D1. The State of Political Science Worldwide

Chair: Ilter Turan (Bilgi University, Istanbul)

During the early stages of the empirical revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was optimism among its proponents that we would be heading in the direction of a universal political science with commonly shared concerns, research questions, methodologies. It soon became evident such optimism was premature. The new did not replace the old but developed alongside with what existed already. Other new approaches such a rational choice modelling rose to prominence soon afterwards. The discipline did not free itself from questions of normative philosophy but encountered criticism that the cures proposed were manifestations of normative choices and culturally and socio-economically derived preferences. In authoritarian societies, on the other hand, the discipline was not used so much for analyzing political phenomena as legitimizing the regime. The end of the bipolar world and the coming of globalization generated new hopes that we might be headed in the development of a universal discipline. Is that happening? While larger global scientific communities appear to have developed, it is far from certain that we are headed in the direction of a unified and integrated discipline of political science. Where does the discipline stand today? What are the different approaches, schools of thought, specializations that characterize the discipline, what are the main cleavages, what are the major lines of discord, what are the areas in which highest harmony is achieved? Are there regional variations, how so? Are some of the areas more universal than others?

Papers that address the state of political science worldwide are invited. Proposals may choose to focus in one area of the discipline, in a geographical region as well as the general state of the discipline and its problems.