Dvora Yanow*

Department of Public Affairs and Administration
California State University, Hayward

Why should a virtual organization that exists only as an email listserve and numbers "only" some 700 members - a very small fraction of the total APSA membership - matter to the Public Administration Section?

APSA's Perestroika - as distinct from the Soviet movement from which the name derives - was birthed in the Fall 2000 from an email posted initially to a handful of political scientists around the US. Signed "Mr. Perestroika," the private email bemoaned the state of affairs in US political science - in effect, that it had denuded itself of the study of politics in favor of a technicized, mathematecized analysis abstracted from the lived social realities of political life, systematically sidelining research of a more qualitative, field-based sort and those scholars who pursued such research.

Within 48 hours, the email message had bounced widely around the country, leading not long afterwards to the creation of the listserve that bears the name "Perestroika glasnost" . Now four years old, the listserve continues to be administered anonymously, and subscriptions are handled personally and privately by the list owner, whoever he, she or they is/are. Indeed, the identity of the initiator(s) and owner(s), singular or plural, remains unknown to most, if not all, Perestroikans, and the anonymity of the P-list makes it possible for graduate students and junior faculty, fearful of going public either with their views or as Perestroikans, to post their comments.

Why should such fears exist? Perestroikans contend that US political science journals, faculty searches, and curricula have been commandeered by research oriented toward complicated statistical, rational choice, and modeling methodologies, such that scholars doing in-depth, single case analyses based on extended (participant-)observation, conversational interviewing, and/or documentary analysis cannot get their work published or get hired and students are not exposed to such methods in their doctoral training or in undergraduate curricula. That so many have been, or feel themselves to have been, marginalized within the profession has led to exceeding caution among many in its "apprenticeship" ranks. Indeed, those of us doing interpretive-qualitative research are often asked by doctoral students at conferences or on the occasion of guest lectures how to get such work approved by dissertation committees, how to get a job, how to get published.

Perestroika has provided such scholars with an intellectual community that cuts across disciplinary subfields (as well as the conservative-liberal political spectrum). Perestroika has held receptions at each APSA meeting since its first in September 2001, where there were so many in attendance that they spilled out into the hall and down the corridor, even after all the chairs had been removed. There have also been gatherings at several regional political science meetings, as well as substantive panels at APSA. The movement has brought back into the profession many who had taken refuge in area studies and other programs and journal pages. Members seem to be predominantly from the IR and Comparative Politics communities - a factor, perhaps, of the initiator's network - but there are also active members from Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Administration.

But P has achieved more than "just" giving disaffected political scientists a place to hang out at meetings and on the virtual airwaves. Individual Perestroikans have taken it upon themselves to analyze the publication records of the major US political science journals; and their documentation - available in the pages of PS: Political Science & Politics - provides concrete evidence for the claim that political theory, history, and qualitative-interpretive case studies, both domestic and overseas, have hardly seen light of day in those outlets over the last 20-30 years. For the flagship journal of the APSA and the journals of the regional associations to be so one-sided does arguable harm to the study of politics and its practitioners - not least of which is the disillusionment of many doctoral students, drawn initially, so they say, to the study of questions relevant to their lives, at finding that the narrowed focus of the dominant methods distance them from such study. In one example, students at Yale University organized and pressured the department to offer a course in philosophy of science and qualitative-interpretive methods. I have heard personally from several, planning to transfer to other disciplines (e.g., sociology, history), that Perestroika kept them in political science departments. Within APSA, the "Political Methodology" Section, despite its general name, and its journal are oriented toward quantitative methods. Last year, a conference-related group applied to the Executive Council and received approval for a new Qualitative Methods Section - which by the time of its premiere at APSA 2004 had surpassed Political Methodology in membership. Moreover, APSA launched a new journal, Perspectives on Politics, now in its second year of publication, whose pages are oriented toward the study of politics and narrative, rather than mathematical, writing. And Lee Sigelman, who took over a year ago as editor of the American Political Science Review, has revamped the journal's review practices and editorial policy to be more open to qualitative-interpretive and theoretical work, and the present editors of Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Politics have promised the same. PS has also published symposia and articles authored by Perestroika affiliates documenting curricular offerings and graduate education requirements across the US, showing the paucity of qualitative methods offerings - students are usually sent to other departments for these - and the privileging of 2-3 required courses in advanced statistics.

Many affiliated with Perestroika - as a network, rather than a formal organization, it does not take action as a single entity, nor do those sounding opinions on the listserve in any way speak for the movement - have also called for contested elections for officers and Council members. APSA is the only major disciplinary association in the US that does not have contested elections - an irony not lost on P members. Some (even within Perestroika) argue that contested elections will lose APSA its hard-won gains in the appointment of women and race-ethnic minorities to leadership positions; and, indeed, the Association has seen a recent run of women Presidents, from Theda Skocpol (2002-03) to Susanne Rudolph, an active Perestroikan (2003-04), to Margaret Levi (2004-05). However, President Rudolph appointed a committee to study the question of elections, and its research showed that these other associations have created various avenues to ensure such representation. APSA bylaws enable any group of 10 members to nominate someone for Council or an officer's position, thereby forcing a polling of the membership. A Perestroika affiliate has for two years now organized such a nomination, and this year one of the two P-nominees has just been elected to the Council.

Perestroikans continue, then, to press for a broadening to other than quantitative methods in the study of politics, as reflected in changes in journal editorial policies (with some success) and in graduate education and undergraduate curricula (something addressed by the Committee on Graduate Education in its 2004 Report and likely to be the subject of discussion this year).

Whether the movement will have any effect on hiring practices is yet to be seen. At the very least, the discussion has led some departments to revisit what they teach in their required methods courses. Changes in electoral policies will likely take much longer to bring about, if ever. On balance, then, Perestroika appears to have had and to be having an effect on several aspects of US political science practice. This has not gone unnoticed: magazines and newspapers from The Economist to The Chronicle of Higher Education have featured Perestroika, often comparing it to the "post-autistic economics" movement in England. And Yale University Press is publishing an edited book that brings together the original P email and chapters reflecting its various areas of concern (Kristen Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Revolution in Political Science; forthcoming 2005).

So, what, if anything, does this have to do with the Public Administration Section and its members? P.A. scholarship and scholars have long experienced the sort of marginalization that spawned P's crie de coeur in the originating email, from both sides of our research identity: political science and organizational/management studies. This is our shared, old history, departmental (how many of us are in independent p.a. departments or struggling either within a political science department or a business school?), institutional (how many of us belong to two or more associations - ASPA, APSA, the Academy of Management, APPAM, ARNOVA - and attend two or more conferences annually?), and scholarly (I wonder how many of my political science and organizational studies colleagues read p.a. journals, whereas many of us make the effort to read those plus journals in the other areas). Parallel methodological arguments have been made in public administration over the years - that its history of case studies (think Kaufman, Blau, Crozier, etc.) and their methods have been lost to recent generations of students and continue to be "drowned" by advanced statistics and/or econometric course requirements, although some journals - notably Administration & Society - have continued to publish field-based research of various sorts. I am not in the best institutional location to get a clear sense of how these matters play out today in US institutions - Cal State Hayward's department is independent, gives only a Master's level education, and is heavily theoretical - but my sense is that ASPA's Section on Public Administration Research, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the Public Administration Theory Network and its Administrative Theory & Praxis, to name but a few, have brought more visibility to both theory and qualitative-interpretive research than they had in the late 1970s-early 1990s.

However, what I have learned from hanging out for four years among Perestroikans and other political scientists at APSA and pursuing the research of those engaged in interpretive methodologies is that there is a broad ignorance of the wealth of scholarship known to those of us who wear p.a. hats. And vice versa, I think: we are largely unaware of developments in IR and Comparative Politics that parallel our work and interests in bureaucracy theories, bureaucratic forms of organization, policy implementation, and the like. This is why P.A. Section members should be more interested in Perestroika (and I have already started arguing in that forum for the vice versa), aside from questions of associational governance. I have discovered Comparative Politics scholars writing about Weber for whom the vast research done in p.a. on his theories is not on their maps. IR has "discovered" policy implementation (among ourselves, I would say "at last!"), but they are theorizing in ignorance of the 30 years' worth of work in public policy and administration published by members of this section and others.

What Perestroika promises is a reorientation of the political science discipline in the US toward the study of politics; and that reorientation, coupled with a refocusing on qualitative-interpretive methods in the context of the philosophy of social science, can create bridges across the artificial divides that have institutionalized public administration within "American" in many curricular maps of the discipline. In this revamped political studies, research on Egypt and research on Chicago - whether focused on labor studies, on social movements, or on voluntary, non-governmental organizational forms - speak to each other, and this synergy promises to revitalize the discipline, its ideas, its students, and its analyses.

That is why Perestroika should matter to members of the P.A. Section at APSA.

*Acknowledgement: My thanks to Peri Schwartz-Shea for comments on the draft of this essay.