One of the resolutions I’ve set for myself this summer is to read a lot of articles from the Annual Review of Political Science, which is very different from the similarly-acronymed and better-known American Political Science Review. ARPS articles are, for the most part, state-of-the-field surveys and overviews, not original research contributions– though they can be very original in how they define a field, in what they choose to incorporate and how they choose to delimit boundaries. To oversimplify, a study becomes more likely to be published in the APSR the more it departs from what we already know, whereas an article in the ARPS offers a creative synthesis of what it is that we do already know about a topic, question, method, or approach. (This is characteristic of the Annual Reviews journals broadly, not distinctive to political science.) I’ve somewhat arbitrarily set the target that I will read at least two per week from the 2013 and 2014 volumes.

Why?

I worry that my knowledge of areas of political science outside my immediate specialties is aging. I think this happens to all of us; we get breadth of a kind in graduate school, but it’s hard to maintain as we pursue specialized research projects. The literature we know to engage with and cite in our areas of deep knowledge stay up to date; the works we namecheck for penumbral claims stay stuck in our graduate exams lists or field seminars. I’ve seen plenty of cases of this in other people’s work that tangentially touches on fields I know; they rely on something they read decades ago in a way that makes me say “if that’s a minor premise, the conclusion is almost certainly wrong, because that claim has long since been overturned.”

I think the problem is especially severe for political theorists, because remaining active researchers in political theory typically does not demand that we stay current on methods in empirical political science, or even that we practice the skills of reading empirical political science carefully. I have sometimes stayed current on a few areas of empirical work (federalism, ethnic conflict, state-building), but having spent the last several years on intellectual-historical projects I feel out of date even in those.

A second reason is the danger of cherry-picking that’s endemic to interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work: going out and finding the one study in some neighboring field that says what you need it to say, then returning to your own field and brandishing it like a club to show that you’re right and to claim the prestige of interdisciplinarity at the same time. “If you knew any economics,” says the philosopher, “you’d see that…,” with one or two citations thrown in that say something that is deeply controversial among economists. Sampling around randomly in the APSR seems like a way to aggravate that temptation; what I’ll remember are the novel findings that are convenient for some argument I want to make, rather than where the center of gravity lies in some field.

Running through both of those reasons is a conviction that responsible political theory/ political philosophy/ normative social theory/ etc cannot be done in isolation from social science, as well as my standard enthusiasm for political science as a whole field of study. I’ve been a part of a couple different multidisciplinary research teams recently that have reminded me how much I enjoy good conversation across the political theory/ political science divide and how valuable I think normative/ theoretical and empirical work are for each other. But day in and day out I’ll end up reading only political and legal theory and philosophy plus intellectual history; if I want to remain a political scientist in good standing it will take some active work.

This being 2014, a resolution like that is obvious bait for a series of blog posts, and for a precommitment to blogging as a strategy for helping me stick to my resolution. I don’t yet know how much I’ll have to say about each article, and I suspect I often won’t have any critical engagement to offer. But there ought to be a little something to say about each one, and Matt’s endorsed the idea of my doing it here, despite the absence of any particular overlap with BHL as such. I’m grateful for that, since the precommitment device is much stronger on a blog with 2000-3000 views per day than it is on my long-neglected personal blog that would probably end up with 20-30 even if I actively returned to it.

As the lone political scientist among the philosophers (not counting Munger, who’s an interloper from economics!) I’ll try from time to time to say something like “here’s the kind of normative claim for which these empirical findings might be relevant.” I may also indulge in some editorializing about what political science as a social science discipline has to offer that, say, economics does not, since I think economics occupies an outsized place in many political philosophers’ (and especially libertarian political philosophers’) understanding of what social science has to say. But I’m going to try to read in a not-strictly-instrumental or narrowly targeted fashion; I’m not doing this in the direct service of axes I have to grind. I want to reacquaint myself with what my discipline as a whole looks like these days.

All of that said, the obvious way to ease myself into the project is by reading the one(!) political theory article that’s been published in the ARPS in the last two years, Michael Walzer’s “The Political Theory License,” which is also the first article in the first of the two volumes. I’ll post on that later this week.