A while back, the sociologist Fabio Rojas blogged this question which I’ve thought about ever since:
What theories or research methods have been exported by political science to other social sciences? Poli sci has been a big importer. They sucked up rational choice and identification from econ, and now they are importing social network analysis from sociology. Do they have a trade imbalance?
Is he right? Are we a big importer from other social sciences? And what if anything have we exported?
One could write a history of political science as the importation of the theories and methods of one field after another. Our origins are in the legalistic analysis of constitutions and laws. In the middle of the 20th century, the leading lights of the field borrowed structural functionalism and modernization theory from sociology and Talcott Parsons especially. The 1950s also saw a behavioral revolution imported from psychology. In the 1960s, many turned to Marx and class analysis, for example, in dependency theory and critiques of modernization. By the 1970s, a determined minority were adopting the rational choice approach from economists.
Things get complicated after that (more on this below), but, as Rojas notes, recent years have again seen imports from economics (the credibility revolution), psychology (social identity theory and perhaps framing), and even sociology (network analysis). Commenters on Rojas’s original post mention other imports: path dependence, punctuated equilibrium, transaction costs, constructivism, and set theory.
That is a lot of importing. But as Elaine Benes notes, “Just imports? No exports?… Why not both?”
It is harder to think of larger frameworks and methods that we have exported. I can’t say much about early political science and its influence. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of good histories of our discipline, so I don’t know whether group theory, for example, was exported to other fields. The same goes for the pluralists and their conceptions of power (most prominently Dahl’s Who Governs). I know that sociologists ended up criticizing the pluralists and developing alternative views of power, but was the pluralist movement influential in and of itself?
Our major export: Institutionalism
I wonder if the strongest case could be made for historical institutionalism or the new institutionalism more generally as a political science innovation that has successfully infiltrated other fields. I am thinking of the school of thought that began in the late 1970s and 1980s with the claim that states are at least partially autonomous actors with preferences of their own and extended this insight to institutions more generally. It challenged the view that the state is simply a creature of dominant classes and other social forces.1 To be sure, what came to be known as the new institutionalism included sociologists along with political scientists. In fact, the classic volume Bringing the State Back In (1985) was edited mainly by sociologists.
But if we consider the distinct forms of institutionalism and their evolution, as famously memorialized by Hall and Taylor, a distinctive political science version becomes more apparent. They distinguish rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism. The rational choice approach obviously comes from economics, though we can note how it hit a dead end with its various chaos results. As an aside, I believe it was political scientists, led by Shepsle and Weingast’s structure-induced equilibrium, who showed that institutions could take on a life of their own even with rational actors; they weren’t purely endogenous. Meanwhile sociological institutionalism, its origins are in its name, was characterized by a focus on a logic of appropriateness within institutions and the ways actors followed assigned roles, norms, and rituals.2
What was distinct about historical institutionalism was that it posited institutions that were not just a tool of social forces nor of logics of appropriateness. Institutions could have an independent effect on the world. This approach was prominent in the study of economic development, for example, in studies of the developmental state in East Asia and elsewhere (perhaps initially Chalmers Johnson’s work and ultimately the 1997 World Development Report: The State in a Changing World). Other influential works considered the corporatist model as an alternative to pluralism (Schmitter and Collier among others). And of course Lijphart proposed that democracy could be institutionally structured in multiple ways - not just the dominant majoritarian model, but variously consociational and consensus forms.
While the early versions of historical institutionalism and state autonomy developed jointly with sociology, the export of institutionalism to economics can be seen in the work of North who made these ideas palatable for economists. Around the same time, economists began researching the effects of independent central banks, another application of the institutional approach. One can draw a path from these efforts to Acemoglu and Robinson’s important work on the institutional roots of prosperity. The key, however, is that institutional works were pretty thin on the ground in economics prior to the new institutionalism in political science.
In short, I would argue that historical or new institutionalism - the idea that institutions had independent effects on the economic, political, and social spheres - was a distinct innovation of political science and that it has been successfully exported to economics among other fields.
Methodological exports?
It is a bit harder to see the export of distinctively political science methods. Our main statistical and formal models are typically imported from economics if not statistics.3 Experimental approaches mostly came from psychology and ethnographic methods from anthropology.
I would put forward two areas where we are exporters. Arguably survey research methods have been developed most extensively by political scientists. Though the origins of survey research are more in sociology (Lazarsfeld and Stouffer) and marketing, surveys have been used most extensively in political science. The American National Election Studies are among the oldest series of surveys and major survey initiatives like the World Values Surveys are often designed by political scientists (Inglehart in this case). Theories of the survey response (Converse, Zaller, and others) meanwhile are a political science specialty that any field using surveys needs to grapple with. While I know less about the origins of survey methodologies (sampling, question design, survey experiments), I am guessing that political scientists played key roles. Needless to say survey methods are widely used across the social sciences.
Two other potential exports are small-N methods and conceptual analysis. Lijphart’s work on the comparative method or Eckstein’s on case studies and subsequent developments in small-N or qualitative research like structured, focused comparison and process tracing have mostly come from the workshop of political science, but are frequently used in other social sciences. The same might be said for certain mixed methods which combine large and small-N (Lieberman, Gerring and Seawright, etc).
This makes some sense. Economics is almost entirely a formal and statistical field. Sociology sometimes defines itself as a rejection of the economics approach (I’ll post on this soon). Political science is happy to draw from both sides. We mostly embrace the scientific pretensions of economics, but we also don’t turn our noses up at qualitative evidence. It is no surprise then that we have been a focus for the development of more rigorous small-N methods.
Meanwhile, Sartori’s elucidation of the structure of concepts and subsequent work by Goertz and others arguably set the standard in the creation of concepts. I am less familiar with how these developments were exported to other fields or were developed in parallel. I sense that they are used in sociology, but less in economics. Again, this represents our middle ground between a formal economics and an anti-formal sociology.
We might also be able to claim some credit for exporting specific concepts. The procedural definition of democracy is usually attributed to the economist Schumpeter, but Dahl’s conceptualization that separated competition and inclusiveness underlies many of the attempts to measure and assess democracy and these have been widely used in macro studies across the social sciences. The distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism (Friedrich & Brzezinski, Linz) could be added here and was certainly influential in policy if not scholarship.
Some of our conceptualizations of political economy have arguably been exported as well. The different institutional designs of capitalist economies beginning with the pluralist versus corporatist distinction and culminating in the Varieties of Capitalism are probably most closely associated with political science (though one could add sociologists like Esping-Andersen and economists like Andrew Shonfield and David Soskice).
These conceptual exports highlight the fact that political science tends to be a data exporter. Datasets developed by political scientists are widely used across the social sciences. Measures of democracy, most recently the V-Dem project, are the best known, but I could cite a slew of other macro and micro data that political scientists have created and which are used across the social sciences. Just consider the recent winners of the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba award given out by APSA’s Comparative Politics section or the international relations datasets compiled by Paul Poast at NewGene. Rojas suggests that creating data is something that economists can learn from sociologists as well.
Theoretical exports?
The commenters on Rojas’s initial post mention a number of theories that have been exported from political science. One argues that much of social movement theory originated in political science, especially political opportunity structures. They quote McCarthy and Zald, “the unacknowledged intellectual foundation of the resource mobilization perspective is the American political science tradition of interest group theory that viewed politics as a continual contest for influence by groups with different levels of power. The tradition offered a more palatable view of political conflict and protest as part of the normal influence process of a pluralistic society.”
Another commenter points to March’s work on garbage can models and Simon’s on bounded rationality and satisficing, but it might be a stretch to classify them as political scientists even if it was the field of their PhDs.
Though I am far from an expert on formal theory, in a few areas, I believe classes of formal models were created by political scientists and were influential elsewhere. I mentioned structure induced equilibria above and I could add agenda setting among other areas. On the opposite side of the discipline, we have been pioneers in the study of the influence of ideas on policy beginning with work by Hall. If we are considering exports to the policy community, we could mention James Q. Wilson’s broken windows theory.
Why a trade deficit?
In sum, I would argue that political science does have a trade deficit with the rest of social science, but it might not be as severe as Rojas claims. I would say that our biggest exports are the new or historical institutionalism, small-N methods, and perhaps survey research and datasets.
What are the reasons for our deficit? A few candidates come to mind.
Limited domain. Compared to anthropology, psychology, sociology, and even economics, our subject matter plays a limited role in human life. Most people neither participate in nor care about formal politics. It is thus less likely that general theories of human behavior would emerge from political science as opposed to other social sciences.
Lack of a founding theory/thinker. While other social sciences have a distinct founding moment - Durkheim’s work for sociology, Smith and the marginalists for economics, variously Freud, Skinner, or others for psychology - political science lacks such a clear founding. Would we go back to Plato/Aristotle or Machiavelli? Could we claim Weber?
A mushy middle ground. Other social sciences may have grabbed the main theoretical positions before political science was institutionalized. If economics is defined by a rational approach and sociology by a non-rational one (again, more to come on this), there is not much space for an alternative. Meanwhile, political science training isn’t technical enough to compete with economics nor humanistic enough to compete with sociology and anthropology. Our contributions thus end up somewhere between these two stools both theoretically and methodologically and hence less distinctive. We import and synthesize but we don’t export.
What’s your view either as a member of our tribe or a potential importer? And does it matter?4
This view was held both by Marxists - the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie - and rational choice theorists - Riker’s view of institutions as congealed preferences subject to cycling.
One candidate for export are scaling techniques developed by political scientists to analyze roll call votes. I don’t have a sense about whether they have been exported to other fields.
One of Rojas’s commenters refers to a post by Neil Smelser (no longer functioning). Smelser expresses some skepticism about these imports. “Willard van Orman Quine, the late philosopher who did not love the social sciences very much, once compared them to the Cargo Cults of Melanesia—that is, groups of despairing peoples who are forever waiting for magical arrivals of ships filled with unlimited supplies in the form of tinned foods, transistor radios, and personal salvation. The unflattering analogy was that social scientists seek their salvation by waiting for new theories, models, and insights from outside. While caricatured, Quine’s dig struck a nerve and was not altogether out of touch with reality.”