Canadian political science: missing in action? A practitioner wonders why the progressive side of the discipline has gone mute.

Canadian political science: missing in action? A practitioner wonders why the progressive side of the discipline has gone mute. PERMIT ME TO POSE A provocative question, deliberately directedtoward the progressive stream of Canadian political science: Is thediscipline missing in action? Where are the centre-left voices? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What about the other side of the spectrum? you might ask. Simplystated, there is no doubt conservative colleagues have wieldedconsiderable influence through direct as well as indirect ties sinceJanuary 2006 to the Prime Minister's Office, sustained partisan andgovernmental engagement at the provincial level (Alberta financeminister Ted Morton, for example, is on leave from his position at theUniversity of Calgary) and impact via these channels on both Canadianpublic opinion and public policy. Progressive political science, on the other hand, only appears tobe alive and well if we focus on conference programs, scholarlypublications as well as individual professors' blogs and Facebookpostings. What rests beneath this seemingly healthy veneer? In my view,a relatively narrow, shrunken conduit linking left-of-centre elements ofthe discipline with the wider general community. In fact, the publicinfluence of progressive political science is arguably weaker than atany time in living memory. By invoking comparisons with the past, we risk recreating anera--whether burnished in gold or shadowed in darkness--that neverexisted. In this instance, conservative scholars and their patrons inelected office have propagated a myth to the effect that left-of-centreideas ruled and, eventually, nearly ruined the country during theLiberal years. I present no such case, since to the extent that aleftish social science perspective has registered in parliamentarydebates during recent years, it has primarily done so from the farreaches of the opposition--notably in the interventions of federal NDPleaders (before they became members of Parliament, Ed Broadbent taughtpolitical science at York University and lack Layton at Ryerson). I will propose instead the far more compelling argument that duringearlier decades, Canadian governments of all stripes drew expertise frommultiple ideological sources. Ours was once a more consensus-based, lesspolarized political culture governed by norms of civility and balancethat seem quaint, indeed antiquated, from the perspective of 2010.Contemporary political science students express shock when they learnthat the federal Liberals appointed a former Ontario Conservativepremier, John Robarts, to co-chair a commission on national unity in1977. They find it even harder to believe that the key free traderecommendation of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union andDevelopment Prospects for Canada, appointed by Prime Minister PierreTrudeau in 1982, was adopted by Brian Mulroney's government of thelater 1980s. Similarly, 20 and more years ago our political spectrum, asrefracted through media outlets, pivoted on a fulcrum that wasdistinctly more progressive. Peter Gzowski's popular CBC radioprogram Morningside, featured through 1993 a weekly political panel thatcurrent Mother Corp executives must shudder to recall because all threeguests would now be tagged as pink or, more probable, downright red. Atthe time, Dalton Camp, Eric Kierans and Stephen Lewis represented theright, centre and left, respectively. They debated crucial issues of theday with a degree of interpersonal respect, commitment to coredemocratic values and interest in understanding other points of viewthat seems out of sync with the rise of quick-bite, "gotcha"journalism. Universities were also different places back then. Social scienceprofessors were encouraged to engage as public intellectuals, since theprominence of individual scholars was seen as institutionally beneficialand, in the case of political scientists, integral to expectations thatwe would actively contribute to debates then unfolding in civil society.Academic leaders worried less if the funders of post-secondaryeducation--then primarily governments and now, more ominously,individual students and their families, research partners in the publicand private sectors, plus individual and corporate donors--actuallyagreed with what we said. Over time, shifts in our governmental, media and academicenvironments have blurred, and largely obscured, the progressive face ofpolitical science. On campus, sustained pressures to hold externalresearch grants, publish specialized research in narrowly targetedacademic journals, participate in an international conference circuit,fundraise to finance our home units and also teach larger and largerclasses leave little time for much else. At a recent panel discussion onthis subject, one youthful colleague highlighted a tension between the"big picture" thinking that journalists and members of theeducated public properly expect of us and prevailing disciplinary norms.Empirical political scientists, she noted with regret, often avoidasking what is good or just because such questions are consideredunscientific, hence unresearchable and, ultimately, unpublishable. In anage of publish or perish, who would choose such a path? A second junior academic in the discussion described the effects ofhaving scholarly versus practical enquiry proceed down separate tracks.At his university, efforts to create policy-relevant, useful knowledgefor government were hampered by the large gap between A) what decisionmakers wanted--namely, workable solutions to pressing problems, and B)what contemporary political science generally produced--that is,research that was too theoretical and driven by internal academicdebates to approximate A. Given that the signposts to promotion andrecognition in universities do not flag problem-solving research, heobserved, a vicious cycle has emerged whereby political scientists donot contribute and policy makers do not ask for our input as often asthey might. The third panellist, a senior Quebec scholar, summarized theupshot of these trends as follows: many political scientists who taketheir social responsibilities seriously seem content to sign petitionsabout such matters as the proroguing of Parliament or electoral reform,while economists get on with the actual business of influencing publicpolicy. Ouch. This missing-in-action status remains more than just an anecdotalphenomenon, to be dissected and lamented by colleagues in conversationswith each other. To demonstrate the extent to which progressivepolitical science is absent in contemporary Canada, let's pursuethree brief counterfactual thought experiments that imagine what publicdebate would look like if this part of the discipline were present,which in turn permits us to understand why it is weak or entirelyabsent. First, if the concepts of power, representation, justice, equality,citizenship and human rights figured more prominently in public debate,then we would have at our fingertips an analytically rigorous set ofideas that both reveal and explain the uneven distribution of influenceand resources that undermines democracy at this time. Takingtransformative action to rebuild our political fabric would follow fromeach of those starting points. Yet all six themes have lost tractionrelative to the totemic markers of our time, notably competitiveness,productivity and economic growth. Second, with the latter three desiderata depriving the former sixof oxygen, it is not surprising that we have to enter the realm offantasy to imagine a second scenario: reforming the"post-crisis" international economic system in ways that wouldenhance the well-being of citizens. (I place the phrase post-crisis inquotation marks because the strain on global markets, alongsidepressures the world credit collapse and its various knock-on effectshave imposed on the legitimacy of democratic governments, arguablycontinues.) As things stand, discussions of how to move forward usuallyelevate the regulatory preferences of large financial institutions aboveall else, leaving little room for the fundamental point that liberalstates and markets are ideally tools for improving the lives of humanbeings. Third, if the House of Commons operated as a representative chamberthat communicated voters' voices to elected MPs, then the leader ofour Official Opposition would not have had to travel roughly 40,000kilometres this summer to discover that Canadians are worried about thefate of democracy. The same earnest, concerned people who came out tomeet Michael Ignatieff from coast to coast to coast would havechannelled their views to their local representatives, and then thoseperspectives would have found their way into party deliberations andparliamentary debates involving all sides of the House. But, of course, that is the kicker. If institutions worked the waythat political theories and textbooks say they should, then the resultsof each thought experiment would exactly parallel our lived experience.The point is that they deviate to such an extent as to be moreperpendicular than parallel. Why has progressive political science not been there to highlightand explain the disparity? Like the proverbial historian who seeks tounderstand why war broke out or guns went silent at a particularjuncture, this political scientist sees more than one causal factor atwork. Some of the reasons I would propose can be traced to originsoutside the discipline, while others have internal sources. Let's begin with the larger environment in which we talk aboutpolitics. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher famously declared in a magazineinterview: "Who is society? There is no such thing! There areindividual men and women and there are families and no government can doanything except through people and people look to themselvesfirst." The core belief that civil society exists, and that itoperates in part as an essential check on the actions of democraticstates, has been endangered for decades--or for so long that we riskforgetting this foundational idea. One crucial reason why progressivepolitical science enjoys minimal public profile is because it isgrounded in the valuation of a highly oppositional idea, one that hasbeen seriously on the defensive since the rise of neoconservatism,namely the belief that citizen mobilization and government action canproduce positive improvements in the lives of individuals and for thecollective entity we call society. Given the dominant view since the 1980s that markets matter, whilestates and societies (if the latter even exist) do not, it is hardlysurprising to find low rates of voter turnout among citizens who came ofage in that decade and following. Eroded levels of electoralparticipation and declining public trust in political institutions andleaders have spread to middle-aged and older voters as well. Moreover, adangerous feedback loop has evolved to reinforce this pattern, sincediminishing the importance of government means fewer and fewer of thebest and the brightest are attracted to run for office or join thepublic service. The tenor of parliamentary debates has arguably declinedas well, with civil behaviour and meaningful policy debates increasinglyrare in our aptly named question periods (that produce few answers tothe problems facing Canadians). What citizen realistically believes,particularly in an age of such dauntingly complex policy challenges,that democratic government can provide solutions to problems when boththe A and B teams have deserted the polis? The same influences shaping citizens in general also affect peoplewho study politics as a career. My informal observations since the late1970s (when I was in graduate school) suggest it is rare to find apolitical science PhD student who wants to write a thesis about theCanadian House of Commons, political parties or cabinets at federal orprovincial levels. If multiple generations of political scientists viewthese institutions as in large part irrelevant, boring or both, then ourdiscipline generates a minimal supply of scholarly perspectives tosatisfy public interest--if and when such interest were to materialize. The demand for political science analysis is, of course, the flipside of the supply problem. It is true that progressive perspectiveshave been diluted by a rightward shift in print and electronic mediaorganizations since the 1980s, but this is only part of the story. Themore troubling piece is that conservative advocates have been bettercommunicators, finding new ways to dress up old ideas such aslaissez-faire capitalism and patriarchal family organization in spiffynew outfits for each debating season. Even with rising levels of formaleducation in Canada and most of the industrialized world, those conceptsare still easier to explain than Keynesianism or gender equality and, inanxious times, they enjoy the advantage of evoking nostalgic ties to ashared (however imperfect) past. The crucial edge the right enjoys, however, follows from aconscious, decisive push to invest in foundations, think tanks,conferences, media outlets and so on to promote a particular point ofview, and to train like-minded folks to sing with impact from theconservative hymnal. Alas, nothing close to matching funds hasmaterialized in the rest of the political spectrum--a phenomenon thatunderpins the absence of fresh, compelling voices that could championconsumer rights or affordable housing, with these perspectivescreatively repackaged in attractive ways. Even if such views burst onto the public scene, who would payattention? We live in an age when narrow-casting via the internet and,especially, newer social media have crowded out broadcasting, leavingfew incentives to pay attention to other points of view or, for thatmatter, to politics of any variety. Much of what passes for politicalcommunications, as a result, is fundamentally insular, an inwardlydirected preaching to the converted. At the same time, the art ofengaging in serious issue discussions has also gone AWOL; leaders rarelydisplay powers of persuasion designed to draw citizens into vibrantdebate with each other, because such skills have been eclipsed by acynical reliance on driving voters apart via wedge issues and negativeadvertising--each of which undermines the social cohesion necessary tosustain democratic politics. The wounds that progressive political science has inflicted onitself are all too obvious: our work is often so theoretically inclinedand academically focused as to be publicly inaccessible. We havepermitted the key concepts that matter to democratic politics to appeartarnished and dated, even though they are arguably far more uplifting,inspiring and essential to our collective future than any combination ofAyn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher. Worstof all is a pervasive sense that we are powerless to do anything aboutour MIA status. In a curious twist on Lord Acton's dictum, an Americancomedian once posed the following question: "If absolute powercorrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?" Idoubt it, but feeling that way sure makes you purely academic. Sylvia Bashevkin is principal of University College and a professorin the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Shewishes to thank Csaba Nikolenyi, Greg Anderson, Amanda Bittner, AlainNoel and colleagues in the audience for insightful questions andcomments on this subject at the Canadian Political Science Associationmeetings in Montreal in June 2010.