Abstract :
Ask political scientists what it is they study and you will get a range of answers reflecting the breadth of research communities affiliated with the discipline. (As of 2002 the APSA has 36 organized sections and 50 related groups.) For a variety of purposes, the fact that we share little more than an institutional label may not matter much; but for the purpose of doctoral education, this very institutional label forces us to grapple with what we have in common. The years devoted to doctoral education represent the key point of socialization to the academy at large, and the profession in particular, and program-wide doctoral requirements enact departments’ judgments about what constitutes a “political scientist” above and beyond the substantive fields of American politics, comparative politics, international relations, and political theory.1 What are these requirements? In this paper, I report aggregate statistics on doctoral program requirements and offerings based on my extended study of 57 doctoral programs in the United States (Schwartz-Shea 2001). For each department, three sets of questions guided the investigation: (1) Are there any program-wide requirements? Or, are requirements decided by each field? (2) What are the curricular definitions of “methods” and “methodology?” That is, are “methods” courses exclusively quantitative or are courses in “qualitative” methodology offered or required as well? (3) To what extent are philosophy of science and the scope and/or history of the discipline offered or required at the doctoral level? This evidence base provides a starting point for addressing the title of the paper: Is this the curriculum we want? More specifically, to what extent is there a core to the discipline of political science that is transmitted to its future scholars? Does this core transmit what is most important or most central to the discipline? Does this required core, as well as the additional offerings in methods and methodology, prepare future scholars to understand the range of approaches that members of the discipline find important for the study of politics? In what follows, I first describe the data and methodology of the study, offer background relevant to understanding curricular choices, and then present the aggregate statistics. In the final sections, I discuss the findings and then offer an argument for methodological pluralism inclusive of qualitative research based on an interpretive epistemology.
