Re-Formulating the Politics: Current Debates in Contemporary Political Science

The meaning of politics changes over time by the socio-cultural, economic, and historical conditions of the societies. It is possible to provide various definitions of politics from ancient times to the contemporary era. From the classical perspective, in the fourth century, Athens termed ‘‘political philosophy,’’ that became a term of equal status (and imprecision) with ‘‘political thought’’ and ‘‘theory” (Pocock, 2008, p. 164). It enabled a historical grand narrative to emerge, in which ‘‘the history of political thought,’’ ‘‘theory,’’ or ‘‘philosophy’’ moved from Platonic or Aristotelian beginnings through a medieval period in which ‘‘philosophy’’ encountered Christian theology into one in which this encounter was liquidated and replaced by modes of thought, theory, and philosophy it was agreed to term ‘‘modern.’’ (Pocock, 2008, p. 164). Aristotle’s politics, for instance, was about the polis itself, where we live together and have a good life. The search for the human good itself on an ethical basis is directly related to politics as a good concept. For Aristotle, it was essential to develop a sense of collectivity through organizing and pursuing the highest good because individuals are not self-sufficient to obtain their needs and desires by themselves. He needed to flourish our lives as a whole. Priority was given to the good in every area of life. The imperative was to depict the good, which is virtuous, religious, flourishing, and the therapeutic good.

Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, based his definition of politics on the level of law and common sense. Unlike Aristotelian ethical understanding of politics, Hobbes asserts that people are not organized for the highest good itself. Instead, they have various norms and practices that require a common standard. Moreover, Hobbes’s theory of politics was a theory about potestas (the relations between rights and authority) and about “how human agents have good reason to act” (Dunn, 2010, p. 419). According to John Dunn, potestas is the third face to transform potential —which involves the notion of nature with the human desire to have power. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Law of the 12th century was the significant political rule of domination, hierarchy, and secularizing forces, as well as the ordinary and practical side of everyday life. It can be assessed that relatively brutal kings coexisted with formal orderings of modern law and the biblical imperative of virtue religion. Aristotle, in those times, was rediscovered in a secularizing influence of Roman Law discussing the man of the citizen. Politics was intrinsically the realm of philosophical value. With the modern understanding of politics following the 16th century onwards, politics was associated with the activity itself, unlike its former philosophical and value-oriented conceptualizations. It followed that people became the actual political actors within the mass political discussions, specifically in the 17th century as the century of science. With the First World War, people started asking what politics is and to see where it fits in human civilization. The modern intellectual and political academic world started to study the behavioralist (Robert Dahl), manageable, measurable implications of politics in everyday life and people’s attitudes towards politics. The empirical, quantitative, instrumental, functional, and causal explanations of politics in contemporary political science from the early 20th century onwards overlap with the following recent articles. The articles I scrutinize provide testable and generalizable data about gender studies, media studies, environmental studies, and participants’ behaviors. It is clearly shown that survey methods, focus groups, and discourse analyses are the fundamental ways of defining politics, mainly attitude-oriented and framed by power relations discussion. 

The first article I examine is Wendy Pearlman’s (2023) piece Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants’ Emotions. She integrates emotions into “conversations on methods and ethics,” and she develops the term “ethnographic sensibility” to conceptualize an “emotional sensibility” that “seeks to glean the emotional experiences of people who participate in research” (Pearlman, 2023, p. 1241). The exciting part of the article is that it stresses that emotional sensibility, methodologically, “sharpens attention to how participants’ emotions are data, influence other data, and affect future data collection” (p. 1241). This approach differentiates the abstract nature of emotions into a calculable, measurable entity that assumes emotions as not ontologically abstract concepts, on the contrary, as tangible notions. Even though emotions have physical reflections such as increased heartbeat, blood pressure, various mimic expressions, and so forth, they still imply certain norms such as shame, gratitude, honor, fear, anger, and the like. These forms require relatively broad socio-historical analyses, not only a definite number of people’s opinions and their generalizable results. She further asserts that, ethically, it is supplemented by the “Institutional Review Boards’ rationalist emphasis on information and cognitive capacity with appreciation for how emotions infuse consent, risk, and benefit” (p. 1241). The ethical part is also problematic in the senses of generalizability and power relations. Pearlman’s ethical approach is strictly limited to the Institutional Review Boards’ booklets, which makes us question first how it is possible to conduct a study that is expected to be generalizable and ethical by using only one committee’s direction. Second, how is it possible to discuss what is ethical and unethical without even giving a brief discussion on what ethics is in a theoretical sense? Third, how is it possible to rationalize emotions? Is it about giving a causal explanation behind emotions and behaviors—that leads us to rational choice theory? Further, how could we define the power dynamics in the method of ethnographic sensibility? I assume there is a hierarchical power relationship between the researcher—who integrates the review board’s directions on the participant, which also implies an institutional hierarchy—and the participant, who is the actual data source of the study. Thus, there is a strong sense of an institutional analysis of the subject of the study. In this sense, politics is understood as a domain of institutions even though Pearlman states that “political science research increasingly establishes the centrality of emotions in political life due to their influence on how people form preferences, assess information, make judgments, and behave” (p. 1241).  

In addition to the ethical considerations, Pearlman outlines six interconnected realms for emotional/ethical basis as emotional harm, trauma, and retraumatization, emotional harms beyond trauma, emotional harms beyond vulnerability, downstream harms caused by emotional mechanisms, and emotions beyond harms (p. 1244). The common characteristic of these elements is that they are framed through harm. However, there is a lack of definition for the conditions of trauma, harm, or vulnerability in the article. Arguably, this article is end-oriented and ignorant of the definitions of the concepts it tries to implement. This neglect is not unique to this piece; instead, it is one of the main characteristics of the recently published articles in contemporary political science journals.

The second article I analyze is Lotte Hargrave and Jack Blumenau’s (2022) study No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK. This paper focuses on the UK and discusses how “pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years” (p. 1584). In order to test this argument, the authors apply “quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data,” and they frame UK “parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019” (p. 1584). Their main argument is that “the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication” (p. 1584). Like Pearlman’s article, the authors concentrate on the behavioristic explanations of politics.

Nevertheless, the main actors of this study are the political actors themselves, not the citizens, as in the former. Thus, it can be assessed that political actors as the ruling figures are still important in contemporary political science within an explanatory and microanalysis stripped of ideologies and normative discussions. In this article, it is discussed in an interdisciplinary perspective of gender studies as one of the expanding realms of current literature—not only in political science but also in sociology, literature, philosophy, and so forth.

Moreover, the social-psychological aspect is also carried on by stating that “changes to the social roles played by women in public life, and in politics, have reduced the validity of gender stereotypes in the eyes of the public” (pp. 1584-1585). Though the subject of the study is political actors themselves, the discussion is still furthered by recognizing the public realm as well. Hence, the political domain is not entirely detached from the public domain; instead, it includes the social definition of gender roles. It aims to analyze how these roles are fit by the politicians in the parliament discussions without giving priority to the content itself. The authors “conceive of debating style as a characteristic of speech that is distinct from its content” (p. 1585). Doing so could lose its impact on political science since it strips the meaning from the concept and ends up in the field of psychology. This is one of my prominent critics of contemporary political science. Despite the flourishing area of inter-disciplinary studies—that could also be beneficial in relating various disciplines to bolster the main argument—the scope of the sciences could become eradicated. That would have resulted in the expulsion of meaning and content.

The authors’ solution to this problem is that they operationalized their study by using a diverse set of indicators from social psychology. They “survey both literatures and identify eight styles that reflect the ideas of communality and agency, and are also – in principle – detectable in the speeches politicians deliver,” which are “human narrative, affect, positive emotion, negative emotion, factual language, aggression, complex language and repetition” (p. 1585). Even though these styles help scrutinize gender roles in parliamentary speeches, they are unique to political science. They could be used for analysis in various contexts such as medical studies, law, engineering, and education in terms of complex language, positive or negative emotions, and attitudes towards the patient, client, or student. Furthermore, they use “context-specific patterns of word use” (p. 1591) that are embedded in the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) model. They assert that “word-embedding models rely on the idea that words which are used in similar contexts will have similar meanings,” and they allow the authors “to learn the semantic meaning of each word directly from how the word is used by MPs in debate” (p. 1591). To empirically test the meanings of the words used in speeches, they adopt a Bayesian dynamic hierarchical model, which allows the authors to account for a “wide variety of both individual- and topic-level confounders, while also flexibly estimating changing gender dynamics in style over time” (p. 1593):

Their findings from these formulas are listed as follows: “in recent years, women in the House of Commons have demonstrated less communal and more agentic styles, and the gender gap on most dimensions of style that we examined has decreased.” The recent parliamentary behavior is “poorly described by traditional stereotypes,” but the authors do not provide “empirical evidence regarding the mechanisms that led to these changes” (p. 1598). Despite the complex and technical use of language and formulation of the political speeches, there is no example from the speeches or the repetitively used words that are generated in the given models. The authors are obsessed with the study’s results but not with the context or the meaning of the actual political speeches in the parliament. I find their attempt to formulate the qualitative nature of the female members of the parliament’s speeches and behaviors problematic to illustrate the shift from 1997 to 2019.

The third article I delve into is Juho Vesa and Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz’s (2023) study, The Varying Mechanisms of Media Access: Explaining Interest Groups’ Media Visibility across Political Systems. This article focuses on “two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of elite actors.” They hypothesize that “media effort explains interest groups’ media access more strongly in competitive, pluralist interest group systems and that insider (i.e., “elite”) status does so more strongly in hierarchical, corporatist systems.” They analyze “surveys and media data on interest groups in the pluralist United Kingdom, the moderately corporatist Denmark, and the more strongly corporatist Finland. As hypothesized, media effort is most effective in the UK and weakest in Finland” (p. 1226). This article adopts a comparative study, one of the most favorable study arenas in contemporary political science. In addition to the discussions on media visibility at the levels of elite actors and interest group systems, the authors add the level of democracy as well. They state that “the question of which interest groups gain media visibility has important normative implications for democracy because it affects how equally different societal interests are represented in political systems” (pp. 1226-1227). I consider this article’s multi-layered structure impressive compared to the first two articles because it brings up relatively more political discussion regarding power relations and its reflection on the democracy levels. Even though it borrows concepts from media studies, it does not lose track of the political interrogation of the power structures and successfully incorporates them into its case study.

They draw on “two classic explanations that political communication scholars have used to understand how political actors gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of political actors with elite status.” The first perspective considers media access as “a result of active information provision from political actors to journalists, who, because of their routines and economic imperatives, need a constant flow of prepackaged information.” Therefore, “the more effort interest groups put into targeting the media, the more media access they should be expected to gain.” The second perspective posits that “powerful actors in elite positions gain more media visibility because of their intrinsic newsworthiness and exclusive access to information.” This latter perspective also indicates that insider interest groups would have higher news access because of their privileged status in having regular access to policymaking arenas. Accordingly, they hypothesize that “journalists’ tendency to grant access to insider groups is stronger in corporatist systems because corporatist systems institutionalize the insider status of key groups, and therefore, the status differences between insiders and outsiders are stronger and more transparent” (p. 1227). Their dataset involves 1500 interest groups, which are member-ship-based organizations seeking political influence and consists of “observations of groups’ appearances in selected quality newspapers and surveys of groups in each country” (p. 1228). They found that:

insider status matters the most in Finland, second most in Denmark, and the least in the UK; but its effect in Denmark does not differ significantly from its effect in the two other countries. Moreover, the difference between Finland and the UK regarding the effect of insider status is small and not statistically significant in every robustness check. (p. 1228)

Although the authors provide a clear result, there is a lack of connection among democracy levels, media visibility, and power distribution. This article frames its scope only at the last two levels of discussion. Accordingly, it is found that “politicians’ media visibility mirrors the distribution of power in the political system.” In political systems in which “political power is more concentrated to the head of government, media visibility is more slanted toward the head of government than in systems that distribute political power more equally” (p. 1231). Overall, this article provides a broader perspective and discusses power relations from the perspective of media studies in a more balanced way than the former articles I analyzed. Commonly, political and non-political agents are integral subjects of the study in these three articles. Thus, contemporary political science significantly deals with the actors themselves in a non-normative way to depict the changing relations among the social groups and interest groups in societies. These studies also show that there is a tendency for induction in contemporary political science aiming at finding generalizable results from case studies, surveys, discourse analyses, modeling, and the like.

I extend the scope of this paper to the notion of revolution by interrogating Killian Clarke’s (2023) article Revolutionary Violence and Counterrevolution. Clarke collects a dataset of counterrevolutions from 1900 to 2015 that reveals “revolutions involving more violence are less at risk of counterrevolution and that this relationship exists primarily because violence lowers the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success—but not counterrevolutionary emergence.” He demonstrates mechanisms by comparing “Cuba’s nonviolent 1933 uprising (which succumbed to a counterrevolution) and its 1959 revolutionary insurgency (which defeated multiple counterrevolutions)” (p. 1344). Similar to the former article’s case studies in different periods of history, Clarke also selects historical events and expends its analysis to the more recent era. He turns his attention to postrevolutionary periods and discusses counterrevolutions as “new revolutionary governments face” (p. 1344). Clarke argues that “revolutions in which challengers adopt violent modes of resistance produce regimes less likely to be overthrown by counterrevolutions.

Conversely, nonviolent revolutions are more vulnerable to being reversed” (p. 1344). To support his argument, he adopts a cross-national framework that involves “98 counterrevolutionary challenges across 123 cases of revolution and that 22 of these counterrevolutions were successful in toppling the new revolutionary regime” (p. 1344). He defines the new revolutionary regimes “restorative counterrevolution” because “it seeks to restore the former regime to power following a successful revolution.” It also describes as an “irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the prerevolutionary political regime” (p. 1345). Similar to Pearlman’s article, Clarke tries to add new conceptualizations into contemporary political science in an empirically supported way. He states that his way of implementing an empirical study supported by theoretical argument differs from previous studies’ more comprehensive framework that emphasizes “mechanisms like violent repression, concessions, or cooptation, which would mostly be ill-suited to explaining the conditions under which fallen incumbents restore themselves in office.” Clarke asserted that his narrowed empirical study only focuses on restorative counterrevolutions, which enabled him to develop a more “focused and coherent argument” while also recognizing that “this leaves other manifestations of counterrevolution for future scholars to explore” (pp. 1345-1346). Complementary to other articles discussed in this paper, Clarke’s study also leaves room for generalizability for future studies. Finally, he distinguishes his definition of counterrevolution from a democratic breakdown (p. 1346). He argues that “the nature of the revolutionary process—and, specifically, whether challengers embrace strategies of violent or nonviolent resistance —should determine the extent of old regime desperation and the distribution of coercive capacities after the revolution ends (p. 1347). The emphasis on the nonviolent act is also a crucial part of Clarke’s study that furthers the political analysis toward large numbers of participants, and “the more everyday citizens that pour out into the streets the more likely elites are to defect from the incumbent regime” (p. 1348). There is a strong overlap with the other articles’ focus on the agents. Yet, this study approaches political and non-political figures from a broader perspective without giving specific importance to their acts.

On the contrary, Clarke is more concentrated on the conceptions of counterrevolution and nonviolent acts themselves. The solid methodological concerns, as discussed in the other articles, take place in Clarke’s paper as well. By the application of the “penalized maximum likelihood estimation strategy” that is often used to “adjust for rare events bias but can also reduce the bias from small sample sizes” (p. 1351), the author also applies most similar systems to his study (p. 1355). It was also pivotal for him to establish “causality in observational studies” (p. 1355), one of the main building blocks of the articles I examined. Lastly, this paper raises a “set of normative questions about the strategies that are most effective for opposing autocratic rule” (p. 1358). Due to the pursuit of normative theory, this article can be identified with general theories that seek to establish universal discussions on revolution and power. 

Finally, Laura Ephraim’s (2022) article Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics is worth discussing due to its ambition for bringing politics and the theory together. Environmental politics, as one of the most studied areas in the recent literature, involves a multi-dimensional discussion in Ephraim’s article. She displays the “destructive logic of mass production and consumption” (p. 985) that triggers political action. This article advocates an environmental politics rooted in “an alternative aesthetic, one that looks to earth as a precious and generous giver of strange, disquieting spectacles of otherness” (p. 985). In doing so, she adopts an Arendtian frame that enables better to “recognize interdependence between biological and political life and appreciate the role of nonhuman lifeforms in constituting spaces of appearance where human freedom and plurality may flourish” (p. 985). Her argument involves Arendt’s “earth– world and labor–work–action distinctions” by revealing “how an ethos of gratitude toward earth’s gifts of life both complements and complicates her efforts to protect the world as a sanctuary for politics” (p. 986). Secondly, it focuses on Arendt’s critique of capitalism “for eroding the differences between earth and world, and imperiling political freedom and plurality, by unnaturally accelerating the metabolic and reproductive processes of “life itself” (p. 986). From a more contemporary perspective, she demonstrates how a “waste economy driven by fossil fuels mutually endangers both biological and political life” (p. 987). The waste economy is critical for her because she asserts that its “artificial acceleration of life itself is fatal to political life” (p. 989). Third, she elaborates a more complex view of life with its aesthetic qualities from Arendt. Fourth, she illuminates that “text’s provocative affirmation of life’s sheer entertainment value through a close reading of Arendt’s critique of the entertainment industry in The Crisis in Culture” (p. 987). 

Ephraim’s study represents the motive for analyzing current debates on environmentalism as not a unique issue embedded in specific geographies but rather as a universal problem of the waste economy. While Arendtian notion of politics could be defined in the frame of the special theory that sheds light on politics as an action in freedom acting together in equality where we affirm our diversity, Ephraim’s taking of Arendtian concept inclines to adapt her theory into a generalized issue. Ephraim’s contribution to this article includes “nonhuman lifeforms in animating political life without miscasting nature as either a stabilizing ground for human agency,” similar to what Arendtian environmentalists tend to do, or “as a source of agency in its own right, as new materialists tend to do” (p. 986). The involvement of nonhuman agents in the picture is also worth noting how contemporary political science expands its scope from its anthropocentric perspective to a more inclusive and holistic approach. However, the nonhuman agents’ entities are not fully integrated into the realm of contemporary political science; instead, it is an issue frequently discussed in the disciplines of philosophy (i.e., new materialism), sociology (Actor-Network Theory), engineering (AI technologies), and the like. That is why Ephraim’s attempt to politicize nonhuman life regarding the environment is worth mentioning. She gives examples from environmental activists such as “Yeampiere and her Brooklyn-based environmental justice group UPROSE” which “festooned hundreds of signs and banners for the 2014 People’s Climate March with images of colorful sunflowers” (p. 996). Political action, in Ephraim’s article, is coupled with an equally emphatic call to be free and act” (p. 996). In contrast to the other four articles scrutinized in this paper, this article does not engage with data collection or modeling systems. Nevertheless, it could still be considered part of the general theory that seeks generalizable normative discussions such as life itself, the human-nature relationship, and the capitalist economy in a broader sense that assumes its detrimental impacts on the environment.

In conclusion, contemporary political science is pursuing an explanatory theory rather than a theory based on understanding. The ways it implements politics are related to strict methodological encounters such as case studies, surveys, focus groups, interviews, discourse analysis, and the like. Despite the qualitative characteristics of these methods, the results have been shown and discussed in a quantitative language by aiming to formulate abstract concepts such as emotions and speeches, as well as political concepts such as power and freedom. The main subjects of the study can be listed as political agents, citizens, interest groups, and so forth. It could be assessed within general theory considering the empirical, rational, causal, and inductive reasoning structure.

References

Clarke, K. (2023). Revolutionary Violence and Counterrevolution. American Political Science Review, 117(4), 1344-1360. doi:10.1017/S0003055422001174

Dunn, J. (2010). The Significance of Hobbes’s Conception of Power. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13(2), 417-433. doi: 10.1080/13698231003787844

Ephraim, L. (2022). Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics. American Political Science Review, 116(3), 985-997. doi:10.1017/S0003055421001180

Hargrave, L., & Blumenau, J. (2022). No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK. British Journal of Political Science, 52(4), 1584-1601. doi:10.1017/S0007123421000648

Pearlman, W. (2023). Emotional Sensibility: Exploring the Methodological and Ethical Implications of Research Participants’ Emotions. American Political Science Review, 117(4), 1241-1254. doi:10.1017/S0003055422001253

Pocock, J. G. A. (2008). Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative. In John S. Dryzek & Bonnie Honig, & Anne Phillip (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, 163-174. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548439.003.0008

Vesa, J., & Binderkrantz, A. S. (2023). The Varying Mechanisms of Media Access: Explaining Interest Groups’ Media Visibility across Political Systems. Political Studies, 71(4), 1226-1242. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211064580