The Relevance of Political Science

Description

Cover Contents List of tables and figures Notes on the editors and contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Tensions over relevance Relevance: the standard lines of defence Three lines of vulnerability The developing argument of the book PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON RELEVANCE 1 Challenging three blockages to relevance and political science: the obvious, the avoidable and the thorny Politics and evidence: a difficult relationship Incentive structures in academia limit the pursuit of relevance Doubts about the intellectual case for relevance undermine its practice Designing a solution Conclusions 2 The relevance of relevance Causal and descriptive knowledge The science of social science Engagement and objectivity Are there other possible foundations for social science? A pragmatic inquiry 3 Relevant to whom? Relevant for what? The role and public responsibility of the political analyst Introduction: relevance – divided by a common language? The private language of political science Relevance and rationality: between perestroika and glasnost? Relevance: deserved or attained? Diagnosing and resolving the crisis 4 The rediscovery of the political imagination The road(s) to irrelevance The political imagination A rallying cry to the university professors of politics 5 Guilty as charged? Human well-being and the unsung relevance of political science Variations of relevance Does democracy produce human well-being? State capacity, quality of government and human well-being Poverty, state capacity and quality of government Does democracy generate political legitimacy? What does political science want to explain? Political theory, state capacity and quality of government Empirical measures of the relevance problem in political science Theory: why state capacity and quality of government generate human well-being Quality of government, social trust and human well-being Conclusions: the seven sins depriving political science of its potential for being relevant to human well-being 6 Why did nobody warn us? Political science and the crisis Ideas Institutions Interests What did political science get right? Conclusion PART II: RELEVANCE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF SUB-DISCIPLINES AND DIVERSE APPROACHES 7 The relevance of the academic study of public policy Introduction: linking policy research to policy practice The contribution of political science: reconciling knowledge and power in public policy-making Concerns for relevance and the two-communities metaphor of policy knowledge utilization Moving beyond the two-communities model: knowledge brokerage Conclusion: research relevance in policy studies – an ongoing research agenda in political science 8 Why political theory matters Introduction A chequered past? Political thought: creating an impact The challenge of demonstrating an impact Bright future 9 Constructivism and interpretive approaches: especially relevant or especially not? Of gadflies and journalists: problems with postmodern and interpretivist claims to specific and direct relevance Constructivism as eye-opener for policy-makers and especially students Conclusion 10 Is comparative politics useful? If so, for what? Varieties of relevance The contributions of comparative politics Challenges to the relevance of comparative politics The limits of relevance in comparative politics Conclusion 11 Can political science address the puzzles of global governance? Towards global governance? Enter the scholar: The political science contribution Discussion Conclusions 12 Maximizing the relevance of political science for public policy in the era of big data Citizens, social media and big data Governments, digital technologies and the promise of big data for policy-making Big data challenges Maintaining relevance Public policy pay-offs Conclusion The case for relevance Why is relevance difficult to deliver? A manifesto for relevance Bibliography Index