Is Political Science Too Pessimistic?

Things are better than ever. When President Obama talks to young people, that’s the message he uses to gird them against cynicism. “If you had to choose a moment in human history to live — even if you didn’t know what gender or race, what nationality or sexual orientation you’d be — you’d choose now,” he tells interns. The world is “wealthier, healthier, better educated, less violent, more tolerant, more socially conscious and more attentive to the vulnerable than it has ever been.”

If those same young people study contemporary social science, they’re likely to hear a much different story, at least on the subject of race. They might read about psychological research that shows how hard it is for people to spot and overcome their own biases. They might hear how white supremacy has changed form rather than disappeared. They might encounter scholarship describing how conditions arguably got worse for black people under the administration of our first black president.

The pessimism of that narrative worries Jennifer Hochschild, who recently wrapped up a term as president of the American Political Science Association. She thinks that her fellow social scientists — generally a liberal lot — have moved further and further away from the belief that individuals or groups can improve the world. At her discipline’s annual conference in Philadelphia last month, the Harvard professor devoted her presidential address to provoking a debate about why that is and what the alternatives might be.

Hochschild has spent decades studying racial and ethnic politics. She is probably best known for a book called Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton University Press). The 1995 study described a growing divide between middle-class and poor blacks around the question of whether the United States was capable of achieving its commitment to the American dream, with well-off blacks increasingly disaffected, while poor blacks, who might have had more reason to be, were not as alienated. More recently Hochschild published Creating a New Racial Order (Princeton, 2012), written with Vesla M. Weaver and Traci R. Burch, which argued that the United States could be on the cusp of a potentially positive transformation in racial dynamics because of immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change.

Over a series of conversations before and after her talk at the conference, I spoke with Hochschild about the pessimism that has overtaken her field. What follows has been edited and condensed.

What’s the core of your argument?

If you look across a broad historical swath of time, there are two explanations for social science’s left pessimism. In the 1960s, the kind of research people were doing was essentially optimistic. So: The behavioral revolution is going to transform the way we do our science, which is going to help us make the world better. The theories of modernization which swept the field of comparative politics and international relations said basically we’re on a positive upward trajectory, so that less developed countries are going to become like more developed countries. T.H. Marshall’s argument about the progressive nature of human rights over three centuries said we’re now more or less at the end of the rights revolution because more or less everybody either has or is going to get a full panoply of rights.

The racial-research literature was also extremely optimistic. Gordon Allport. Gunnar Myrdal. Milton Gordon. There was a series of major research traditions that said basically we can solve the problem of racial hierarchy and racial segregation either through political action or through individual transformation.

Fast-forward to the 1990s and the early 2000s. Much social-science research — and I think colleagues would disagree with me, but I’m going to make the argument anyway — has moved away from all of those forms of optimism into much deeper arguments about structure. That there are deep, underlying, structural and/or psychological, institutional forces that control our lives. So the loss of human agency as a driving force in explaining political phenomena — that’s the core transformation from 1960 to 2000.

The second part of the core argument comes from dinner with a friend in London two or three months ago. His argument is that, until 1989, the left had major revolutionary forces that they could believe in. The American Revolution. French Revolution. Civil War. Russian Revolution. Chinese Revolution. Even if contemporary politics looks pretty dismal, which of course it did through much of that 200-year period, there was a vision of an ideal future. And the fall of the Berlin Wall totally demolishes any hope of a grand structural world-historical transformation. And since then, what have we had? Not much. The Arab Spring, but that doesn’t turn out to look very good. South Africa and the end of apartheid — that doesn’t turn out to look so good. Black Lives Matter, but we don’t know where that’s going to go.

So the loss of a huge transformative vision, combined with the deeper structural arguments within political science, leaves the left without a conviction that human or group agency can actually make much of a big difference in anything that really matters.

What precipitated your taking on this subject?

Probably what precipitated it was being within an African-American-studies department but also doing research on race and ethnicity. There’s a very strong tenor of discouragement, pessimism, dismay, frustration. And there’s increasingly strong research about how much individual attitudes, preferences, and behaviors basically don’t matter.

On the one hand, if you go in the psychological direction — the logic of implicit racism, motivated reasoning, media framing — it kind of doesn’t matter what I think or think I think. My behavior is either deeply racist, if you believe in the implicit-bias argument, or it’s deeply racially harmful regardless of what I try to do.

And then the other direction the research literature has gone is more structural, institutional, historical. There’s this wonderful work about how essentially all of the important American political institutions have been shaped by either the desire to retain slavery or the post-Civil War desire to maintain racial hierarchy and white domination. So, the Senate and the House, the nature of American tax policy, the nature of the introduction of new states out of territories in the 19th century, the nature of the GI Bill, the nature of Social Security and social-welfare policies — a whole lot of big, clunky, institutional or structural phenomena, according to this literature, are essentially racial. They’re about racial hierarchy. They’re in the service of maintaining white domination.

How has the Obama presidency affected that scholarship? You quoted a number of scholars specifically on that question, like the political scientists Fredrick C. Harris (Columbia) and Michael Dawson (Chicago) and the religious-studies scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Princeton).

There is an argument, and this is part generational. William Julius Wilson continues to argue this — I think I would — that the Obama election, and especially perhaps re-election, represents a genuine break in the old racial hierarchy. Partly because whites voted for him to some considerable degree, and partly because he no longer had to rely on whites. And then the response from Harris, Dawson, Glaude, is that in some important sense that’s superficial. We changed the president, but mass incarceration continued to rise. Undocumented immigrants continued to be deported even at a higher rate. Poverty didn’t decline. Whites who are inclined to be racist are even more so. And so, either Obama and his administration weren’t able to overcome these deep underlying flaws, or, even worse, the fact of Obama’s presidency allows people like me to be complacent that we’re actually fixing these problems, and there is no genuine either effort or capacity to fix them.

In your talk, you presented more-positive data, showing, for example, that the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites declined from seven years in 1990 to 3.4 years in 2014. Are you saying all these other scholars of race and ethnicity are wrong? Social scientists should be more optimistic?

I’m not saying they’re wrong. This is very high-quality scholarship. What I want to say is that they’re partial. That these particular versions of those analyses may well be right, but there are other structural, institutional, personal, moral forces that push in the opposite direction.

We need to also pay attention to ways in which, at least the United States, maybe the world in general, is genuinely not only making efforts to escape the story that I’ve just been telling, but actually succeeding at it. There’s a lot that goes into data on life expectancy. And you don’t get those quite dramatic transformations in life expectancy unless an awful lot of things are going right.

My argument generally is, in some sense we have the choice as scholars whether to emphasize all of the genuine things that either are going wrong, or have gone wrong, or have not changed, and all of the things that are better, potentially getting better, or have changed. And for us to focus entirely on one side of that complicated story and not pay attention to the other side is both empirically wrong and politically and psychologically demobilizing. If you tell people that everything you’ve been desperately trying to do for the last 30 or 40 or 50 years has failed — forget it. Why do I keep trying?

Is this a subject of a lot of debate in the field?

No, it’s not. And that’s part of what I think has driven me to do this. I know very few scholars of racial and ethnic politics who will say anything very optimistic, at least in public.

There is another piece of this. David Mayhew, at Yale, has been arguing in recent years that we as a discipline have lost contingency. We’ve lost attention to names, dates, human actions, choices. And that by focusing more and more intensively on either Foucaultian-type underlying structures of power; or rational-choice type, institutional design shapes everything; or psychological-type implicit unconscious motivations, we as scholars have given up examination of whether a single individual or a group or a current or an event or a moment changes things in a big, long-term way. The dismissive political-science phrase is, Well, that’s what journalists do, right? They tell human-interest stories, we tell underlying structural stories. So there’s a lot at stake for political scientists in saying that what we do is deeper structural analysis.

Mayhew’s argument is that intellectually that’s a mistake. If somebody else had been elected president instead of Abraham Lincoln, things would be really different. If somebody else had been elected president rather than FDR, things would have been really different. If Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy had not been assassinated, things might have been really different. For us to give up that kind of analysis is to just lose a lot intellectually.

Marc Parry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.