Timely
and Vital:
UC Irvine's Unique Approach to Political Science
By Professor Katherine Tate, Chair
When UC Irvine was
established in 1965, the School of Social Sciences existed as an interdisciplinary
unit without departments. The Department of Political Science was formed
in 1987, and quickly achieved exceptional distinction in the School of
Social Sciences and on the campus as having a “top 30” doctoral
program. U.S. News & Report ranked the Department 29th in 2001. A
study that will be soon published in Policy Studies Review by a London
School of Economics Professor ranked the UC Irvine's Department of Political
Science 7th out of 400 political science departments in the world based
on quality of the scholarship produced by the department faculty, measured
by the type of journals the work is published in, as well as quantity
(see http://www.lse-students.ac.uk/HIX/WorkingPapers.htm).
In fact, political science is one among UC Irvine’s twenty-two doctoral
programs that is listed as among the top-50 programs in the country according
to the U.S. News & World Report (see http://today.uci.edu/facts/rankings.asp).
That the department is ranked so high is not surprising, given who serves
on its faculty, notably those whose scholarship has dramatically shaped
the discipline in important and lasting ways. Jack Peltason, an American
Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow, joined the UC Irvine faculty as the
campus’ chancellor, and has also served as President of the University
of California. He is known for his scholarship on the American judicial
system, notably for his theory that judicial decisions are neither self-evident
nor fixed, rooted in judicial philosophy and wisdom, but are contingent
and subject to external circumstances and conditions. It is through his
pioneering, radical scholarship on the courts that we scholars can understand
judicial outcomes such as the Bush v. Gore decision in which the Supreme
Court effectively decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.
Peltason is also the co-author of a textbook on American government, Government
by the People, that remains a best-seller today. Also a member of
the American Academy, University Distinguished Professor David Easton
is best known for offering a new definition of the state that transformed
how political scientists studied politics. How do states compel human
cooperation beyond the physical force of law? How do states retain authority
and stay in power? These questions were not addressed until Easton presented
his theory of the state’s authoritative allocation of political values
in his 1953, The Political System. Easton continues to teach the
introductory, annual political science course for the Department’s
entering Ph.D. students. Professor Bernard Grofman became the third political
science faculty member to be elected the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 2001. Grofman is best known for having scholarship on voting
rights that has powerfully influenced how such cases are litigated in
the courts, notably the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles. Grofman is a leading
political scientist in a number of different fields, having extraordinary
range in his scholarship as an expert on comparative electoral systems,
American elections, voting behavior, methodology, and formal modeling.
Grofman teaches introductory statistics in the Social Science 10 series,
which is a required sequence of courses for all undergraduate social science
majors, including political science.
The most distinctive feature of the Department is that it is organized along non-traditional lines. Instead of organizing along the standard four subfields in political science (American, comparative, international relations, and theory), we elected to focus on process of politics and of political behavior. Rejecting the “areas” of political science put us ahead of intellectual trends that were simultaneously taking place in the discipline, in fact, as the solid wall between comparative politics (area studies) and international relations was collapsing, and as Americanists increasingly were turning toward comparative research. The “process” focus over subfield specialties was formalized in our degree requirements for both our undergraduate majors and graduate students. Undergraduate majors are required to take courses in Micropolitics, Macropolitics, and Introduction to Political Analysis. Micropolitics or PS 6C introduces students to understand how individuals citizens “fit” into the political system. Students are required read classic works by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Marx and Engels. Macropolitics or PS 6B teaches students how governments are formed and structure political life in societies. Students in 6B read, among other things, works by the following authors: Aristotle, Mary Wollstonecraft, Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Jefferson. Introductory courses in political theory, comparative, international studies, and American government are also offered to our majors. Faculty members teach the vast majority of these introductory courses for our undergraduate majors. Undergraduates have the opportunity to learn from the faculty directly. The Department can also boast of having some of the campus’s most extraordinary professors in the classroom, as quite a number of them have won teaching awards from the campus. Our undergraduate program was recognized for excellence in undergraduate instruction in 2002, when the Department won the campus’s “Departmental Teaching Award.” The teaching mission is taken very seriously in the Department as we are educating tomorrow’s professionals, governmental leaders, lawyers, scholars, as well as training citizens.
The strong interdisciplinary character of the Department is also reflected in the faculty research interests. The Department offers an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Concentration Political Economy and Public Choice, a field of study at the intersection of political science and economics, which draws on quantitative and mathematical tools to model the functioning of political institutions and processes. The Department also offers a graduate concentration in political psychology, which Professor Shawn Rosenberg directs. This specialization was developed principally in the 1980s by political scientists interested in social change and institutional development with psychologists focusing on human cognition, emotion and personality. Currently only twenty universities offer graduate programs in this area.
Two members of the Department founded research centers that engage in interdisciplinary research. Since its establishment as a research group in 1990, Professor and Political Scientist Russell Dalton serves as the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy (http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/democ/). CSD promotes research and trainings doctoral students to provide a better understanding of the democratic process and democratization. Professor Kristen Renwick Monroe, a political scientist, two years ago started a new research center—the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Morality and Ethics (http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/ethicscenter/). This new research center promotes scholarship and research on questions such as the origins of morality and ethics. Professor Wayne Sandholtz, also a political scientist, directs the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/gpacs/). This is a multi-disciplinary research center dedicated to promoting scholarly, student, and public understanding of international conflict and cooperation. Political Scientist and Professor Dorothy Solinger is one of the executive directors of the Center for Asian Studies Program (http://www.humanities.uci.edu/cas/) at UC Irvine. The countries and cultures of Asia are significant participants in international politics.
The Department has considerable strength in international studies, including foreign policy, ethics and international relations, human rights, the environment and movement politics, security studies, and international political economy. American interest in international relations surged following the terrorist attack on American soil on September 11, 2001, and this interest has been further sustained by the ongoing American war in Iraq. The causes of war, the legal and moral principles which should govern governmental relations, and the forces and factors behind terrorism, genocide, and rights of people to citizenship are questions pursued by the political science faculty. An additional source of intellectual strength in the Department is of recent vintage; it is in the field of race, ethnicity, and politics. The Department has assembled a team of nationally known scholars working in the field of race, ethnicity, and politics who have produced seminal research on questions pertaining to racial redistricting, racism and intra-minority group conflict, electoral and insurgent group politics. U.C. Irvine may now lead the new scholarship that is broadening the study of race relations and politics to include other American minorities, especially America’s fastest growing groups, Latinos and Asian Americans. In August 2000, California emerged as the first state in which Whites became the numerical minority. America is at a turning point, and the 2000 Census with its new racial classification measure pushes this country closer to the California model of rich racial and ethnic diversity. In light of world and national events, as well as demographic and political changes in the state, not surprisingly, undergraduate enrollments in the Department have steadily increased from about 500 in 1995 to over 700 today.
In broad terms, the unique approach we take to the study of political science has made us unusually interdisciplinary as a political science program. We have extended political science beyond an emphasis on the political or the governmental to include the full range of human sciences so that it remains relevant to today’s students, and vital as a science that addresses pressing social problems that engage citizens, governments, and world organizations.