Interview conducted with Edward Friedman, UW-Madison political science professor.
DC: Where is political science at right now?
Edward Friedman: Much of political science today is a dialogue between two fields: Comparative politics versus policy analysis. What's happening is a struggle between people who see the world as institutions and interests and those who see it as incentives and policy outcomes.
[Take globalization as an example.] One of the results of globalization has been the rise of larger economies. For example, China and India.
The comparative politics perspective will talk about how the institutions of the world have reshaped interests. People in these poor countries, these emerging economies, always wanted to rise. They shut themselves off from the world market because they called it imperialism.
Their interests forced them to act in terms of the new institutions. Now they see the world market as something from which they can benefit.
If you were to take a policy analysis approach, you would discuss incentives: ""If they return their country to glory, then they will stay in power forever,"" so they have an incentive. And you would study what policies they are choosing in order to return their country to glory.
You're talking about the same reality, the rise of emerging economies in the age of globalization. But, there are two basic approaches in political science, and they come at it in these two different ways.
DC: What about the future of political science?
EF: One of the things that defines our age is the speed of change is increasing. You cannot predict how these ever-changing factors—new technologies and newly risen powers—are going to come together. You can't imagine historical conjunctures.
An example: Bush is in power when Sept. 11, 2001 happens. If Gore were in power, maybe instead of a war on terrorism, there would have been a war on the Taliban.
Even though you do your best to assume, I think it's increasingly difficult to even predict medium-range change.
DC: Where do you see the effect of political science on ""the real world""?
EF: John Maynard Keynes said the ideas of practical men are the theories of long-dead thinkers. So, people with practical power tend to be people who went to school a generation ago. If Keynes is right, it's very difficult for people to change their heads.
[It's] something called a culture gap, where the world changes but your ideas don't. You can see on things such as environment, how hard it is for people who grew up in another age to actually believe there's something real to global warming and believe they have to act on it.
One of the better parts of the United States government is the rapid rise of young people to positions as aids and assistants. I think it's easier for new ideas to rise in the U.S. government than in states which have large, permanent civil services—which always have older people next to the ear of power.
Our system allows for youthful and knowledgeable talent to bubble up. So in theory, in theory, we should be able to change a little better than some other places.
The negative side of our way of doing things is that we do not have a professional civil service. As anybody who heard about Katrina can see, you pin it on the political appointees that you get.
If you get appointees who are purely political, you can really suffer in a system like ours.
