Political science in parliaments. Case studies on selected Western parliaments after the Second World War

This special issue discuss the uses of political science in parliamentary plenary debates. Political science is an old research field, but its academization and professionalization, as well as institutionalization of teaching and research with academic degrees, departments, journals, associations and international networks of its own, are largely post-Second World War phenomena. However, the histories of political science vary considerably even between Western countries. The history of the discipline has interested both US and British scholars over several decades, highlighting certain divisions but also tracing similarities and trends travelling across the Atlantic.¹

The belief that ‘science’ could ease politicians’ decision-making burdens has existed since the nineteenth century. In the period after the Second World War, it again gained ground.² Nowadays, ‘knowledge-based’ decision-making is again a frequent demand. It is legitime only when it refers to the use of scholars in different fields contributing to parliamentary politics as experts in committee hearings and as advisors to governments, ministries, parties and so on.

Parliamentarians who listen carefully to the experts understand not only how academics occasionally disagree, but also how controversies are an inherent part of academic research. All scholarship is an engagement in ongoing debates, in this respect resembling politics more than is commonly thought. Parliamentary debate in multiple stages from different perspectives is based on a procedure of weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of a motion and confronting opposing perspectives on a question, in contrast to the monocratic belief in the authority of science and legitimizing expert rule.

With political science, it is possible to illustrate how scholarship can contribute to political action. Scholars in the field can convincingly argue that, for example, certain types of electoral systems are ‘unfair’ or that experts should not be left without parliamentary supervision. Such insights are connected, however, with the procedures and practices of dealing with open controversies at the core of parliamentary and democratic politics.

There are differences, of course, between scholarly and parliamentary practices. Parliamentarians should respond to specific questions on the agenda of debates. Max Weber, in his 1904 essay on ‘objectivity’, understood that for scholarly debates there are no common questions,³ but disagreement on the research agenda tends to be greater than in parliamentary politics. In parliamentary debates the issues are, as a rule, decided by majority vote, whereas in scholarly debates different interpretations, competing approaches and dissenting visions can prevail simultaneously, and their presence provides a condition for preventing stagnation in scholarship.

This special issue will not enter into scholarly debates on political science, but will solely discuss the presence of such a tradition of thought, more recently an academic discipline, in parliamentary debates.⁴ Our problematic concerns the parliamentary perception and assessment of political science in different countries, mainly in the period after the Second World War. How have parliamentarians in different countries spoken of ‘political science’?

Different ideal-typical ways of referring to political science can be imagined. A traditional way would be to appeal to its scientific authority in a way that is expected to silence all debate. A common way is to refer to political science in a manner that seems to support one’s own side in the debate. A more modest way is to return to political scientists’ concepts, theories and arguments to clarify the debate on the agenda.

In the post-Second World War era, an increasing number of parliamentarians have studied political science at university. However, the number of professors in parliament has declined: both the professionalization of parliamentary politics, and teaching, research and administration at the universities, require more time than ever. Only in countries with recent democratization and parliamentarization, such as in Spain, or in post-Communist countries, such as Slovenia, do political science professionals still play a major role in parliaments and governments. In modern-day politics and particularly in the populist line of argument, the involvement of science is also seen as problematic. However, in the US it has become common practice for politicians and academics alike to move between governments and research institutions.

The mutual distrust between academics and politicians might prevail between political scientists and members of parliaments to a particularly high degree. Some parliamentarians still repeat the popular mantra: ‘Is political science really a science?’ and refuse to support its funding (see Anna Kronlund’s article on the US Congress). More generally, we can speak of an academic arrogance towards parliamentarians: the latter are looked down on, as mere talkers, bound to short-term politics or subordinating ‘wise’ decisions to the tactics of the government-versus-opposition divide. Parliamentarians also remain with good reason suspicious of scholars, who tend to think in terms of pure and clear-cut alternatives. Parliamentary politics, in contrast, concerns the items on the agenda, which might make the alternatives in the debate look more specific, to be amended in detail in plenum and committee, and adapted to the existing political constellation. External advice may clarify the situation but not facilitate decision-making in the concrete political context.

Political science has frequent difficulties with explicating its practical ‘impact’. One way to discuss this is to look for how its knowledge has been used in parliamentary debates. There exist very few studies on how academic research is referred to in parliament, such as Kristin Asdal and Bård Høbek’s studies on the whaling debates in the Norwegian Stortinget prior to the First World War.⁵ The digitalization of parliamentary debates over a long time period in most countries with powerful parliaments provides new possibilities for conducting studies on plenary debates across time and parliaments, for instance on the controversies of concepts such as democracy or freedom.

An example of parliamentary use of political science is Kari Palonen’s article on political science in the Bundestag debates.⁶ West German political science, originally supported by the Allied powers, had its own features and controversies that were visible in parliamentary debate. The different histories and characters of parliamentary politics in other countries have prompted us to form this special issue of comparative studies on the parliamentary use of political science. ‘Parliament’ is understood here in a wide sense as any deliberative assembly that follows parliamentary-style rules of proceeding.

These general problematics can be seen in different ways in the four articles in this special issue. The wide-scale academic institutionalization of political science had its beginnings in the US from the late nineteenth century onwards. Furthermore, US political science has retained its strong position in the discipline to the present day. However, the public reputation of the discipline is highly disputed, and this can be seen from the recent debates in the US Congress, which Anna Kronlund analyses in her article. In Austria, political science, as Marion Löffler emphasizes in her article, has been established only since the 1970s, which gives it a rather precarious reputation that is linked to the party struggles in the Austrian Parliament. The expansion of British academic political science has taken place mainly in the post-Second World War period. Its reputation has also been subject to controversies, which Kari Palonen compares with his study on (West) German political science in the Bundestag.

In their article, Taru Haapala and Hanna-Mari Kivistö discuss the debates in the early Council of Europe, which are intelligible only against the backdrop of classical and contemporary debates in political science and laws on federalism, confederalism and functionalism, supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. Furthermore, the article problematizes the clear border given in mainstream political science of the time in judging for the criteria by which the parliamentary quality of an assembly has been judged. The Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe could not dismiss the Committee of Ministers, and it did not have legislative powers. Members of the Consultative Assembly, however, were parliamentarians, the Assembly followed the rules of parliamentary procedure and debate, it set up its own committees that met outside the plenary sessions, it moved to increase its controlling powers and it debated the possibilities of the regularization of consultations with the Committee of Ministers and the parliaments of the member states.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Kari Palonen

Kari Palonen is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published extensively in English, German and Finnish on the concept of politics and its history, on the principles and practices of conceptual history, on the political thought of Max Weber and on the political theory, rhetoric and procedure of parliamentarism.

Anna Kronlund

Anna Kronlund, Dr., Docent in Political Science (University of Jyväskylä), is an acting university lecturer in political science at the University of Turku, Finland. Dr Kronlund's research interests include US politics, especially the US Congress, political debates, and concepts. More recently, she has been leading a research project that studies United Nations' legitimacy and transnational challenges. Her monograph US Congress' Powers Under Debate: Separation of Powers and Parliamentary Politics in Times of War and Crisis was published by Nomos in 2022.

Notes

1 R. Adcock, M. Bevir and S.C. Stimson, Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges Since 1880 (Princeton, 2007). About the differences in disciplines in both the US and Europe, see G. Capano and L. Verzichelli, ‘European Political Science: The Magnitude, Heterogeneity and Relevance of a Divided Discipline’, in G. Capano and L. Verzichelli (eds), The Fate of Political Scientists in Europe. From Myth to Action (Cham, 2023), pp. 1–35.

2 D. Bessner and N. Guilhot (eds), The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science and Democracy in the 20th Century (Oxford and New York, 2018).

3 M. Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in J. Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre [1904] (Tübingen, 1973), p. 184.

4 Political science histories have been researched from different perspectives, including language. See S. Smith, ‘The Language of Political Science in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 80, (2019), pp. 203–26.

5 K. Asdal and B. Hobæk, ‘Assembling the Whale: Parliaments in the Politics of Nature’, Science as Culture 25, (2016), pp. 95–116; K. Asdal and B. Hobæk, ‘The Modified Issue: Turning Around Parliaments, Politics as Usual and How to Extend Issue-Politics with a Little Help from Max Weber’, Social Studies of Science 50, (2020), pp. 252–70.

6 K. Palonen, ‘Political Science as a Topic in Post-War German Bundestag Debates’, History of European Ideas 46, (2020), pp. 360–73.