Towards a new research agenda

Or: Why I still think it's important to study politics after a year working in government.

[See part two here]

Political science in general

One part of me is a political scientist by inclination and training. I am skeptical of some of the things that label implies - in particular, its flawed aspiration to science - but I've come to recognize that many of the disciplinary boundaries are useful signposts.

Think about the other word in that description - "political". A political scientist is generally committed to understanding events and dynamics as manifestations of political forces. This, of course, drives us into greater nebulosity - what does "political" mean? I know libertarians who claim that politics is merely a surface distortion of underlying, impersonal and beneficial market forces, and math professors who claim that that publication in respected journals is fundamentally politicized. So there are a range of opinions on the matter.

Here, I will largely sidestep this question, and refer you to Machiavelli, who likened the ideal prince to a "centaur". That is, half-man, half-beast: An entity that deployed equal measures of consent and coercion to rule. Politics, therefore, is what happens when some people get others to do their bidding by convincing and forcing them to do it. Pace Gramsci, you can't have one without the other, either.

What does this mean? Broadly speaking, it means that I look at phenomena in a distinctive way. An economist might ask: What's the market? What's the comparative advantage? What's happened to dairy prices this month? A sociologist might ask: What are the cultural norms and practices? Why are all the men wearing those things around their necks? A political scientist, by contrast, might ask: Who exerts power in this situation? How do they do it? Why don't other groups rebel?

What I can't do (yet)

Ultimately, we must base our investigations in some theory. If you claim to be doing otherwise, you just kidding yourself. (As JM Keynes famously said, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”)

I decided relatively early on that I should take up this point, and become as theoretical as possible. If one needs a good theory to proceed, I reasoned, that should be my first priority.

This logic led me to a very theoretical attempt-at-a-thesis in my last year at university. It was an attempt to reconcile - or draw out the gaps between - the writings of Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx on the subject of historical progress and repetition. It turned out to be an extremely broad topic that had the nasty tendency of slipping away from me every time I tried to get my hands firmly on it. I wrote three or four versions of the first chapter and gave it up as a bad job.

The problem was this: Benjamin and Marx, while marvelous founts of theoretical insights, both proceeded from the material facts of a situation or phenomenon. They developed different methods of historical materialism, but kept their theories firmly tied to the facts, to the concrete material.

In short, I realized that if I took their theories seriously, I was going around my investigations the wrong way. Rather than committing to a theory about the workings of the world, I needed to commit to a methodology that would allow me to draw theory out of reality. Benjamin talked about constructing theory as montage, or the building of the Crystal Palace: for him, it meant drawing together and assembling many many minute components, fragments of history. I suspect that it will mean something similar to me.

Just the facts, ma'am

One of the first lessons I learned in government was that assertions usually wouldn't cut it. Evidence is needed - often in the form of hard statistics. I've spent a great deal of time perusing releases and datasets from Statistics NZ, looking for expected and unexpected findings. Where possible, I've tried to let data drive my questions - first, ask what has happened, and then ask how.

Naturally, it's not that simple. The first things one learns about any source of data are its limitations. Comparison between countries or years can be difficult even where broadly similar statistics exist. And in most cases, rigorous social and economic statistics only began in or after the Great Depression - a period of time too short to allow any rigorous analysis. (Let alone perceive any long-run systemic dynamics!) So I am not naive about quantitative views on the world - important, but limited.

So: Data, concrete facts. But data on what? Broadly speaking, there are two approaches. The first is top-down; it examines the broadest-picture data on a society - measures of national accounts, growth, income distribution, expenditures, etc. The second is bottom-up; it goes down to the level of daily life and starts seeing what it can find there.

These two "levels" at which to examine a country (state, city, region, world, etc) are linked, of course. Let me give an example: The global financial crisis last year.

The broadly accepted view of the crisis was that it resulted from high-level disorders ranging from global current account imbalances (i.e. China lending a lot of money to the US) to excessive liquidity (caused by the US Federal Reserve keeping interest rates dangerously low) to poor corporate governance (or, as some of us call it, widespread corruption in the investment industry) to negligent regulators (possibly as a result of that corruption).

A less commonly heard version of events is this: That the global crisis had its roots in a household debt crisis (particularly in the US). As real hourly wages have stagnated or declined over the last three decades, the it is only possible to increase consumption in the US's "market of last resort" by increasing indebtedness. A related although not identical phenomena was the two-decade-long housing bubble, which effectively underwrote this increasing debt. Naturally, this model was not sustainable, and when it fell apart, it blew huge holes in banks' balance sheets. The basic problem, therefore, was not a "macro" disorder, but an everyday problem (stagnant wages, rising debt) generalized and replicated across the continent.

In short, in order to understand many of the things that I want to understand, I must discover how they work in daily life, how they operate on a "micro" scale. In a sense, this is a version of the conclusions I arrived at after three and a half months in Argentina: that a global climate change model is all well and good, but what do carbon dioxide concentrations mean for a small farming village in an already-dry place?

I should mention one more thing about the household debt/global financial crisis example. Both of those two (stylized) explanations are partial. Without the "macro" imbalances - reckless lending and "securitizing" practice, the Chinese need to lend us money so as to maintain their principal export market, etc - household debt never could have risen to the level it did. (In other words, if you can't find someone to lend you money, you can't get it - no matter how much you need it.) And without rising household debt (or some similar phenomenon) the "macro" imbalances would not have had the same scope to express themselves as destructively as they did.

Drawing connections between these two "levels" is often the task. And, as my dad tells me, I am very good at thinking globally, and very good at thinking about specific cases. It's just the steps between the two that I could do better...

Weaponizing the results

At the end, there will be findings. I will investigate, pontificate, conclude, write. But what to do after that?

The second major lesson from working in the government has been that policy matters. An undergraduate education in political science taught me quite a lot about what governments can do, and why they might choose to do it. I learned about state power, and the justifications for its exercise. This ignored a third major question: How do states exercise power? How do they get things done? (The most insightful book I read on the topic was State, Power, Socialism by Nikos Poulantzas.)

It goes without saying that the making of the sausage is not a pretty operation. But it's got me thinking: If I think that x, y, or z is happening, what should I do with that knowledge? How can it be used to change course on policy? And if I think that a, b, or c should be done, how could I do it? What means are available to do what I think should be done, and how can they be deployed?

If political science is to have ambitions to change the world, rather than just explain it, it has to answer these questions. (This leads into all the uncomfortable questions about accommodation and compromise, and the inevitable gap between vision and praxis. But I will set those aside for now.)

To my mind, this involves two main considerations. The first is simpler: it requires one to complete the circuit, in a way, returning from conclusions or theory to the real-world situation, and then asking two questions. First, what do you want to change, and how? Second, what policies would need to be enacted to do so?

The second consideration leads quickly to a confusing morass. After deciding what is to be done, one must consider how it is to be implemented. This, inevitably, involves dealing with institutions, and, to the extent that any radical or disruptive proposal is put forth, swimming against the bureaucratic current. (Like salmon: hopefully to spawn rather than be eaten by a bear.) In my experience, institutions tend to be inertial, and there tends to be an accepted discourse in which you must speak. (Foucault talks about power-knowledge. He's not wrong, regardless of what you think of his evidence base in History of Sexuality.)

Summary of a sorts

There is something here about theory, something here about information and concreteness, and something about praxis. Tensions exist within this general agglomeration of approaches; it is more an attempt to draw out the beginnings of a methodology than an actual research agenda. More on that later.