George Thomas Kurian – The Encyclopedia of Political Science

Автор: George Thomas Kurian
Название книги: The Encyclopedia of Political Science
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Политология и Социология
Страницы: 1942
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A 21st century approach to the study of politics Political science needs a resource that serves as a core reference to the central ideas, concepts, and frameworks underlying the study of politics and that highlights the intersections of politics with other disciplines. “The Encyclopedia of Political Science (TEPS)” is designed to fill that need. It is the encyclopedia for political science in the twenty-first century. Prepared with the assistance of the American Political Science Association (APSA), “TEPS” brings together a distinguished editorial board and over 600 distinguished and rising scholars to chronicle and assess the core issues that have long concerned students of politics. This comprehensive, multi-volume work traces the evolution of political theories, concepts, research frameworks, and political practices from across the world. As it examines the interplay of political ideas and processes, the encyclopedia also conveys the vitality and excitement of politics in practice. Cognizant of the global nature of political ideas and movements, TEPS reflects a wide range of concepts and frameworks, both Western and non-Western, national and international. An authoritative survey of the state of politics and political science, this five- volume work consists of more than 1,500 A to Z signed entries by contributors from over 30 countries, including 300 overview articles or interpretive essays. The encyclopedia supports all of the core undergraduate courses in political science: American government, comparative politics, international relations, public policy, public administration, political behavior, political theory, and political science methods. It will be an essential reference for all academic and public libraries. Quick Facts: thematic Table of Contents that maps major subfields and topics in politics; over 1,500 A to Z entries; contributing essays from scholars across the globe; and, prepared with the assistance of the American Political Science Association.

The Encyclopedia of Political Science (TEPS) is an ambitious
survey of the world of politics at the beginning of the twentyfirst
century. TEPS, developed by the Encyclopedia Society
and CQ Press with the assistance of the American Political
Science Association (APSA), is an authoritative resource for
political scientists and students of politics throughout the
world. It assembles more than 1,500 signed articles by contributors
from nearly forty countries, making it one of the
largest encyclopedias on political science published to date.
Politics has many definitions, all of which are explored in
this work. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers one of
the classic and broadest definitions of politics as the quest for
good government. Politics is thus one of the most consequential
of collective human activities and, next to religion, possibly
the oldest. The search for good government has engaged
humans from the time they formed groups and communities;
modern political science brings an unprecedented toolbox of
conceptual and empirical instruments to this search. Hence,
political science is one of the world’s most interdisciplinary
disciplines—there is scarcely any area of human life untouched
by it. Political science impinges on and is influenced by public
administration, electoral processes, economics, religion, legal
systems, societal ethos, education, technology, science, and a
host of other related activities and disciplines. Politics is about
power: who wields it, how it should be used, and the relationship
between the ruler and the ruled. Because politics determines
the pathways to power, it also serves as the gateway to
history: what is politics today is history tomorrow.
Every discipline requires a flagship resource that professionals,
teachers, and students can use. TEPS is designed to be
such a foundational resource for political science. It is primarily
a synchronic encyclopedia that presents the state of the art
by assembling and distilling ideas. This is the function defined
by the old Latin term for encyclopedias, Notitia. TEPS is also a
diachronic encyclopedia that presents the foundations and historic
evolution of political ideas, concepts, and theories. This
is the function defined by the Latin term Summa. Political
science is driven by ideas and concepts, values and theories,
as well as philosophers and thinkers. Politics represents the
confluence of theory and praxis. On the one hand, ideologies
form the bedrock of political science. But politics also exists
as an empirical science, especially in the arena of government
and elections. TEPS devotes a considerable number of entries
both to the nomothetic, or abstract, side of political science
and to the empirical side.
The appearance of TEPS at the beginning of the twentyfirst
century is significant because the end of the twentieth
century brought enormous challenges to politics. Quantitatively,
the universe of political science has expanded. The
global electorate—the number of voters eligible to vote in
free elections—is now 3.8 billion, compared to just 87 million
at the beginning of the twentieth century. This means
that more people have become stakeholders in the political
process throughout the world. There are 193 sovereign
nations in the world, compared to 35 at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and more of them are democratic than
ever before. There are 1.7 million political officeholders and
elected officials in the world. The number of universities
with political science departments has decupled and so has
the number of political science scholars and political science
media and associations.
The qualitative changes have been equally impressive. The
world of politics is continually buffeted by remarkable events
and transformed in unlikely ways. The sovereignty of the
nation-state has been eroded by endogenous and exogenous
forces, including the growing globalization of a borderless
world from without and centrifugal ethnic, nationalist, religious,
and linguistic forces from within. The very lexicon of
politics has changed, and the sources of collective identity have
been recast. New concerns and issues such as the environment
have challenged the primacy of such older concerns as economic
inequality. Solidarities animated by gender, race, ethnicity,
religion, and language have challenged the old dichotomies
based on the traditional Left/Right polarities. The Internet has
transformed political communications and is competing with
the ballot box as an agent of political change. Vox Populi has
become Twitter Populi.
TEPS is not merely concerned with change. Although
change forces us to view the world as a moving target, there
are enduring themes in politics that remain as urgent in the
twenty-first century as they did in Athens in the second century
B.C. The institutional and constitutional bases of politics
and the loci, exercise, and legitimacy of power confront
political scientists as much today as they did in Aristotle’s
time. Political corruption and cronyism are as rampant today as they were in ancient Rome. Politics is about power, and
Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts, absolute power
corrupts absolutely, holds true today. Other enduring themes
include the rule of law, modernization, demography, revolution,
reform and restoration, tradition, convergence, value systems,
lifestyles, class and ethnic conflicts, religious conflicts, the
homogenization of cultures, and the preservation of diversity.
These colliding political ideas and movements have blurred
the traditional tidy boundaries of political science and in some
cases have caused them to disappear altogether. Political science,
like politics itself, has become borderless. Political science
now represents the union of law, economics, anthropology,
media studies, women’s studies, sociology, law, history, theology,
international relations, statistics, technology, and philosophy.
Political scientists import ideas from other disciplines and,
in turn, export ideas to them, but, on balance, political science
is a net importer of ideas. On an ideological level, the traditional
and convenient binary divisions (Left/Right, North/
South, domestic/international) that once constrained innovative
scholarship have disappeared or no longer hold as much
currency. TEPS thus maps the enlarged terrain of political
science as we move into the twenty-first century.
There are large areas of political life and culture not covered
or explained by political theory. These include the imponderable
and unpredictable dilemmas, the problems and paradoxes,
that make the study of politics a formidable undertaking. It
is the task of political scientists in the twenty-first century to
deal with these problems. Among them are:
Problem 1. Why does it appear that injustice persists even
under the best legal systems and in the best governed nations
and under the best constitutions? Do the foibles and frailties
of human nature—including corruption, scandals, and
blunders—make the quality of any political system no better
than the quality of its politicians?
Problem 2. From whence comes the force of the status quo
and inertia in political evolution, the almost pathological resistance
to change in human nature?
Problem 3. Is it power alone that corrupts, or does powerlessness
corrupt just as much?
Problem 4. Why does politics, like religion, seem to be a
source of disunity as much or even more than of unity, and
why are divisions in democracies perhaps even more prevalent
than under other political systems?
Problem 6. Do the Eurocentric assumptions of political
science about political beliefs and behavior, such as theories
about sovereignty, nationalism, and political ethics, have
relevance in the Third World, or do they actually contribute to
failed and rogue states like Somalia in Africa and Afghanistan
in the Middle East?
Problem 7. Why do class and ethnic groups radically diverge
on their political ideologies and philosophical stances despite
sharing a common political system? As Gilbert and Sullivan
famously said, “Why are some men born Tory and others born
Whig?”
Problem 8. How are conventional notions of civil rights,
citizenship, and nationality scrambled and reassembled in the
presence of large groups of undocumented immigrants in
industrialized countries?
As in all social sciences, there are no absolutes in political
science. Every political system, every form of government,
and every method of determining the popular will ever
devised by man is flawed—some more than others. In Plato’s
philosophy, all forms of government are only shadows of the
ultimate ideal government in the unseen realm. The task of
the political scientist is to bridge the gap between the shadows
and the ideal.
Political science is not merely an academic discipline, and
political scientists do not just study the anatomy of politics.
Political science is renewed with every political administration
and with every major political event and with every political
leader. Influential political leaders construct their own -isms
(Fidelism/Castroism, Maoism, Gandhism, Reaganism, and
so on) so that the political philosophies and ideologies that
undergird the discipline have to be reinvented constantly. Further,
political science is arguably so important in the scheme
of human knowledge because of its normative function. As
problems emerge in the body politic, political science suggests
remedies, probes into causes, and provides solutions. TEPS is
designed to frame the issues, problems, and challenges and to
provoke a polygonal effort to suggest solutions.
ARCHITECTURE
The value of an encyclopedia resides not merely in its contents
but in what the French call ordonnance—the selection,
classification, and arrangement of entries and the placement
of navigational aids. TEPS is a strict A–Z encyclopedia that
follows the principles of alphabetization in the Chicago Manual
of Style. Each entry of more than five hundred words carries a
bibliography that includes journal articles. Most entries carry
cross references to related entries. Readers are also advised to
consult the Thematic Table of Contents that appears in the
frontmatter. This is a map of the entries in the book organized
by subject matter or subfield. Within each theme, there are six
classes of entries, each weighted and assigned a length based
on its importance.
Class 1, Core Articles: These are wide-ranging articles that
define a field or major analytic concerns and include commentary,
discussion, interpretation, and comprehensive reviews
of literature. They are designed as tours d’horizon to lay the
groundwork for all other entries.
Class 2, Long Interpretive Essays: These delve substantively
into key issues, concepts, ideas, and theories or develop a particular
argument or thesis.
Class 3, Short Descriptive Essays: These deal with the less
theoretical and programmatic aspects of the discipline but have
no commentary.
Class 4, Breakout Articles: These are derivatives from core
articles that examine and explore particular aspects of a topic.
Class 5, Lexical Entries: These are designed to provide useful
definitions of unusual terms and concepts.
Class 6, Biographies: No biographies of living persons (with
a few exceptions) are included in this category, but the nearly three hundred biographies cover the seminal thinkers and figures
in the formation of political science as it is today and will
be in the coming century.
APSA ASSISTANCE
TEPS was produced and published with the assistance of the
American Political Science Association (APSA), the world’s
largest professional organization for the study of politics and
political science. It is a privilege the editorial board and publisher
have taken seriously, and we have tried to meet the high
standards of scholarship that such a collaboration demands.
The APSA nominated the five members of the editorial
board, and APSA’s membership formed the principal source
for contributors.
When I approached Michael Brintall, executive director
of APSA, with the idea of producing the first major political
science encyclopedia of the twenty-first century, he warmly
embraced the vision and offered the full support of the organization.
But for his positive response and unwavering commitment,
TEPS would never have become a reality.
EDITORIAL ORGANIZATION
Three elements determine the strength and quality of an encyclopedia.
The first is the credentials of the contributors—any
encyclopedia is only as good as its contributors. We assembled
one of the finest teams of political science scholars, based on
the recommendations of the editorial board. The contributors
were drawn from a host of disciplines in the social sciences
and humanities as well as political science. All were chosen for
the originality and importance of their contributions. They
were also chosen from more than forty countries to ensure
that the breadth and range of interpretations match the needs
of a global information age. The selection of articles and the
mix of authors represent an attempt to strike a balance among
various schools of thought, regions of the world, gender identities,
and ideological emphases.
The second element of strength in an encyclopedia is the
editorial board. We had three levels in place. The principal,
or working, editorial board consisted of five members nominated
by the APSA: James E. Alt, Simone Chambers, Geoffrey
Garrett, Margaret Levi, and Paula D. McClain. Core articles
in TEPS bear the impress of their careful review and input.
To bring such a vast work to completion, even more help was
needed, and we are most grateful for all the work of the content
editors who reviewed long and short essay entries. We also
thank the larger seventy-two–member board of editorial consultants
and advisers and the international board of editorial
advisers, which was drawn from political science associations
from around the world to assist the editor in chief in choosing
contributors from outside the United States. Together, these
boards shepherded the project and enlisted the best possible
contributions from universities and associations across the
globe. The full list of members of these three boards appears in
the preceding pages.
The last element of strength is the publisher. CQ Press
has remained for many decades the premier political
science publisher in the United States, and its imprint guarantees
the integrity of a work. Over the four years TEPS
was in the making, I had the privilege of working with
a number of veteran publishers and editors at CQ Press,
including John Jenkins, the president; Andrea Pedolsky,
editorial director; and Doug Goldenberg-Hart, acquisitions
editor. Doug is an experienced reference book editor,
and his editorial skills and dedication kept the project on
track during its extended gestation. The development
editing team was led initially by January Layman-Wood;
followed by Nancy Matuszak, who helped to bring the
project successfully to its home stretch; Andrea Cunningham;
and John Martino. Finally, at the Encyclopedia Society,
managing editor Sarah Claudine Day worked on the
project from beginning to end.
Our collective mission for TEPS was not merely to create
an encyclopedia that is original, accurate, and comprehensive
but also one that conveys through its 1,500 entries some of
the vitality and excitement of the world of political science
and politics and offers vibrant cutting-edge interpretations and
insights.
We welcome and earnestly solicit feedback in the form of
comments, suggestions, and corrections for future editions.
Please address them to me (gtkurian@aol.com) or to the publisher
(iencypolisci@cqpress.com).
GEORGE THOMAS KURIAN