This Special Issue of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS), established in 1967 to “make the study of politics relevant to the struggle for a better world.” Specifically, Caucus founders stood in opposition to the failure of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and its membership to speak collectively to the pressing political issues of the time, including the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and many other mobilizations of marginalized groups. A broader critique of the discipline of political science and its claims of value neutrality reflecting behavioralism’s dominance in 1967 drove the Caucus’ formation, and remains at the center of its mission in 2017. New Political Science is the official journal of CNPS, an independent non-profit organization. CNPS is affiliated with the APSA through the New Political Science section of the APSA. The journal, Caucus, and Section all work together to provide a space for scholar-activism and methodological pluralism. The Caucus is organized around the position that a commitment to social justice, a sustainable democratic society, and human rights are central to the study of politics. This position remains as relevant to studying politics in 2017 as it was in 1967.
The question of “what is new” spotlights the challenges inherent to the category or signifier of “new” central to the Caucus and the journal’s aim to provide ideologically progressive and methodologically diverse approaches to redefining the purposes, categories, and politics of political science. The “newness factor” percolates throughout political science, as scholars debate matters such as whether or not “globalization” is a contemporary phenomenon, “intersectionality” represents a centuries old methodology and epistemology or a systematic framework developed over the past thirty years, and what is “new” about “new social movements.” Donald Trump’s election as United States (US) president in November 2016 has reignited debates about whether or not and to what degree his election, rhetoric, presidency, and reliance on Twitter represent anything “new” on the American political scene. “New” then infers relevance in terms of determining what political science as a discipline can tell us about power, structures, contexts, and membership in political communities in the twenty-first century.
Similar questions have dogged the New Political Science section and the journal as members over the years have debated changing “new” to another term. The Section took its name as a reference to the “New Left” and its affiliation with the vision of that political mobilization in the late 1960s. Such naming reflected, at the time, an association of the Section with white male political scientists focused solely on the works of Karl Marx and Marxist ideology. The section and journal have certainly shifted beyond this original framing of its membership and political orientation to become much more intentionally diversified in methods, approaches, theoretical orientations, membership, and leadership. To reflect a move forward from this “New Left” origin, changing the name of the section to “Critical Political Science” has emerged as one path forward. Still, however, the “newness question” remains in terms of what frontiers, critical interventions, and visions for the future do the political scientists who identify with the Caucus, Section, and journal hope to achieve through their work. The “struggle for a better world” driving these three enterprises begs the question of newness or what does “better” actually look like, mean, and how do we get there?
The articles making up this Special Issue take on this question from a range of varied perspectives. We begin by establishing our historical and intellectual roots in the original, uncut version of Clyde Barrow’s manuscript first published in 2008, published here as “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science.” In it, Barrow extensively examines the major scholarly works written by Caucus founders, including “political scientists of many diverse viewpoints … united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science.” Barrow concludes that, while the Caucus was never able to gain electoral control of the APSA, its achievements include creating the space for public intellectuals and scholar activists to advance “a critical and empirical research agenda with the potential to yield results with normative implications that diverged drastically from those of the apolitical behavioralists.” In other words, “What makes the new political science a radical political science is the nature of the social problems it identifies and the solutions that it proposes for those problems.”
William Kelleher takes up directly the question raised at the end of Barrow’s piece, “which way do we go now?” Whereas Barrow shares the concern of some others that perhaps the Caucus cared too much about organizational insurgency within the APSA at the cost of pursuing more radical intellectual and political revolutions, Kelleher argues that contesting elections for control of the APSA is exactly what Caucus members should be doing right now. Through an alternative reading of David Easton’s categories of pure research, applied research, and political advocacy, Kelleher urges the Caucus to go “back to the future” and attempt to seize “an opportunity to offer a more positive and coherent alternative paradigm to the profession” by gaining control of the academic establishment: “Maybe the 50th Anniversary is a propitious time to re-think CNPS’s organizational strategy. APSA offices can still be contested.”
In a similar vein and with a much broader perspective, Tim Luke pushes forward the questions raised by Barrow and Kelleher, placing them squarely within the current political context of the Trump presidency in 2017. His article, “What Must be Done: Sustaining New Political Science After America’s Decades of Decline” engages in the kind of critical political science characteristic of CNPS by looking backward to the circumstances around the election of 1912 to better understand the 2016 election. In particular, Luke takes up the current turn away from science and technocratic administration of government inaugurated in 1912 to consider the contemporary context in which “fake news” replaces “truth” and science, destabilizing the grounds upon which Americans try to grasp a political world marked by uncertainty and precarity. CNPS, Luke recommends, must now, maybe more than ever, remain committed to pursuing hard, fact-based critical engagement with our political times despite the ever-increasing public pressures against such academic work and the academy itself.
Also putting the past in conversation with the present, Bradley MacDonald’s “Traditional and Critical Theory Today: Toward a Critical Political Science” addresses the very nature of “newness” by pushing toward a “critical” political science by thinking through the contemporary significance of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Karl Marx. MacDonald calls for a return to “critical” inquiry in political science as a discipline through analysis of these critical political theorists. In doing so, MacDonald answers a resounding “yes” to his article’s central question paraphrased here: can the past of critical theory pierce the dreams of traditional political theory and analysis to help us think afresh about our political future and the “old” work of human oppression and exploitation? For CNPS to move forward on its commitments of fifty years ago that remain as pressing today, MacDonald asserts, will require revisiting its relationship to critical political theory that acts as a “practical double” or doppleganger to traditional political theory of the status quo. In doing so, MacDonald reminds us of CNPS’s critical role in creating a “space of negation open for the possibility of future action.” “New” political science then emerges from those spaces pried open through critical political theory, analysis, and practices.
Outlaws, outliers, and outside-within positionalities often capture the attention of those engaged with questions of “newness” as these peoples, locations, and standpoints generally represent the “critical” position assumed by those denied voice and membership in the dominant political discourses and communities of our time. Pushed to the margins, the voices of those from Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA communities, and Standing Rock, to name only a few, emerge in a set of articles bringing new groups into our consideration of contemporary political science in 2017. Courtenay W. Daum’s “Counterpublics and Intersectional Radical Resistance: Agitation as a Mechanism for Transforming the Dominant Discourse” focuses on Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock as counterpublics necessary to performing critical roles as agitators who, in periods of abnormal justice, challenge the dominant discourse and, thereby, power structures that systematically oppress vulnerable peoples who, nonetheless, come together and stand against white supremacy and nationalist populisms such as that advanced by President Trump and his Administration. Daum, indeed, posits a claim critical for this Special Issue that the Caucus for a New Political Science is a counterpublic and, as such, should agitate to challenge and change the dominant discourses and structures disciplining political science. In doing so, we may very well need to break with accepted norms and practices of professional etiquette to advance this “struggle for a better world.”
Chad Lavin in “Escaping by the Spatial Imaginary, or Politics as Occupation” challenges the impulse in political science and theory to focus on the “spatial imaginary” that links physical locations with their rhetorical meanings by exploring Occupy Wall Street and its occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City. Lavin thinks through “occupation” to recommend a turn toward the temporal imaginary as dialectically tied to the spatial in order to expand our ideas about politics as occupations of space through exercises of force by developing a critical understanding of time. Doing so, Lavin recommends, would open a space for “a greater appreciation for history, civic work, and creativity.” Ultimately, Lavin invites “new” political scientists to think of politics, not in the Weberian terms of vocation, but as an occupation, “infusing political discourse with that indispensible democratic resource: hope” that entails a view to the horizons of the future and a “better” world.
Returning to the “old” to engage the “new” theme central to this Special Edition celebrates the critical approach to political science taken by CNPS while applying it to current political issues, debates, and methods. Alex Melonas navigates the space between the “old” and “new” by challenging us to rethink the role of the natural sciences, specifically human biology and neuroscience, in political theory. His article “Thinking Philosophical Anthropology Through the Natural Sciences” considers age-old debates over the relationships between city and soul, mind and body, nature and nurture using contemporary research in the natural sciences to apply findings such as those in “disgust sensitivity” to the political issues of immigration and same-sex marriage. He explains that, “what is ‘new’ is an urgency to revisit a series of ontological and political questions at stake in presuming a certain version of nature and nurture.” Overall Melonas’ work considers developments in areas such as new materialism to move past dualisms positing biological determinism versus social constructivism in order to reimagine the human subject as a human animal.
Queer J. Thomas’ “Constructing Queer Theory in Political Science and Public Law: Sexual Citizenship, Outspeech, and Queer Narrative” offers an important counterpoint to Melonas, arguing for a sexual constructivism to replace biological determinism and, as a result, sexual essentialism. Thomas makes the case that “queer theory is not new, but relatively new to political science” and public law, and as an inherently disruptive force against the status quo, queer should remain central to the project of “new” political science. Taking these two articles together, we see that “old” debates regarding human subjectivity and our understanding of it still resonate in “new” ways as we consider the horizons of membership in political communities.
Matt Guardino and Dean Snyder’s article “The Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex and the US Social Order: A Political-Materialist Analysis” looks back to the traditions of critical political economy and social theory to move forward in addressing the problems posed by this Complex in promoting social irrationalities registered here in the internet, political news, and Big Pharma. This article locates advertising, broadly speaking, within Marxist and early Frankfurt School critiques about the creation of new “wants” as opposed to directing society to meet the basic needs for all peoples. Guardino and Snyder argue that this Complex redirects us today to produce economic waste and erase privacy, underappreciated aspects impeding the Left from systematically responding to US neoliberal capitalism. Positing this Complex as “among the most significant barriers to the democratic construction of a healthy society,” Guardino and Snyder advocate for political materialism that conjoins thinking with the past to imagine an alternative democratic socialist political future.
The final articles included in the 50th Anniversary Special Issue of NPS utilize empirical and quantitative methodological approaches to conduct relevant political science with normative political ends. They remind us that “new political science” is committed to methodological pluralism and making the study of politics “relevant to the struggle for a better world.” In his article, “Does Fusion Undermine American Third Parties? An Analysis of House Elections from 1870 to 2016,” Bernard Tamas directly challenges the literature that argues that fusion, the co-nomination of candidates by both third and major parties, strengthens third parties. Through an analysis of elections to the US House of Representatives from 1870 to 2016, Tamas demonstrates that candidates have done worse in fusion states, and that fusion actually serves as a way for major parties to co-opt and weaken third parties in America. Tamas analyzes the strategy and history of fusion both qualitatively and quantitatively, examining a variety of historical third-party cases, including most recently the Workers Family Party in New York, and speaks to the role of third parties in the 2016 presidential election. In his conclusion, Tamas reminds us that “statistically-driven research can be more integrated into the Caucus’s mission to make the study of politics more relevant for progressive change.”
A long-time Caucus member and 2012 CNPS Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award winner Sanford F. Schram organized the symposium on “Race, Rage, and Resentment: Researching the Trump Coalition” based on three research papers developed from a faculty seminar at Hunter College that fit the scope of this Special Issue celebrating CNPS’ 50th Anniversary. All three articles in the symposium utilize data from the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) conducted by researchers at Stanford University in late January, 2016:
The sample consists of 1,200 adults who were chosen in a manner that provided a nationally representative sample based on age, race, gender, and education. This survey provides an early snapshot of Trump supporters and allows us to look inside his coalition as it was in formation.
In his article, “The Racial Gap in Voting Among Women: White Women, Racial Resentment, and Support for Trump,” Charles Tien uses white women’s voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election to reexamine the gender gap from an intersectional perspective, concluding that the gender gap is, in fact, raced, and identifying racial resentment as part of the explanation of why white woman voted for Trump. Tien demonstrates that there is a racial gap in the gender gap, reinforcing the need for intersectional analyses in the discipline. Tien conducts a multivariate analysis which also examines class hypotheses about Trump’s victory in the context that exit poll data demonstrate that Hillary Clinton did better amongst low-income voters, concluding that economic factors were not important in explaining Trump support amongst white women. In fact, Tien finds that “none of the three economics-related variables were statistically significant in explaining support for Trump,” casting doubt on the populist working-class narrative around Trump’s victory. Moreover, Tien’s analysis finds that support for Republican party candidates “was largely driven by racial resentment and not by economic class.”
The final article in the symposium, “The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters” by Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram demonstrates that Trump was able to form a coalition of low-information voters (not low-education voters), and specifically white low-information voters, “vulnerable to relying more on their emotional fears and resentments about immigrants, Muslims, and blacks (but not their anxieties about the economy.)” Fording and Schram’s conclusions reinforce both the findings of Lee on diverse racial frames of resentment and the findings of Tien that intersectional race-gender resentment played more of a role in forming the Trump coalition than class resentment. Using ANES data to analyze the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump, the three symposium articles included here help political scientists demonstrate how we can use empirical, quantitative methods toward normative political ends.
Claire Snyder-Hall’s essay “Battling the Prince: A Political Memoir” rounds out this Special Edition with Snyder-Hall’s personal reflection on her foray from the study of political science in the academy to running for political office. This journey provides a cautionary tale about the depths of authoritarian attitudes and behaviors as seeping into the American body politic, including the Democratic Party and those who identify with the Left. Snyder-Hall warns us about the “perennial allure of power and the habits of deference people develop to make their lives easier, both of which undermine our ability to govern ourselves as equals.” Democratic government requires the citizenry to remain critical of the structures of power and those who inhabit them while staying engaged with the process whether by running for office, occupying public spaces, or protesting in the streets. Cautionary narratives from the actual political world such as Snyder-Hall’s contain a certain urgency in 2017 that offers an appropriate concluding essay for this Special Edition celebrating CNPS’s 50th Anniversary.
We hope this Special Issue dedicated to the CNPS 50th Anniversary (1967–2017) helps reinforce for readers what is “new” about New Political Science. We have attempted in this issue to provide examples of the kinds of frontiers, critical interventions, and visions for the future the political scientists who identify with the Caucus, Section, and journal continue to strive to achieve through their work. We hope the commitment to methodological pluralism, scholar-activism, and making the study of political science relevant to the struggle for a better world resonates with you, our readers, and that you will continue to support the work of the Caucus and the Section and send us this kind of work to New Political Science the journal for decades to come.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Jocelyn M. Boryczka is a co-editor of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics & Culture, Associate Professor of Politics and Faculty Chair of Service Learning at Fairfield University where she teaches feminist, contemporary, democratic and modern political theory. Her most recent book is Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue, and Vice in Backlash Politics (Temple University Press, 2012). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Transformations, New Political Science, Politics and Gender, and Feminist Theory. She regularly travels to and works with educators in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Jennifer Leigh Disney is a co-editor of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Winthrop University. She is the author of Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua (Temple University Press, 2008). Her articles have appeared in journals such as New Political Science, Social Justice, and Socialism and Democracy.