The Role of Research in the Unification of a Discipline

Large-scale complex research project designs are providing a new impetus to the elimination of subfield boundaries within political science. Major projects are taking advantage of the methodology and technology of contemporary social research to include comparisons among institutions, across cultural boundaries, and extending through time. As a consequence, traditionally narrow field and subfield concentrations on segments of the political process are giving way to intellectual interests that bring together hitherto separate concerns. The full potential for discipline-unifying research will, however, not be realized until there is a strengthening of the organizational infrastructures for research, a broadening of training in research design and administration, and an increase in fundingfor large-scale projects. The execution and subsequent intellectual exploitation of large research projects will carry additional problems that will be solved only with substantial changes in the workways of the political scientist, but those problems are greatly outweighed by the positive contribution that such research will make to the future of the discipline. The growing capacity of American scholars to study politics and governance systematically rather than segmentally has brought us to the beginning of a new era. We should contemplate the future, understanding that political science can and should become a unified discipline. Methodological differences no longer define nor are defined by substantive interests. Many of the boundaries between traditional subfields are sustained only by the inertia of custom; the boundaries can and should disappear. The intellectual challenges of the discipline are increasingly, and appropriately, centered on complex interrelationships that are being explored in major research endeavors. And, because inexorable trends in all of the social sciences, as well as in national science policy, are fostering large-scale research that purposively brings many interrelated interests together in single projects, I believe political science should prepare for a new era in which large-scale, programmatic research activity will give a new and more coherent shape to the discipline. The historically separate origins of the various subfields of the discipline are now less relevant than the intersections that today connect the subfields. Drawing from my own field of electoral behavior, one can ask how, in a day of presumed single-issue politics, the study of electoral behavior can be intrinsically separated from the study of bureaucratic clienteles that help shape the public policies that are reviewed by citizens engaged in retrospective, issue-oriented voting? How can judicially mandated educational policy be understood or appreciated with no regard for the politically potent demands of affected voters? How can the ebb and flow of foreign policy be comprehended without a basic recognition of the bounds by which public outrage defines the permissible? How can the performance of an office of personnel management be appraised without regard for the electorally inspired concern for civil rights?