaker, Institute of Government, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

CONCLUSION

No doubt I have missed some good ideas to add to this list, but I wanted to supplement my letters to President Jarvis and our Program Co-chairs by calling your attention to various feasible activities that would, I believe, strengthen American Political Science as a discipline based on comparative studies, not just introspection rooted in our local situation; enhance the inter-disciplinary dimensions of our work, especially by linking up with American Studies people; and growing the normative citizenship implications of our field by creating links with Civics teachers, schools of education, and undergraduate teachers of Political Science. I would welcome comments from you and thank you for your interest and leadership in APSA.

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Updated 26 September 2000