Current Criticism of APSA Is Nothing New

Over the several decades of my professional career, complaints about APSR and petitions to change the structure of APSA have been perennial features of life among political scientists. To a remarkable extent the agenda of concerns has remained quite constant, focusing on issues of allegedly excessive emphasis on technique and method, the representativeness of the Review, and the APSA's governing structures. Over the years the Association has tired to address these concerns, sometimes with a degree of success, but rarely enough to satisfy or silence the critics. In part, the problem lies in the supposed incompatibility of the ostensible polarities; teaching versus research, technique versus substance, real world politics versus theoretically driven research. Of course, these are not either/or choices but questions of degree, and the appropriate balance may vary considerably across both time and the spectra of subject matter and professional career paths. Moreover, though we may give it more lip service than true commitment, the principle of interdependence really does operate on each of these dimensions of our disputes. As that splendid scholar and wise man, V.O. Key, Jr., said in his presidential address 40-odd years ago, “Method without substance may be sterile, but substance without method is only fortuitously substantial” (1958, 967).

Micromanagement and Peer Review

The purpose of peer review is to keep standards high, thus giving reviewers two specific tasks. One is to recommend rejection of work that reflects an author's poor command of the literature, lack of methodological competence, and inattention to literary precision and clarity, while bearing in mind that a lively and dynamic scientific discipline must encourage diversity and avoid an excessive orthodoxy. The other is to offer instructive advice to authors who submit their papers while avoiding the temptation of telling others how to do their research.

Response to APSR

From the outside looking in, it is hard to specify what is wrong with an institution. Those of us trying to reform APSR know from the results that something is wrong. The journal is not representative of the many types of research that political scientists perform. No one, not even the editor, has questioned that. But exactly why the journal is so unbalanced, and what might be done to correct it, are vexing issues for those of us who have never participated in its management.

Perestroika: For An Ecumenical Science of Politics

The Perestroika movement is a reaction against scholars who wish to turn the study of politics into what Thomas Kuhn called a “normal science.” They seek to impose a consensus on epistemological and methodological questions in order to hasten scientific progress. This group of scholars comprises mainly rational choice theorists, formal modelers, and those who do exclusively quantitative research. I refer to them as advocates of “hard science.”

This symposium had its genesis in a workshop on understudied groups in advanced industrial democracies. Sponsored by the American Political Science Association and funded by the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, the workshop met from August 27 through August 29, 2000 in Washington, D.C. It was the first of a cross-cultural series on a spectrum of topics that will give trans-Pacific scholars the benefit of each other's experiences and perspectives. When APSA applied for the grant it stated that: “Japan and the United States share many attributes but also have stiking differences. These similarities and differences allow for informative comparisons and interesting exchanges that are the hallmark of good scholarship. Sharing different perspectives and experiences on a wide range of topics will be helpful and enlightening to scholars on both sides of the Pacific.”

“Nor should we omit in our study [of public administration] the problem of legislative-administrative relations, in view of the increasing role of the public servant in the determination of policy, through either the preparation of legislation or the making of rules under which general legislative policy is given meaning and application” (Gaus 1931, 123).

In the title of his 1993 Gaus Award Lecture, Francis Rourke posed the deceptively simple question, “Whose Bureaucracy Is This, Anyway?” His subtitle was “Congress, the President, and Public Administration.” Rourke, a pioneer in the field of bureaucratic politics, concluded that federal administration was constitutionally and politically under the “joint custody” of Congress and the president. Clearly, Congress has formidable constitutional authority and responsibility for the structure and operation of the executive branch. A great deal of political science research demonstrates that the legislature and its committees are a major political force in federal administration. Even as the older “iron triangle” model gives way to newer approaches, no one (other than misguided reformers) could reasonably answer Rourke's question and exclude Congress. Its oversight, influence, and intervention in agency operations on behalf of policy objectives and incumbency are central features of contemporary federal administration.

Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed.

Almost a decade ago, historian Gary Okihiro asked “Is yellow black or white?” (Okihiro 1994). Although Okihiro argued for solidarity between nonwhite groups, he noted that yellow is neither black nor white: That dichotomous racial framework does not adequately represent Asian Americans. Similarly, a political framework that was developed when African Americans were overwhelmingly the nation's most numerous minority does not fully capture the politics of Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander ancestry. As recent waves of non-European immigrants have required a broader conception of what it means to be an American, they have also made it necessary for political scientists to develop an expanded notion of the scope of minority politics.The distinct Characteristics of Asian Pacific-American (APA) politics have led to the formation of Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC), an APSA-related group. APAC helps to bring together political scientists and other scholars who study APA politics.

Introduction: The Emerging Political Status of Asian-American Elected Officials

Research on Asian-American elected officials is scarce, but Asian-American officeholders are not. The National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac (Lai and Nakanishi 2001) lists hundreds of Asian Americans who hold elected offices in national, state, and local governments, in addition to a number of appointed officials and judges. Furthermore, increasing numbers of Asian-American, political candidates run for national and state-level offices (Cho 2000a; Lien forthcoming), and there have been periodic Asian-American political movements (Wei 1993). Nevertheless, Asian-America political leadership and Asian-Americans' roles in campaigns have often been overlooked in the discussion of minority politics, in part due to the community's relatively young and largely foreign-born population (Brackman and Erie 1995).

Our 2000 presidential election fore cast was considerably off the mark. We predicted Gore would receive 56.9% of the two-party popular vote. Gore did get the majority of this popular vote (about 50.2%), as we predicted, but his total fell many points short of our forecast. Does such a loarge error (of 6.7 points) invalidate our model? We are hesitant to say so, since we forecast Clinton's victory in 1996 almost exactly using the same model, and more closely than other political scientists. While the Gore result has some outlier characteristics, incorporating it into the model does not really budge the structural coefficients. Put another way, introducting the 2000 data does not alter the magnitude of the regression estimates for the three independent variables: GNP change, popularity, peace and prosperity. As shown in the second column of Table 1, the coefficients from the 1952–2000 estimates are, respectively, 1.81, .14, and .14, while the coefficients from the 1952–1996 estimates are, respectively, 1.83, .16, .14.

Foreword

It is common belief that democratic political systems are gender neutral. Yet data show that women continue to hold far fewer elected positions than do men. It is thus imperative that we re-examine not only the assumption that political systems are gender neutral, but also the electoral systems themselves. When we identify how the current electoral and political party systems support or sustain these low rates of female office holders we may begin to understand the hurdles that women face in entering politics.

As someone who has reported on this Association for two decades, who has profited from what I have learned from you, I am deeply honored to deliver this lecture, following such major figures who have connected political science to the real world as Lee Hamilton, Donna Shalala, Pat Moynihan, and, of course, Dick Cheney. Big time.

“He's breaking every political scientist's heart.” Mark Shields, commenting on the Gore campaign for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on election eve, November 6, 2000

It did not look good for Gore leading up to Election Day. Five days before the election, not a single national poll had Gore ahead. Indeed, the polls at that time showed Bush leading by four percentage points on average (see Table 1). Bush was campaigning in California, and the rumors were that he already had shut down his own internal polling. Even on election eve, only two polls (CBS and Zogby/MSNBC) showed Gore ahead. In these final preelection polls, Bush was leading by 1.7 percentage points on average, and with a pooled N of over 10,000 respondents! At midnight, as Election Day began, the Iowa Political Stock Market vote share market indicated a commanding Bush lead of 4.5 points and the winner-take-all market put the effective probability of a Bush victory at 71%. Some political commentators were writing Gore's epitaph (Kurtz 2000). His one hope, it appeared, was to win the Electoral College vote despite losing the popular vote.

For at least 150 years, Asian Pacific Americans have faced racial discrimination, violence, and segregation. Unable to vote before World War II, many used legal challenges and other non-electoral means to fight for equality (Salyer 1995). Family and regional associations formed for economic needs, while other groups organized to defend worker rights (Bulosan 1973; Kwong 1997; Yoneda 1983). Civil rights organizations such as the Japanese American Citizens League (founded in 1930) and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (founded in 1915) promoted assimilation and opposed discrimination.

This collection of rich, provocative essays heralds a new opportunity for the reinvigoration of political science. Our premise, and the premise of our essayists, is that the term “area studies” is a misnomer. The political scientists whose works have focused on specific world regions have yielded significant theoretical and conceptual contributions for the discipline, both in the past and in the present.

In this brief overview, I examine Japanese literature in women and politics in Japan. In doing so, I focus specifically on literature that examines political institutions—defined here as a set of rules and procedures that affect public policymaking—in the field of equal employment laws. In the first section, I lay out the types of literature that exist in this field. In the following section, I draw attention to what the literature lacks in the field of women and political institutions. In the third section, I scrutinize a few articles that concentrate upon political institutions and politics related to women. In place of a conclusion, I make suggestions for future study.

Studying Asian-American politics with public opinion data is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in the last decade have a number of surveys (collected mostly at the local or regional level) been taken, reflecting expanded interest in the growing Asian-American population and the development of ethnic sampling and interviewing techniques.In this article, the terms “Asian” and “Asian American” are used interchangeably. While most research on Asian-American political behavior focuses on voting, some work examines other forms of political participation. Recent scholarship concerns not only individual characteristics, but also contextual and institutional factors.

On August 29, 70 days before the election and more than 100 days before anyone would know who would be the next president, my trial-heat and economy model for forecasting presidential elections predicted that Al Gore would receive 52.8% of the national two-party popular vote. By the actual returns, after all the recounts and court rulings were completed, Gore received 50.3% of the national two-Party popular vote, 2.5 percentage points less than the model predicted. While this error is larger than normal (the mean out-of-sample error from 1948 to 1996 for the model is 1.5 percentage points), three of the last thirteen elections had larger out-of-sample errors. In short, though the performance of the forecasting model this year was well within normal bounds, the model was not quite as accurate as usual.

Area studies in the United States is under siege. Government and foundations are turning their attention and funds elsewhere. Although they operate from very diffrent quarters, critics are taking area studies harshly to task for both alleged errors of commission and omission. Yet mine is an optimistic message. These difficulties must be seen within the context of a change in the demographic composition of graduate studies in the U.S. An infusion of intellectual energy from foreign graduate students and post-docs is leading to a reinvention of traditional area studies as global networks of scholarly engagement. Over the longer term these networks, and the scholarship they will create and sustain, bode well for the continued intellectual vitality of this field of scholarship.

Information about women who hold appointive office is a neglected area.

–Eileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary, HEWEileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HEW, quoted in Carroll and Geiger-Parker, 1983.

With every new presidential administration in the United States, the incoming president is in charge of appointing thousands of individuals to work throughout the executive branch of government and assist him in fulfilling his constitutional responsibility to “faithfully execute the laws of the Nation” (Pfiffner 1996). When the Center of American Women and Politics (CAWP) first began studying female political appointees in the early 1980s, very few women had ever served in Cabinet positions or other high-ranking executive positions within the federal government. In fact, in 1977, almost two hundred years after the founding of the United States, President Carter appointed only the fourth and fifth women ever to serve as Cabinet Secretaries (CAWP 1998). As Carroll and Geiger-Parker note in the introduction to the very first study of female political appointees, “for the first time in history, women had been appointed in large enough numbers to survey and to compare with other appointees” (1983a, ix).