Thread by @AnnaMeierPS

My visceral reaction to the tweetstorm attacking @RossMittiga and his article was anger—not at the many commentators who clearly hadn’t read the article (though c’mon, folks) but rather at the microcosm of so much that is exclusionary about US political science. 1/

1. Conceptual territorialism, and the unwillingness to accept flexibility and creativity with ideas we have come to see as sacrosanct instead of contingent (democracy is an idea, not a cult);

2. A conceptualization of rigor as “how many robustness checks have I run” as opposed to “how deeply have I thought about the multitude of assumptions I am making and how much work have I done to situate them in wider conversations”;

3. A complete unfamiliarity with how to engage with work that does not follow the norms of positivism, or even empiricism, and an unwillingness to learn, despite insistence that theorists/interpretivists/etc. learn the norms of positivism;

4. A continual dismissiveness toward political theory as something lesser, instead of the foundation of all the research we do whether we acknowledge it or not;

5. A conflation of normative theory, and really any political science that is not quantitative or experimental, with journalism, which is at its core a frightening misunderstanding of journalism (including among some of you who use “the media” as a data source);

6. A positioning of work with explicit normative takes or moral implications as flippant “opinions,” in complete disregard for the implicit implications and “opinions” in *all* work (including among some of you who use “public opinion” as a data source);

7. An eagerness to pile on or dismiss the work of Global South and otherwise marginalized scholars, while the field continues to exalt the racist and sexist work of white scholars in the Global North;

8. An added eagerness when there is any sense that women (in this case, the @apsrjournal editorial team) might be responsible for pushing the boundaries of the discipline;

9. A deep discomfort with junior scholars whose work challenges the status quo in any way, instead of supporting this work and learning from it to do better work ourselves.

I want us to be better than this, but I fear that we have shown time and again that we are not and are not willing to be. /fin