Sketch of a discipline in crisis: the methodological dispute in the North-American Political Science

Abstract

This article takes the most recent methodological dispute in Political Sciences in the USA as a starting point to reflect on the issues impacting the discipline and its role within the Social Sciences. This dispute became public in 2003, when a group of more than 200 North-American political scientists spoke against the editorial line adopted by the American Political Science Review journal, which favored the publication of articles based on mathematical models and in game theory. The article presents the historical origins for the disciplinary fragmentation of the Social Sciences and discusses its consequences for the construction of knowledge in the field of Political Science in present days. It argues that the expansion of academic works that identify themselves with subareas of the traditional disciplines – i.e. Political Sociology, Political Anthropology, Economic Sociology, Political Economy, etc. –, contrary of signifying the deepening of the fragmentation of the Social Sciences, shows a trend in the direction of the reconstruction of its methodological corpus.