What’s Wrong with Us? Sexual Misconduct and the Discipline of Political Science

ABSTRACT

Sexual misconduct matters not only when it is perpetuated by political actors in political institutions. It matters wherever it happens and whomever it happens to, because it is, at its base, political. Politics is fundamentally about power: who gets what, when, and how. As political scientists it should be at the heart of what we study, but it isn’t. Our discipline creates artificial (and somewhat arbitrary) boundaries about which studies of politics count as meaningful research and which do not. We discourage research that explores more expansive notions of how politics is practiced in broader society. As academics we have the luxury of speaking out. I argue here that political scientists ought to embrace an expansive definition of politics to address the real questions of power, its abuse in our society and in our profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual assault
• sexual harassment
• sexual misconduct
• power
• politics
• political science

Acknowledgments

This essay is much better because I received helpful comments from Julie Novkov, Dara Strolovitch, Elizabeth Sharrow, Nadia Brown, Bryan Early, Elizabeth Pérez-Chiqués, and the participants at the Institutions and Societies Conference at the University at Albany. Any errors and all opinions are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The dollar figure is likely to flag the attention of university leaders elsewhere, even though we should be dealing with this regardless of cost.

2. See “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html.

3. By comparison, a similar search in the journal Politics and Gender turns up 40 articles out of a total of 623 articles since the journal’s founding in 2005.

4. See, for example, Micah Emmel-Duke, “How the University of Minnesota Hides Its Professors’ Sexual Harassment,” Citypages, www.citypages.com/news/how-the-university-of-minnesota-hides-its-professors-sexual-harassment/481408991 (accessed May 17, 2018).