1. A thread, responding to a series of complaints about political science by @BrankoMilan which seem to me to be generally quite wrong-headed. Note before beginning - while I've only the most tenuous personal acquaintance with him, I think his work is very good and use it.
2. This round of complaints started
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1421576780721397761with the suggestion that political scientists were caught "totally flat-footed when Piketty produced a slew of cross-country data showing the transformation of labor parties into the parties of an educated elite."
3. That followed a tweet a few months previous,
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1393978277132394497complaining that political scientists did not seem interested in studying "comparative democracy & voting patterns" outside 20 odd developed countries. Both tweets provoked howls of outrage
4. and voluminous threads of replies from political scientists, pointing to the voluminous bodies of research addressing just those questions. So now, Branko has retorted with a different line of attack - that political scientists are hopelessly unambitious.
5.
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1421892378491772928Even if political scientists have written about these questions, it has been for chapters in edited volumes - "see page 867 in the volume no-one has ever read." Whom did they influence? Where are the dozens of op-eds? he asks, rhetorically.
6. The temptation is, of course, to reply in just the same rhetorical mode, pouring scorn on the cultivated ignorance of economists, a longstanding object of unhappiness for political scientists (but also for Branko - more on this later). That would be temporarily satisfying only
7. What is more useful, maybe, is an actual serious reply, that tries to draw out the threads of the relevant arguments - and that is what I am going to try to do. NB that this is not my major area of study, so I am sure I am missing out on lots, which others can correct me on.
8. So why do I think that Branko is wrong? The first reason is - as he now implicitly accepts - that there is in fact an existing literature on the transformation of labor parties. The second is - as he rhetorically denies - that this literature has fed into broader public debate
9. My own acquaintance with this literature began in the early 1990s when Sam Barnes assigned Kitschelt for my Ph.D. intro to comparative politics class. As others have informed Branko, Kitschelt identified the basic structural cleavage back then ...
10. between the issues that engaged middle class professionals to vote for social democratic parties, and the bread and butter issues that more traditional working class voters were assumed to care about. This fed into broader arguments about Inglehart and postmaterialism e.g.
11. Which other political scientists are far better qualified than me to talk about. The more important question though is whether it languished between the dusty covers of edited academic volumes, or got out into the world. The answer is the latter.
12. The most visible path was via another scholar of political parties, Peter Mair. His 2006 essay Ruling the Void, (later a posthumous book), built out a broader argument about how parties (particularly social democratic parties) had become disconnected from traditional voters.
13. He argued that this was the product of two forces - the fragmentation of traditional structures, including class at the bottom, and the increasing identification of party elites with a new transnational class at the top. newleftreview.org/issues/ii42/ar…
14. Peter was Irish, but he was especially concerned with the problems of UK Labour (which furnished many of his examples). And the book was extraordinarily influential in UK political debate, both in itself, and through journalists like @chakrabortty theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
15. Another line of influence was via the sociologist Colin Crouch (who - full disclosure - was my informal second dissertation chair), whose arguments about post-democracy were influenced by and influenced Peter. Again, his major concern was decline of social democratic parties.
16. I talk about this here - aeon.co/essays/the-lef… in an essay which, to my surprise was picked up and translated by a major Italian news magazine - Colin's arguments were widely discussed and read in continental Europe.
17. This broad family of arguments has in turn spurred wide-ranging, vigorous and _public_ discussion of the problems of social democratic parties, long preceding Piketty's work. Three strands come to mind pretty quicly.
18. One is the work of people like Sheri Berman, published in obscure venues such as the New York Times op-ed page nytimes.com/2017/10/02/opi…. Sheri has used her work to push against the socialist left and the current left's focus on cultural issues, favoring more traditional SD.
19. Another is the strand represented by UK thinkers like @cjbickerton theguardian.com/profile/christ… who have built on Mair's and others' arguments to push a left case for Brexit, arguing that the EU hollowed out European social democratic parties and national level democracy.
20. A third is the work of people like @juliaflynch fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/ly… who invoke left parties' suspicion of class politics and penchant for technocracy as a key factor spurring the rise of populism.
21. Obviously, these people disagree with each other (and may sometimes detest each other). Equally obviously, they are out there in public, using political science arguments about the elite-reorientation of left parties to explain what is happening, in ways that get picked up.
22. So, the evidence shows that Branko is wrong on this question. But equally, it would be wrong to read this thread as an extended "I told you so." Instead, it's an invitation to talking better across disciplines. Branko's critics see him as another parochial economist ...
23. What they fail to appreciate is that in internal debates, he's a harsh critic of his own discipline's parochialism. So how can we get further? Piketty - who Branko's complaints began with - offers one model. He seems to see himself as a social scientist more than an economist
24. (perhaps with a strong flavor of Annaliste historian too). That is not to say that Piketty cites every political scientist who he could and perhaps should have (I've heard some grumbling), but that he clearly aspires to work and think across disciplines.
25. That seems a better model than starting out with the assumption that if you don't know about others' work, it either doesn't exist, or is so obscure it might as well not exist. The latter understandably gets people's backs up. Finis.
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