Political Science as a Contest of Perspectives

I n 1987 I left New York and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to join the political science department of Indiana University, Bloomington. While I had done my graduate work at Yale University under the supervision of Bob Dahl, one of the leaders of “the behavioral revolution,” it was only upon my arrival at Indiana that I became fully initiated into the world of professional political science. One of the first things I noticed was thatmany ofmy senior colleagues were frequently talking about “The Review.” “Did you see that new piece in The Review?” “Are you sending your paper to The Review?” “He published in The Review last year. That’s almost as good as his book publication, and it should nail his tenure case.” “The Review.” What is this Review of which they speak, I wondered? I was familiar with The Review of Politics. Not that. I was familiar with The Review of Radical Political Economics. Surely not that! The New York Review of Books? Hardly. “The Review” was, of course, the American Political Science Review, the gold standard of American political science and indeed, presumably, of political science writ large.The journal of political science, to which all others were secondary. The apotheosis of American political science as a discipline. The “flagship” of the research armada. The American Political Science Review has occupied this status ever since its founding in 1906. But as the discipline grew it also outgrew this fine journal’s suzerainty. By the millennium, a wide range of questions were raised about the journal, questions that can be boiled down to one core question: was the journal big enough, and broad enough, to fully encompass and represent the range of approaches, styles, and genres of research and writing characteristic of the discipline roughly one hundred years after its founding? The answer of many to this question was a loud “no!” And so APSA took notice. And so was born a new journal, whose very name announced its broad mission: Perspectives on Politics. From its start, in 2003, Perspectives has sought to incorporate a wide range of approaches to political science methodology, research, and scholarly writing, and a range of different genres of writing: peer reviewed scholarly research articles, programmatic and reflective essays, book reviews and review essays and symposia. When we took over the journal in 2009, we sought to make more explicit the inclusive mission of the journal by branding the journal as A Political Science Public Sphere, as a way of emphasizing the importance of dialogue and debate across conventional divides within the discipline, and the importance of publicity more generally.We sought to make more explicit the different genres of writing that we would publish and the forms of review and editing to which each of them is subject; to make clear that the journal’s approach to scholarly research articles is that the very best scholarship is perspectival, and offers some new way of understanding some important political problem that emerges from ongoing scholarly debates and must proceed by critically engaging these debates; and to make clear that as a general journal of political science, we recognize that there are different kinds of scholarly conversations and research “products,” and different moments within the research process itself, and that this particular journal furnishes a space for this range of serious scholarly inquiry. At the same time, we have also tried to make clear that the primary mission of the journal is to feature political science perspectives on politics. We have thus sought to be very ecumenically “problem-centered,” and to avoid many interesting discussions that were largely about methodology rather than about politics by way of applying methodology. There have been some exceptions to this “rule,” and themost notable was the journal’s stance towards “DA-RT,” a stance which involved both an editorial policy—refusal to sign onto the “DA-RT” statement and the articulation of a less restrictive and voluntary policy—and an editorial essay entitled “For a More Public Political Science,” explaining this editorial policy and linking it to a broader statement about the purposes of political science. This statement struck a nerve. According to the 2016 Publication Report of Cambridge University Press, it is the second “most popular” piece published by any APSA journal in the past five years, having received over 19,000 online full-text views (the most “popular” article was also published in Perspectives, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s “Testing Theories of American Politics,” which has received over 88,000 full-text views!). The journal’s “position” on DA-RT represents a major