World Trends in Political Science Research

The purpose of this report is to examine, on an international scale, the current trends in political science research.The initial intention was to base the survey on the available information about researches being carried on by institutions, but it soon became apparent that such a survey could not give an adequate picture of current work or trends. In the first place, systematic information about research by institutions was, at the time of writing, available on a comparable basis only for a few countries and areas. In the second place, even if information on research by institutions were available for all countries, an analysis of it would give a very one-sided picture of the main trends in political science research. For it would leave out of account all the work being done by individual scholars, and even groups of scholars, in the ordinary course of their academic work. To single out the work being done by research institutes (whether they are attached to universities or established independently) and to call this “research,” would be putting a narrrow interpretation on the word. It is, of course, tempting to do so. It is possible to canvass institutions and compile a comparative register of their researches; it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to compile a register that would list all the significant thinking being done in political science, including the theoretical work being done by individual academic political scientists in all the universities.