The Political Science Interpretivist

On October 16 th , this year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will begin its 20 th National Congress. This is the biggest event of 2022 for the CCP, because the Congress only meets every five years. It will last for between a week and 10 days. It takes place in the Great Hall of the People, next to Tiananmen Square, in Beijing. Among other things, the delegates will vote on the New 5 Year Plan, vote on revisions to past 5 Year Plans, and elect the Party’s Central Committee from among their membership. The Central Committee is the governing body of the CCP. It has about 300 members. The Committee members will then select its General Secretary, or chief executive officer. Most China Watchers expect to see Xi Jinping elected to his third term as General Secretary. No Presidential Election Little known to Western media is that no presidential election is held by a Party National Congress. According to the Constitution for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the president is to be elec...

  Warnings about the 2022 Midterms that Biden had Better Heed                                                                                                                                                               Introduction   Earl Ofari Hutchinson has written an interesting, well researched, and quite readable book. As the title* indicates, the book is about the importance of midterm elections in the US political process, and about why the voter turnout is often a fraction of that for presidential elections. The book came out in September 2022, and the discussion in it concerns th...

Introduction                                                                                                                                      Foreign Affairs magazine has exposed its anti-China capitalistic and nationalistic partisanship in its current 100th Year Anniversary issue. Since the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress will start on Sunday, October 16 th , the magazine seems to think the moment propitious for criticizing Xi Jinping because of the attention the event will attract. [1] No “equal time” articles were published in this issue to provide balance, or to cast Mr. Xi in a more favorable light.  During the 20th Congress, the 2300 ...

Introduction After it all, “I thought that China wasn’t as bad as Americans tended to think.” (182) That’s the conclusion of billionaire Desmond Shum, author of Red Roulette* – his autobiographical account of how he and his wife, Whitney Duan, rose from rags to riches in the go-go years of China’s developmental miracle. Whitney and the Road to Wealth Born in the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, both Whitney and Desmond received a normal education as children. She then enrolled in a military university in 1986. (73) As an outstanding student, she obtained employment as an executive’s assistant in “a real estate development company run by China’s military.” (74) At the time, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had numerous business interests, and Whitney started making connections with the elite among them. Later, the PLA was ordered to divest itself of these businesses as an anti-corruption measure by CCP General Secretary, Jiang Zemin in 1997. (75) The year before that, pe...

Introduction* American perceptions of China lean towards the negative. Taking a morally judgmental stance, “Half of Americans now say China’s policy on human rights is a very serious problem for the U.S. – up 7 percentage points since last year. … And nine-in-ten Americans say China does not respect the personal freedoms of its people.” 82% of Americans have a negative view of China. 64% of conservative Republicans view China as an “enemy” – far more than any other US group. Currently, 55% of Americans as a whole see China as a “competitor.” 34% agree that China is “an enemy.” And, a measly 9% regard China as a “partner.” [1] Yet, there is nothing in the way of the US and China seeing themselves as partners in trade and cultural exchanges, like the US sees itself with European countries; that is, nothing but misunderstanding. How China is like us – that is, we Americans I think it is very unfortunate that the American people understand China in the wrong way. The public’s understanding...

Two of the major leaders in the political science interpretivist movement are Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. They hold occasional chautauquas in which issues related to interpretivism are discussed. On one occasion, it was said that interpretivism is often accused of being little more than a glorified form of journalism, and not worthy of any claims to being “scientific.” I will contest that claim in this post. I will use three well received books concerning American politics. These are: Wildland , by Even Osnos, which uses a journalistic approach. This will be compared with two exemplary applications of the methods used in interpretive political science: On the Run , by Alice Goffman and Evicted , by Matt Desmond. [1] One major difference here, in my view, is that political science writing, if it is to make a claim to being “scientific,” contains a causal theme within its narrative. Journalism is generally narrative without disciplining itself to formulating any causal expl...

David Easton (1952) understood that a clearly defined interpretive framework can serve the normative function of guiding research. He intended his concept of the “political system” to provide that service. He said more than he knew. For, when combined with the Formal Axiology of Robert S. Hartman, Easton’s interpretive framework can provide a service he did not quite envision.  Easton’s concept of the political system can also serve as a standard, or conceptual norm, for assessing the  goodness  of political systems, and for comparing the goodness of systems. This is not a matter of moral approval or approbation, but more like the taxonomist assessing the goodness of a specimen, as to both its categorical fit and its health, i.e., a scientific goodness. Thus Easton’s interpretive framework provides political science with a way to move beyond its traditional explanatory function into the new realm of evaluating the scientific goodness of political systems. Once a set of be...