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Ipoints
n his reflections on Where is Political
Science Going?, professor Sartori brightly
out some present flaws in the disci-
All political scientists should be very grate-
ful to the founders of political science; some
of them (but only some) are mentioned by
pline: too much empiricism and too little ap- Sartori. Without them we would not be here,
plied research. At attacking American-type that is, doing research and teaching, or writing
political science, however, I think he chooses or reading this essay. But, as all founders,
a mistaken enemy. I will hold, in contrast, those of political science established only cer-
that the main source of the mentioned flaws is tain foundations of the discipline whose own
the weakness of political theory. development should lead us beyond. As
I am very happy to know that Sartori has Sartori says, the founders main task was the
always maintained that our model is eco- provision of a number of highly relevant def-
nomics. I do too, and I do not think there is initions to develop further analysis, to which
much more to choose from in the social sci- I would add a number of classifications
ences. But indeed economics is not a model (like those of Sartori himself, for instance, on
to establish political sciences own identity party systems) which opened the way to start
as a soft science, as Sartori holds. Econom- collecting and making sense of information.
ics is a rather hard science and should be However, scientific progress requires some-
taken as such, if it were the case, as a model. thing else. To be put in a simple framework,
Sartori is right that political science has devel- at least four levels of knowledge of whatever
oped relatively little applied research. This is object can be distinguished:
reflected in the supply of teaching, with rela-
1) Definitions and classifications;
tively few programs in public policy and ad-
ministration in comparison to programs in po- 2) Quantitative measurements;
litical science, in contrast, for instance, with
the very high number 3) Causal hypotheses;
of business schools 4) Explanatory theory.
by in comparison to
programs in econom- The founding fathers, as acknowledged by
Josep M. Colomer ics. But the very ex- Sartori, stayed basically at the first level: defi-
Center for Research and ample of economics nitions. What surprises Sartori is that in fur-
Teaching in Economics (CIDE) shows that in the so- ther developments the discipline has reached
cial sciences, as in the second level, centered on quantitative
all sciences, while measurements. The ancient sage, as he him-
there can be theoretical research and applied self is characterized, is absolutely right at not-
research, the latter without the former is nei- ing that too often measurement replaces defi-
ther science nor a contribution to cumulative nitions, which makes the former useless and
knowledge or intellectual, material, or moral sometimes counterproductive. It is impossible
progress of human beings. Atheoretical applied not to share his dismay at so many statistical
teaching can transmit, at most, certain tools exercises pretending only to modify some of
and skills based on practitioners experience the variables in a regression model previously
(in business or in electoral campaigns or in presented by other authors, or to give another
whatever else). But the big expansion of ap- massage to the same data, without even defin-
plied economics and business studies in the ing clearly what we are talking about nor con-
last two or three decades has been successful sidering hypotheses or theories that could
thanks to the high level of consistency which make sense of the exercise or clarify the rele-
has been achieved in economic theory after a vance of the question. Hundreds of graduate
long trajectory of cumulative knowledge. Po- students and assistant professors have been
litical science as an academic discipline and are currently victims of research pro-
emergedas remarked by Sartorimuch later grams made only of statistical exercises with-
than economics and, logically, it is still at a out direction. But perhaps this is a somewhat
relatively backward stage in which theoretical inevitable cost derived from the expansion of
research on basic questions yet to be solved available information, since econometrists
tends to dominate. I wish that theoretical re- have often felt in the same kind of exercise
search in political science may eventually pro- and, although I know other fields much less, I
duce results at least as consistent as those in suspect that this may have also affected other
economics and as able to guide the expansion still more model sciences like physics or
of applied research at a comparable scale. experimental biology.