Robert Bates, a professor of government at Harvard University, made a sweeping attack recently on political scientists who work in"area studies,” the interdisciplinary programs on U.S. campuses devoted to the study of foreign countries.
“I have long regarded area programs as a problem for political science,” he wrote in the current issue of a newsletter published by the American Political Science Association.
Area-studies centers, organized around such subjects as African studies, Asian studies, and Middle East studies, provide a framework at many colleges for the study of other cultures. But Dr. Bates charged that the political scientists who work in these programs had"defected from the social sciences into the camp of the humanists.”
They are more interested in language and culture than in comparisons of political institutions, he wrote. They don’t know statistics. They offer"resistance to rigorous methods for evaluating arguments.”
“Within the academy,” he wrote,"the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge.”
The attack requires some decoding, but it’s a harsh one. Dr. Bates, an Africanist and president of the comparative-politics section of the political-science association, was siding with the political scientists who think that much of area studies has been journalistic,"atheoretical,” and generally mushy.
His criticism exposes a rift in political science that keeps getting wider. The debate is partly about what it means to do good social science. Is political science a field that should be quantitative and"scientific” at all times, using mathematical tools in search of general theories about political behavior? Or can there also be a place for people who do not crunch numbers, whose strength is their familiarity with non-Western languages and societies?
The intellectual debate can also turn into turf battles, in which jobs and institutional prestige are at stake.
One reason for the debate is the transformation of political science in the past 15 years by the rise of rational-choice theory. Rational-choice scholars begin with the assumption that citizens are rational and self-interested. They use econometric models and game theory to chart the dance among bureaucrats, lobbyists, and legislators. Proponents of rational choice say it has lent a new rigor to the field and can lead to verifiable general conclusions about politics. The approach dominates the major journals.
This revolution, however, has left area studies largely untouched. Most area scholars prefer the case-study approach: careful, descriptive scholarship about individual countries. As a result, many political scientists view the field with disdain. Area-studies people are called"real-estate agents,” with a stake in a plot of land rather than an intellectual theory. They are accused of"wallowing in the facts” -- describing in detail conditions of the countries they study, without saying how these findings fit into a context with other countries. Graduate students learn that publishing in area-studies journals -- Slavic Review, say, instead of World Politics -- will hurt their careers in political science.
“Regardless of the areas we study, we feel buffeted, if not besieged, by the same forces,” says Carol R. Saivetz, executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, who is a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard."We are constantly told that we are not up to speed, not methodologically pure -- that we are not good political scientists. I feel this very keenly.”
What is at stake, area-studies scholars say, is the continued presence on U.S. campuses of people who have in-depth knowledge of other societies.
“We think that most of the things that people say about area studies are silly,” says John Creighton Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and secretary of the Association for Asian Studies. “Most of the stuff that people say area studies should be doing is what area studies is already doing.”
Members of the groups that represent area-studies scholars gathered for an emergency meeting in September in Arlington, Va., to discuss the problem. Area-studies scholars insist that they, too, are interested in coming to general conclusions about politics. But the conclusions have to be rooted in well-grounded studies of individual places, they argue, not in arid quantitative models.
They point out that some of the most influential scholarship in comparative politics has been done that way -- Theda Skocpol’s work on revolutions, for example, which looked at Russia, France, and China; or Philippe C. Schmitter’s work on transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, which looked at Latin American examples.
An outburst at the University of California at San Diego in 1994 was an early signal that area-studies people were feeling beleaguered. Chalmers Johnson, an eminence grise in the field of Japan studies, publicly blasted the decision to hire a rational-choice scholar to replace him when he retired.
Dr. Johnson, now president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, has continued his broadsides against rational choice ever since. Its assumptions about human self-interest may not be valid in non-Western cultures, he argues. Courses on it are pushing language-and-culture courses out of the graduate curriculum."The American social-science establishment has become radically overbalanced in favor of what they, in self-congratulation, call theory, but which amounts to priestly jargon,” he says.
At the University of Michigan, a tenure dispute raised the question of how much the political-science department there valued area work. Jill Crystal, a Middle East specialist, sued in 1993 when her bid for a promotion was turned down. The case was mostly about sex discrimination, but she also asserted that political scientists who studied the third world hardly ever got tenure, and that no one had been tenured in her own position, a Middle East-studies slot, since its creation in the 1940s."They had decided that no one working in that area could do anything interesting or anything theoretical,” says Dr. Crystal, now at Auburn University.
In January, a judge dismissed the parts of her case that didn’t have to do with sex discrimination. But by then, one of her colleagues had told the court that yes, he thought her work on oil and politics in the Persian Gulf states was"pre-scientific.” Yes, he had told other professors she couldn’t crunch numbers -- or even count. None of this warmed the hearts of the area-studies contingent in Michigan’s political-science department. (The suit was settled last summer for $100,000. Michigan admitted no wrongdoing and says it settled only to minimize legal costs.)
Dr. Crystal’s account of her colleagues’ regard for area studies echoes complaints from across the country."They view our work as ‘in lieu of native informant,’” she says."We go overseas and come back and describe it to them. We are not really thinkers, we are just cameras.”
In the wake of the Michigan case, other area-studies scholars have left Ann Arbor. Matthew Evangelista, a Russia expert, landed at Cornell University."I just found the department getting increasingly narrow,” he says. Jeffrey Winters, who has written about Indonesia, and Edward Gibson, a Latin Americanist, departed for Northwestern University.
For a while, Northwestern had a reputation as a place that was looking to pick up good area-studies people who were disgruntled in their own departments. But Meredith Woo-Cumings, a professor of political science there who oversaw a major search for new scholars two years ago, denies any such agenda. A Koreanist, she does say she is dubious about rational choice, because it renders academic research on other countries inscrutable to policy makers and the public."I think that scholars have made themselves irrelevant, and I think it’s wrong,” she says.
Given the divisions in the field, political-science departments have had to decide how to align themselves in the marketplace for scholars and graduate students. Duke University and the University of California at San Diego have found niches by latching on to rational-choice work in comparative politics. Both have seen their reputations rise.
At Columbia University, which has eight area-studies centers -- independent entities that can provide research money and office space but not tenure -- the two sides more or less go their separate ways."People recognize that we are going to be one of the last bastions of area studies, so there is a live-and-let-live attitude,” says Lisa Anderson, the chair of its political-science department."The worst that can be said is that there are a lot of ships passing in the night.” Yale University, meanwhile,"is confused,” says one comparative-politics scholar there.
Even the strongest proponents of area studies concede that there are ways in which it can be improved, short of jumping on the rational-choice bandwagon. Area studies has been, almost by definition, America-centric (“area” has traditionally meant areas besides the United States), and it has sometimes been rigid. In the past, for example, scholars who wanted to include Turkey in a comparative study of European countries had trouble finding grants. Their work didn’t fit neatly into the"area” model.
Some of this rigidity stems from the field’s rise to prominence during the Cold War. The Education Department’s Title VI program, which will give $54.5-million to area programs and language study this year, was started in the wake of Sputnik, as was major foundation support of area work. In turn, area studies’ division of the world has often mirrored that of the State Department and the Pentagon. The now-defunct “Soviet studies” -- an"area” that makes sense only when one recalls that the Soviet Union was America’s main adversary -- is the classic example.
Indeed, many of those who provide funds for area studies say they are unhappy with the Cold War cartography. They want to use their money to foster research across regions. The Social Science Research Council, for example, a major source of funds, used to give out grants strictly by area. This year, however, it announced that it would focus on such topics as “ethnic conflict” and"transitions to democracy,” and would encourage comparative work.”'Areas’ are more porous, less bounded, less fixed than we previously assumed,” Kenneth Prewitt, president of the council, wrote in announcing the change.
The social-science council’s decision and similar pronouncements from the Andrew Mellon and Ford Foundations constitute a much-needed shakeup, many area-studies people agree. But some scholars also fear that such changes give academic departments yet another excuse not to emphasize hard-won knowledge of a single place when they are looking for scholars. Chalmers Johnson calls the council’s decision “unilateral disarmament” in the fight with the theorymongers.
Scholars have different ideas about how to reconcile the two sides of the debate. David Laitin, of the University of Chicago, has argued that area-studies people could shake the “real-estate” label by following up a research project in one country with a similar one in another place. Too often, he says, they leap from one unconnected project to another in a single country. In his own work, he has moved from language-revival movements in Africa to such movements in the former Soviet republics.
Harvard’s Dr. Bates promotes"analytic narratives,” a project that he thinks includes the best of both worlds: case studies and the rigor of rational choice. In one such narrative, the University of Washington’s Margaret Levi traces the disappearance of the right of citizens in several countries to buy their way out of the military draft. She describes the pressures that led Prussia to abolish"substitution” in 1814 and the United States to continue some form of it through the Civil War.
But she uses a rational-choice vocabulary, describing the changing policies as a calculus of costs and benefits, in which the demand of states for conscripts must be balanced with the tolerance of citizens for the draft. As the demand for soldiers changes along with conceptions of fairness, states settle on different"equilibrium policies” concerning the undemocratic practice.
Dr. Levi presented her work at a meeting of the American Political Science Association in August. She and Dr. Bates -- along with Stanford University’s Avner Greif, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast -- hope to publish a book of essays as a manifesto for the analytic-narratives approach. They want it to show the compatibility of the rational-choice approach with deep knowledge of other cultures.
“I’m very strongly in favor of area studies, but I think the way it is done causes real problems,” Dr. Bates says."It’s got to be done right. It’s got to be done with a view toward central social-science issues, toward abstracting out what is general.”
Most area-studies people, however, would agree that the first step toward bringing the two sides together is reining in the rhetoric. Piling abuse on area studies, they say, is not going to produce any social-science insights.