8. A PUBLIC AUTHORITY OF POLITICAL SCIENTISTS AND
THEORISTS
Il faut une science politique nouvelle à un monde tout nouveau.
Tocqueville 1835: v. 1, introduction
We all consider the greatest evil and the greatest danger of the present situation to be
the profound indifference into which the country is falling, a growing indifference
that manifests itself by the most formidable symptoms. There are many causes of this
evil; but surely one of the principal ones is the belief that is becoming more deeply
rooted each day in the masses, that political life is no more than a game in which each
person seeks only to win; that politics has nothing serious in it but the personal
ambitions of which it is the means; that there is a sort of gullibility and almost
stupidity and shame in growing impassioned for a game that lacks reality and for
political chiefs who are only actors not even interested in the success of the play, but
only in that of their particular roles.
Tocqueville (1846) 1985: 181-2
Manin’s sequence of parliamentary, party, and audience
democracy suggests a fascinating transformation of the public role
of political thought. First, political scientists and theorists act as
quasi-clerical government experts and observers of parliamentary
politics on behalf of the educated ruling class. Then they become
quasi-underground experts of political parties and observers of
corporatist politics on behalf of the emancipated ruled class.
Finally, they make a living as quasi-commercial media experts and
observers of communicative politics on behalf of the committed
classless public. This closing chapter concerns the public authority
of academic political thought in audience democracies.
I start with the thesis that the establishment of modern
political science in Western societies (large, professional,
mainstream, pluralistic) is the fulfilment of Tocqueville’s wish
dream. Then I discuss the modern distinction between practical
and theoretical knowledge of politics, the ambition of
enlightenment, and the fallacy of scientism. The next section is
about a post-modern dilution of practical and theoretical claims to
political intelligence and truth, the ambition of reflexivity, the
essential helpfulness of political science and theory in the public
sphere, and the fallacy of isolationism. In the final section I
recommend that political scientists and theorists pursue the
modest but vital public sphere role of mediation and rectification.
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Tocqueville’s Wish Dream Fulfilled
In the very introduction of De la démocratie en Amerique (1835), a
cry is heard from the author’s heart: “A new science of politics is
needed for a new world”. The American, Dutch, and French
revolutions shaped a fundamental change in politics. The people
entered the world stage and world history. The idea of popular
representation was invented and tried in many colours and
shades. Henceforth, the struggle within and across national states
would determine the order of modern societies. For all these
reasons, Tocqueville held the view that a science of politics – not a
history or ethics of politics – was needed to interpret the
democratic experience with novel concepts, methods, connections,
and prescriptions. Tocqueville had a troublesome career in French
politics after his journey to North America as member of the
Chamber of Deputies, Minister of Foreign Affairs. He saw political
science as one remedy against the modern disease of civil
disengagement, a corrupting silence of winners and losers alike,
hidden from view by showmanship and stage rebellion in
parliament and government.1
Tocqueville was overstating. Democratic nationalism implies
representative democracy embedded in a constitutional
framework and an open national economy, with guarantees of
justice by a central government and diversity of (partly
contradictory) civil values and life forms. The democratic national
state is special, but not unique. Similarities or overlaps with other
political regimes – the tribe, city, church, kingdom, empire, or
union of federal states – may still matter.
But Tocqueville’s point was well taken. For centuries,
political thinkers had stated that democracy perishes from its own
mistakes, degenerates into rule of the mob, and is part of a cosmic
cycle of emerging, sustaining, and collapsing regimes: rule by the
one, by the few, by all, and then again back to rule by the one, and
so on. Tocqueville’s special intuition gave birth to the general
problem of modern political science and philosophy. Is democratic
society – with a distinctive political system and public sphere – desirable
and sustainable?
It did not take long for the new science to enter the
intellectual and academic scene (see Blokland 2006). From 1850 till
World War I, it soared high under the guidance of such figures as
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Bagehot, Bernstein, Dicey, Le Bon, Marx, Michels, John Stuart Mill,
Mosca, Ostrogorski, Pareto, Spencer, and Wilson, the future
American president. They examined the circulation of elites, the
estates and classes of mass society, party struggle, the public
sphere (press, protest, intelligentsia), the growth of government,
ideologies of collectivism, and colonisation by great powers. Their
controversy was a clash between those who saw democratisation
as progress, and those who saw it as decline of civilization (cf.
Bernstein 1899 with Michels 1911).
In the Interbellum, the research agenda shifted to the crisis of
parliamentarism, liberalism, the rise of European totalitarianism,
and American activism.2 Bryce, Dewey, Laski, Lasswell,
Lippmann, Ortega Y Gasset, Schmitt, Spengler, and Weber were
towering figures here. This stage of development of modern
political science included the great planning debate during World
War II, with contributions such as Mannheim’s Man and Society in
an Age of Reconstruction (1940), Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy (1942), Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944),
and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). It is no coincidence that
refugees – and ex-communists like Koestler and De Kadt –
stimulated agreement about democratic order after the defeat of
Hitler’s Germany, including new ideas about regulation of media
monopolies and government public relations. This was a springboard era for empirical research methods (such as electoral
research and public opinion research), foundational theories,
academic specialisation, and a discourse separated from
jurisprudence, economics, and other social sciences. Controversy
remained with a clash between those who believed in the
compatibility of representative democracy and large scale
modernisation, and those who foresaw the rule of political parties
in a new dictatorship (plebiscitory democracy, people’s
democracy) (cf. Lipmann 1925 with Dewey 1927).
Since 1945, the new science gained momentum under
American leadership and linked to swelling numbers of students,
teachers, and occupational prospects. Robert Putnam (2005: 314-5)
rightly notes that political thought in the past sixty years has been
driven by a small set of questions which was fully linked to the
dark past of falling, failing, and fanatic party democracies. Why
Verdun? Why Hitler? How to make international politics after
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How to democratise new states after the
fall of European colonialism?
Tocqueville’s contemporary academic community is large,
professional, mainstream, and pluralistic. It is large in the sense
that it comprises thousands of faculty and trained civil servants,
teachers, journalists, activists, and consultants, often working far
beyond the traditional core area of electoral systems, foreign
policy, and local administration. It is professional in that there are
official curricula, textbooks, methods, and certificates; associations
for calibration of standards, disciplinary arrangements,
community feelings and protected interests; and boundary
disputes with other social sciences.
It is mainstream in that political science is respected as a
university department, national civil education, and subsystem for
the maintenance of liberal democracy. The University of
Amsterdam legitimated the creation of a Department of Political
Science in the years 1945-1948 by referring to a never-again
attitude concerning appeasement and naivety in the national
response to the rise of Hitler. Generally, and under the influence of
Europeanisation of American social sciences (the brain drain of
Adorno, Lazarsfeld, and many others) and post-war
Americanisation (or proud and jaunty anti-Americanism, as in
France), political scientists and theorists see themselves as
defenders of democratic society. Their books, articles, edited
volumes, and conference papers are distinctive expressions of
democratic commitment and contributions to safeguarding and
invigorating democratic life, on a par with their academic
teaching, public policy consulting, and participation in news
media debates. While they study pre- and non-democratic regimes
and pay attention to features of all political regimes, democratic or
otherwise, their whole body of accumulated knowledge is
presented as an integral part of the capital of democratic societies.
Without real, scientific knowledge about politics politicians,
journalists and citizens cannot arrange the survival, stability and
flourishing of liberal democracy, hence, their current concern with
the phenomenon of joyless politics (distrust and disengagement;
see Munck and Snyder 2007 and my Introduction and chapter 3).3
John Rawls, a leading theorist of justice since 1989 and 2001,
mentions several public roles of political theory: discovery of
agreement on deeply disputed and divisive issues among citizens
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and their representatives; orientation as to the meaning of society
and its culture, institutional framework, and history; reconciliation
with the obligations and limits of democratic society; and
construction of realistic utopias, that is, the study of social
improvement by political means within the boundaries of human
nature. This appears to be an eloquent expression of the
democratic self-image of even the most technical and aloof student
of politics today. While most Western political scientists and
theorists have abandoned Plato’s concept of guardianship, they do
see themselves as keepers of the spirit and promise of liberal
democracy.4
Finally, Tocqueville’s brainchild is endowed with pluralism.
The variety of scholars in current academic political science is
known, as is their love of distinction and diversity. Mainstream
economists take the neoclassical theory of strategic action by firms
and families under the circumstance of relative scarcity for
granted; mainstream political scientists and theorists disagree
about the very existence of a foundation of the political experience.
Comparative scholars sit beside regional specialists; practical
political philosophers mingle with experts in the history of
political ideas, theorists of international relations, proponents of
integrated public policy sciences, and practitioners of fundamental
research and methodology. Many of these scholars move in
different directions.
There is empiricism (or behaviourism, as political scientists
call it); functionalism (or systems theory, or evolutionary
approach); rationalism; institutionalism; constructivism (the new
term for phenomenology and the interpretative approach); critical
theory (successor to historical materialism); and, of course,
positivism and its postmodernism counterpart.
There are also style differences that crosscut the differences
in specialisation and schooling. The natural scientist engages in
discovery of universal laws of politics, preferably in constant
numbers. The formalist, alias theorist, catches the logic of politics
in formulas and proofs. The roundabout thinker highlights one
aspect of society and derives politics from that single aspect (the
political economist, geographer, psychologist, and so on). The
traveller, alias interpreter, uncovers the locality and contextual
nature of political spaces and practices. And the activist uses
political science as a device for political morality, public policy,
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and social improvement. Among my colleagues, I also find empire
builders, researchers, teachers, journalists, and double talents who
combine academic life with a career in party politics or public
policy making.5
The Modern Distinction between Practical and Theoretical
Knowledge about Politics
Nevertheless, most political scientists and theorists are united in
their celebration of a distinction between practical and theoretical
knowledge of politics - on a par with separation between state and
academia in the free world. Indeed, it is the noble task of political
scientists and theorists to enlighten mankind – the public of
publics – by voicing, filtering, systematising, and funding practical
knowledge in a great canon from Aristotle and Montesquieu to
Weber and Lasswell.
Practical knowledge is any set of beliefs and statements that
emanates from daily experience of politics, as well as ongoing
reflection on daily experience within and across broad groups of
politicians and based on senses and conventions. Practical
knowledge grows without scientific pretension and comes from
visceral experience of victory and defeat and learning of such
experience from others, be they heroes of the distant past or
colleagues in the field. Theoretical knowledge is any set of beliefs
and statements that emanates from open, rational, replicable, and
revisable procedures of inference within and across groups of
trained scholars. It grows at a critical distance from politics,
whether high politics (academics in the company of insiders) or
low politics (academics in the company of outsiders). Such
knowledge - also referred to as objectivity, critical consciousness,
or erudition - comes from rigorous scrutiny of the author’s claims
to truth.
Academics are outnumbering and outmanoeuvring the selftaught practitioners of political ideas and practices. There were
more self-taught intellectuals and leaders in the era of party
democracy than in the current era of audience democracy. Perhaps
for this reason, academics pose as generous owners of theoretical
knowledge. They bring to the study of politics a disdain for
uncomplicated and anti-intellectual politicians (hence, their
embarrassment with the professionalisation of political acting
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talent by Reagan, Berlusconi, and their epigones). Yet they invite
serious politicians and citizens to a universe of political
hypotheses and ideas beyond (auto-) biography, diary, narrative,
minutes, official history (of nations, state organs, and parties),
stage-plays, novels, poems, movies, reports, and archives. They
argue that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influences” (Keynes 1974: 383) are
better off by learning and applying the results of empirical and
philosophical studies of politics.
Political studies in contemporary academia are marked by
strong identification with the methodology of the social sciences
(rigour) and the future of liberal democracies (relevance).6 A
feeling for method and argument and their difficulties and limits
in the political world is what makes political scientists and
theorists so different from other honourable academics and nonfiction writers. It is their weapon against current delusion, illusion,
bullshit, self-deceit, prejudice, fallacy, after-dinner talk, closed
thinking, demagoguery, hypocrisy, opportunism, excessive
abstraction and idealisation, narrow-minded specialism,
partisanship, political correctness, ethnocentrism, and other
pathologies of democratic societies based on free communities of
science and thought.7
The interplay between practical and theoretical knowledge
allows for various case sets. Two confirm the self-image of modern
political science and theory. One (scientism) seduces academics to
fall back on anti-democratic habits in the spirit of Plato, rather than
Tocqueville.
The pure case for enlightenment: joint growth of political
knowledge and academic knowledge for abolition and
control of human costs and losses rooted in ignorance,
clumsiness, and special failures of the mind: impulsive
behaviour (passion out of ignorance), ideology (interest out
of ignorance) and dogmatism (principle out of ignorance).
The impure case for enlightenment: correction of political
knowledge by academic knowledge, that is, reducing the
danger of populism by approaching recurrent problems and
tensions “out of the box” and “against the flow” (Brittan
2005).
The case of the limits of enlightenment, based on self-command
by experts: correction of academic knowledge by political
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knowledge of political and apolitical strata of the population,
that is, reduction of the danger of scientism.
Some post-war illustrations of the case of pure
enlightenment are incremental decision making (the public policy
models of Simon and Lindblom), the signalling of power
differences (methods of local power research in elitism and
pluralism), power sharing in divided societies (the designs of
Lijphart and Horowitz), and competent administration of civic
communities based on social capital and governance of commonpool resources (the projects of Putnam and Ostrom). Illustrations
in political theory include Popper’s plea for piecemeal social
engineering, Berlin’s restatement of value pluralism, and Hayek’s
and Oakeshott’s restatement of the rule of law.8
The case of corrective political science and theory belongs to
Montesquieu’s and Madison’s checks and balances (structurally
moderate government), Smith’s free trade (the invisible hand), and
Keynes’s counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Recent examples of
mechanisms in political science are Olson’s free-rider behaviour,
Elster’s precommitment by independent public agencies, Snyder’s
violence and war in incomplete democratic regimes, Sen’s
dissidence-based detection of economic misery, and Sunstein’s
conformity-based polarisation and extremism. Examples in
political theory are Easton’s reduction of overload in democratic
systems, Rawls’s veil of ignorance (protection of the vulnerable in
the public interest), and MacIntyre’s and Charles Taylor’s
restatement of virtues of authorities.
The least flattering and most dialectical indicator of success
of political science and political theory is the case of selfrestraining enlightenment. This concerns settings in which political
experts give up excessive rationalism and learn from pragmatic
upper layers or wise crowds. In The Counter-revolution of Science
(1952), Hayek tracked the modern phenomenon of scientism.
Scientism is a method of politics and public policy that is based
solely on scientific sources, proofs, and recommendations when
theoretical knowledge is drastically limited and nearly impossible
to access (ignorance in hierarchical systems, complexity,
innovation, tragic choices, crises, or basic imbalances) (Hayek
(1952) 1979). The familiar example of retreat of scientism concerns
the libertarian and conservative critique of the cradle-to-grave
welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s (excessive taxation and
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regulation, stagflation, subsidy of expensive private taste),
combined with contractarian, egalitarian, and republican
objections against “government house utilitarianism” (Williams).
Political scientists and theorists had gone too far in their unduly
intellectual support of expanding social policy programs and the
role of state intervention in the pursuit of happiness (ibidem 1985:
108-10).
Recent and sometimes disputed examples of scientism in
political science and theory include democratic neo-liberalism
(market competition within the public domain), democratic
multiculturalism (group rights in the public sphere), and
democratic imperialism (imposition of democracy).
The last example is particularly telling. Since 1945, a consensus
had emerged that the export of Western models of democracy by
force was impracticable and unthinkable. Such pragmatic
consensus was influenced by European decolonisation, American
aversion to colonialism, the terms of containment between the
American and Russian alliances in the Cold War, modernization
(and a bit of civilization) theory, and the idea of national selfliberation (a bastard of conquest and levelling-up theory). The
exceptionally salutary occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria
plus the American backing of Christian Democracy in post-fascist
Italy were by-products of legitimate and effective war efforts.9
Both the ambivalent record of American interventions in the
Middle East (Iran), Asia (Korea, Vietnam) and South America
(Chile) and the wave of peaceful transitions towards democracy in
Southern Europe and, later, South America, South Africa and the
heart of Europe seemed to underline a triple lesson. It was prudent
to promote democracy abroad by means of soft power within the
legal framework of the United Nations: preparation of timely
elections as the final phase of peace-keeping. It was also prudent
to legitimate military interventions and covert operations in the
national and Western interests of stability, rather than to return to
imperialist discourse. And it made sense to follow the general
sequence of national identification, institutionalisation of the state
and legality, and, eventually, formation of mass electorates and
moderate parties (Huntington 1968).
The war in Iraq since 2003 breaks with such chastened
enlightenment in international relations. (I will not discuss the case
of excessive enlargement of the European Union since 1993.) This
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war indicates a brief period of scientism in the foreign policy of the
United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies. According to
radical conservatives and liberals, military intervention may be
justified not only in cases of self-defence, regional instability, and
gross violations of human rights, but also in cases of democratic
nation-building in stagnant authoritarian regimes and so-called
failing states with strategic location for the West. The failure of the
experiment of forced constitutionalism and con-sociationalism in
Iraq seems to confirm a fallacy of an influential minority of
political scientists and theorists, and the sound judgment of many
leaders of government and demonstrators in the West who were
consistently hostile and sceptical in the matter of the theoretical
doctrine of regime change (Cushman 2003, Daalder & Lindsay
2003, Feldman 2003, Frum & Perle 2003, Fukuyama 2003, 2006,
Sharansky 2004, Diamond 2005).
Post-modern Overlapping of Practical and Theoretical
Knowledge in Audience Democracy
The primary feature of audience democracy from the point of view
of social and political theory of science is the overlapping of
practical and theoretical knowledge of politics. Many political
parties, parliaments, governments, and public sphere voluntary
associations and news media, as well as a growing number of
members of the political stratum of citizens, know, understand
and use topical insights of political thought, or think they do. An
important example is the Kantian theory of democratic peace and
its popularisation and application by Wilsonian presidents, such as
Carter, Clinton, and Bush Junior (Mead 2001: 132-173, Mansfield &
Snyder 2001: 1-3).
The public influence and authority of political science and
theory in audience democracy are both outcome and condition of
some related trends. First, modern representative politics has
rationalised itself by hiring advertising agencies, professional
campaigners, pollsters, public opinion analysts, trend watchers,
public relations officers, specialised policy consultants, reporters,
editors, and so on. Most of them have had at least minimal training
in political science or new-fashioned social sciences (management
communication science).
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Academic political science and theory faces lower costs of
access to politics owing to its alumni’s omnipresence in political
staff roles. Such alumni are used to academic language and
reasoning, although they still face contempt and resistance by nonacademic politicians and their assistants.10 But academic political
science and theory can only get the attention of the bastions of
government and private power via accessible writing (lecturing,
debating, and so on), translation of academic language into lingua
franca, and intermediation by professionals in the political theatre
itself. Political hypotheses and ideas are only taken seriously if
they are modified into policy memoranda and media messages.
On the left, the difficult analytical work on liberal
egalitarianism (Dworkin, Rawls, Sen, among others) was
simplified, operationalised, and turned into slogans by Third Way
intellectuals such as Giddens and Mulgan in the United Kingdom,
and Galston, an academic political theorist and active Democratic
Party member, in the United States (Mulgan 1994, 1997, 2006,
Cuperus, Duffek, & Kandel 2001, Schmidt et al. 2005). Some
political theorists (Barber, Dworkin) tolerate bits of cosmetic
concepts of equality (slogans, sound bites) as adjustment to
audience democracy, the new and noisy habitat for practical
philosophers. Others (Barry) detest the Third Way as pseudo
philosophy and false egalitarianism (Dworkin 2000: 1, 7, Barber
2001: 309, Barry 2005).
The right seems less worried and less scrupulous here. It
accepted the necessity of synthesis of science, philosophy, personal
image building of thinkers, and street talk long ago. As
Micklethwait and Woolbridge (2004: 73; cf. Steinfels 1979) put it:
Crucially, the neocons spoke the language of social science. Conservatives
had long insisted that government programs weakened the natural bonds
of society, without ever being able to prove it. The neocons showed that
social problems were much harder to understand than they appeared –
and that social engineering of the Great Society sort was plagued by
perverse consequences. Welfare payments can reinforce dependency.
Preferential treatment may harm its supposed beneficiaries by shielding
them from competition. Overzealous egalitarianism can undermine
educational institutions such as New York’s City College and reduce
social mobility. The neocons were muckrakers of the Right, discrediting
government just as the original muckrakers had discredited the robber
barrons. The neocons also dwelled on the importance of informal
institutions that other social scientists ignored. In 1965, a young official in
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the Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caused a sensation
with a paper – immediately dubbed the Moynihan Report, though his
name did not appear on the original document – that suggested that the
problems of the urban black poor stemmed, in large measure, from the
collapse of the black family. Other neocons showed that a society’s “little
platoons” – its voluntary institutions- are much more vital to its health
than ambitious government programs. And they warned that disorder
was a much bigger threat to social well-being than permissive liberals
might imagine. In other words, they dressed traditional conservative
insights in the language of social science.
The second trend is the rise of integrated media sciences and
media-based popularisation of scientific considerations and
results, both legitimated by the sacred notion of the sovereign
public (audience orientation, putting citizenship first). Political
science is becoming a pillar of integrated media sciences, while
certain outstanding researchers and philosophers are coveted
discussants and commentators in eminent or popular media
outlets.
On one hand, essential questions of (Tocquevillean) political
science on power, authority, loyalty, public goods, public burdens,
distributive justice, and the mixture of representation and
participation in democratic society will enter into news media,
political organizations, and households under the condition of
popularisation. A sufficient number of academics is supposed to
be able and willing to communicate and visualise the answers to
such questions and link them to daily and practical concerns of the
public (both spiritual and material, personal and shared).
On the other hand, media markets of political science and
theory are imperfect. Media that use political experts do not assess
their methods. Political experts do not see the need for a
professional code or independent authority. Soft news media and
dubious experts collude. Philip Tetlock (2005: 229-38) uncovered a
negative relation between media contacts and the quality of
political predictions by pundits. News media, corporations, public
agencies and advocacy institutes hire experts to be brief, simple
and robust in their statements. They prefer “hedgehogs”, that is,
political experts who know one big thing, apply this insight
aggressively over as many domains of human agency as possible,
have no patience with those who do not get it, and see the natural
sciences as the role model for social sciences. It turns out, however,
that “foxes” predict major political events and changes better than
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hedgehogs. They know many small things, distrust great systems
of thought, and are flexible and synthetic in their reasoning. The
predictive ability is related to prudent calculation of probabilities,
acceptance of complexity and surprises, the will to revise false
views, and openness in absorption of deviant historical
information. Foxes are better at developing this core ability, while
hedgehogs have larger media market shares.
The third and final trend is a steady but intangible impact of
political science and theory on the discourse of news media and
the public, in particular the quality press and the political stratum.
Many journalists and interested citizens use fashionable technical
terms and basic concepts imprecisely and without a sense of the
limits of jargon. Think of fascism, balance of power, non-decisions,
rational man (the calculating individual), the Prisoners’ Dilemma
(free-riders), the End of History, neo-liberalism, or framing.
Framing – a concept in cognitive psychology, social movements
research, communication science, and ubiquitous in electoral
research – is imitated by media producers, consumers, and
political party and ministry consultants.
This is not the venue for empirical studies about political
scientists’ and theorists’ influence and authority in various
national polities, absolutely and relative to other disciplines and
other moments of democratic ordeal like the Republic of Weimar
(1919-1933). My speculation is that the influence of this academic
discipline on the political behaviour of politicians, journalists, and
citizens is soft, and its authority is weak.
External influence is soft because political agents in the real
world often have good reasons to neglect learned periodicals
(American Political Science Review, European Journal of Political
Research) without jeopardising their power and money. Likewise,
they may let pass the latest calls for new theories of old
phenomena (government, violence, and so on) and the latest
fashions in the self-assured discipline (group interests, issues of
solidarity and power analysis in the old literature, and group
identities, issues of trust and discourse analysis in the new
literature).11 Such neglect is reinforced by cognitive weaknesses of
political agents, like their neglect of the future.12
External authority is weak, as in the case of realists in foreign
policy.13 Several factors have been conducive to the end of the
vanguard of political thinkers. On the demand side: routinisation
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of liberal democracy with a steady diet of “canvassing, persuasion,
exchange of services, rewards and benefits, alliances and deals”
(Finley on natural politics); routinisation of publicly- and
commercially-funded policy research, with roughly equal
prospects of good and bad policy advice; individualisation of
society (disappearance of broad organizations based on crosssections and cleavages); and the rise of economism, legalism, and
moralism in politics.14 On the supply side: recognition of the
secondary role of political experts in a mature democracy based on
self-respect and self-reflection among citizens and their
autonomous representatives (in particular the elected ones);
proletarisation of academic life (introduction of commercial
methods of organization and management, strong pressure on
teaching and publishing, low remuneration and social esteem for
academic non-stars who make up the majority); globalisation
(growing lack of research interest in purely local politics); and
political correctness and conformism (yesterday’s lack of analysis
of the costs of liberalism, such as cosmopolitanism; today’s lack of
analysis of the costs of conservatism, such as imperialism).15 In the
most pessimist perspective on the public political sphere in
Western societies today, most makers, users, and objects of
political news concur with the irrelevance of academic political
science and theory.
Political scientists and theorists to date try to come to terms
with their public degradation in audience democracy relative to
their privileged position in party democracy. One response is
fundamental study of the problem of regressive reflexivity: the
behaviour of political agents is influenced by insights of academic
observers; academic observers try to model such influence;
political agents take such sophisticated models into account, and
so on. Public reputation, in particular role expectations about what
politicians, journalists, citizens, and experts are supposed to know
about each other and communicate to each other, seems crucial.16
Another, more dubious response is the fallacy of
isolationism. Some political scientists and theorists are fed up with
what they perceive as the messy, shallow, or dirty practices of
popular representation and participation via political television
and online politics. They withdraw into their universities, research
schools, associations, and networks. There they try to continue
their critique as if audience democracy does not matter, either by
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relying on older models of liberal democracy or by leaving politics
altogether out of their models of new society, such as the turn to
(meta-) ethics.17 Some turn to academic politics, overrate their own
standing in democratic politics, and think of the war between
academic subcultures as the real (albeit second-best) thing, such as
liberal nationalists versus liberal cosmopolitans; European
intergovernmentalists versus European federalists; competitive
versus deliberative democrats.
Doorkeepers in the Playhouses of Audience Democracy
There must be a third response that puts into practice theoretical
notions about interplay between, on the one hand, political
scientists and theorists and other experts in academia and, on the
other hand, politicians, journalists and citizens in a “self-reflective”
audience democracy (Fishkin 1992). Political scientists and
theorists ought to strike a balance between proximity (mediation)
and distance (rectification) in their public role.
Like journalists, practitioners of contemporary history, and
think-tank policy researchers, they should actively engage with
politicians and public officials in a broad sense. They should meet
them, talk with them, and shape well-informed opinions about
daily practices of representation and participation under the
present circumstances of politics and law. Specifically, political
scientists and theorists should observe the strategic interaction
between politicians/parties and journalists/media by standing
close by. Generally, they ought to keep in touch with all agents in
the triangle of audience democracy: politicians and their parties,
organizations, and movements; journalists and their media outlets;
citizens and their associations. The trend of globalisation and
diminution of ever more fragmented communities of ever more
specialised experts of politics needs to be stopped because it
undermines the public influence and authority of political
scientists and theorists in polities nationally and internationally.
Furthermore, political scientists and theorists (method- and
theory-pushed as they are, and rightly so) ought to focus on the
general system and equilibrium (if any) of politics in audience
democracy. It goes without saying that they are forbidden to serve
the sectional interests of classes of politicians, journalists and
citizens. But neutrality does not imply a focus on the interests of
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the public as the primary pull factor of public performance by
political experts. Such a focus will merely reinforce the
professional focus of politicians on voters and a similar focus of
journalists on subscribers (audience orientation). It also leads to
canonisation of ordinary people and citizens (‘the voter has
spoken, the voter is right’). Instead, the public political scientist or
theorist should address the interests and concerns of connoisseurs
in the audience, in journalism (fellow reviewers of the political
theatre), and in professional politics. There are, always and
everywhere, political sub-strata who are quality-conscious and
permanently concerned with the stability and future of liberal
democracy as a whole and as a way of life. Political scientists and
theorists to date have trained young people in order to let them
join the ranks of the universal democratic elite. They stopped
training other young people and adult laypersons out of fear of
paternalism or loss of academic tenure. I suggest that audience
democracy needs political scientists and theorists who continue
such training, in the sense that they join the hard business of
public rectification of fallacies, misunderstandings, obsolete
conflicts and cases of human evil in the political process and the
actions of government.
To paraphrase Marx, political scientists and theorists have
only interpreted the world of political communication in various
ways; the point is to help all human beings who are involved in
the high quality and practical improvement of political
communication.
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Notes Chapter Eight
1
Jardin 1988, Wolin 2001; cf. the Tocquevillean anatomy of post-communist Russia in Anderson
2007: 3-12.
2
See on the similarities between Hitler’s maiden speech to the Reichstag and Roosevelt’s inaugural
lecture in March 1933 Ferguson 2006: 221-7, 243.
3
See e.g. Joseph Rowntree Charitable and Reform Trust 2006. See for a survey of all national
committees on political disengagement and reform Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken 2006.
4
Rawls 2001: 1-5. See for an older European declaration Crick (1962) 1992.
5
Almond 1990, van Deth 1993, Goodin & Pettit 1993, Goodin & Klingemann 1996, O’Sullivan 2000,
Katznelson & Milner 2002, Kymlicka 2002, Marsh & Stoker 2002. Variety breeds volume. Oxford
University Press publishes no fewer than eleven handbooks of contemporary political science including
Dryzek, Honig, & Phillips 2006, Goodin & Tilly 2006.
6
See Ricci 1984. Debates on the balance between rigour and relevance are recurrent, as during the rise
of behaviourism in the 1940s, Marxism in the 1960s, institutionalism in the 1980s, and humanism in
the present decade. See Kasza 2001: 597-9, APSA Task Force 2004: 651-66.
7
See most recently King, Keohane, & Verba 1994, Davis 2005; George & Bennett 2005. For the best
illustrations of enlightenment in comparative and international political studies George & Bennett
2005.
8
Putnam 2003: 249-256. See for a survey of progress in power studies Lukes 2004.
9
See e.g. on the Japanese occupation Dower 1999.
10
See on the gap between the common views of politics of members of American Congress and
American political scientists Edwards 2003: 349-43.
11
See e.g. Levi’s “Why We Need a New Theory of Government” (2006: 5-20). The “we” in the title is
not a national or international community of democrats, but an academic community of rational-choice
institutionalists.
12
Pigou (1929: 25) called this the defective telescopic faculty of humans. Thaler (1992: 63-78) calls
this the status quo bias.
13
Even funding agencies show disdain for academic students of politics. See Lupia 2000: 7-13.
14
Finley 1984: 51. See on the depoliticisation in economism Siedentop 2000, in legalism Shklar (1964)
1986, in moralism Ankersmit 1997.
15
See on resentment in the human and social sciences due to proletarisation Grayling YYYY: “They
feel themselves, simultaneously, greatly superior and vastly undervalued, above their countrymen yet
isolated from them and insufficiently rewarded and revered by them. They have about them a
perpetually disappointed air: one senses they feel the world has let them down. Sometimes this will
reveal itself in general sourness; sometimes it takes the form of hopelessly radical political views.”
16
One of the most promising programmes in political theory concerns the intangible hand of
reputation, rather than the iron hand of legal coercion or the invisible hand of competition in Pettit
1996: 284-355, 1997, 2001, Brennan & Pettit 2004.
17
The best recent works on party systems does not deal with media systems: Panebianco 1988,
Kitschelt 1994, 1996, Mair 1997. The best textbook on contemporary political theory does not discuss
social and political ideologies and doctrines in the historical political world but ethical models of good
society and politics in the academic world (starting with utilitarianism). The sections on practical
politics are the shortest: Kymlicka 2002.
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