> The following shows that poli. science ignores the roles of
> corporation. Economics goes one step further. We talk about "firms,"
> but almost nothing in the economics literature ever mentions the role of
> corporate power.
> A Not So Academic Oversight
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
> The American Political Science Association's annual convention recently
> came through town, filling up Washington, D.C. hotels with thousands of
> academics ready to present their latest research findings.
> Browsing through the convention's program, we hoped to learn of new
> findings on the role of corporations in the political process. Instead,
> we
> found that there appeared to be virtually no papers on or even
> referencing
> corporate power.
> --
> Michael Perelman
US political science has long been dominated by those arguing virtues of
interest group pluralism approach (even as 1950s pluralist assertions that
"elites" have little effect on decisionmaking receded in favor of talking
about "plural elites"). High point for "science of politics" was 1950s/
1960s emergence of analysis drawing upon behavioralism and leading to
proliferating studies in areas such as voting behavior because quantifiable
data was available. Recent decades have witnessed rise of "rational choice,"
"public choice," "social choice" poli sci that draws upon economics in
constructing models based on procedural rules about rational self-
interested behavior of individuals. This development has spawned plethora
of studies about bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, voters. One result
of all this has been for poli sci people (with exception of folks in and
around several dissident caucuses such as New Political Science) to be
"merrily" distant from and silent about real-world political debates and
struggles. Michael Hoover
