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At a time when authoritarian regimes are on the rise around the world, higher education in general and political science in particular are facing declining support and sharper political pressures in many places. Political scientists have long promised that their discipline can add to knowledge about politics and educate citizens. However, doubts have grown about whether our increasingly pluralistic discipline collectively generates useful knowledge and communicates it effectively in teaching and in broader public communications. Political scientists need to do more to place their particular studies within big pictures of how politics and the world work, and to synthesize their results. They must focus more on the politics of identity formation that has generated resurgent nationalisms and deep social divisions. They must strengthen their understanding and their community contributions through civically engaged research. They must also place greater emphasis on improving teaching. In these ways, modern scholars can show there is much good that political science can do.

The potential of political science to contribute to debates over public issues has long been hindered by tensions in the discipline's goals of achieving scientific rigor while also serving America's democracy. Those tensions have been exacerbated by recent trends in American higher education working to separate research and teaching activities and to rely more on external donors to finance both. Collectively these trends suggest that political science faces growing pressures to steer away from unpopular topics in both research and teaching, and to abandon the traditional teacher/scholar model of academic careers. It is advisable for the discipline both to seek more actively to promote engagement between different forms of political science scholarship in order to achieve cumulative knowledge that is pertinent to important political issues, and to preserve and strengthen its commitments to effective teaching about politics.

My thanks to Rafael Alarcón, Edwina Barvosa, and Louis DeSipio for their thoughtful responses to my essay, and to Perspectives on Politics for occasioning this discussion. The respondents each highlight crucial challenges for my argument—but their essays also suggest how I might address those challenges more adequately. I will review the contributions of each writer and sketch the lessons I draw from them in turn.

Introduction In 2004, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek argued that the subfield of American political development, or APD, was becoming "a veritable cottage industry."1 Its laborers shared critical perspectives on prevailing scholar ship that "suggested new lines of inquiry" on many topics, including "race relations."2 However, Orren and Skow ronek worried that shared critiques were not enough to sustain this emergent intellectual enterprise, whose diverse scholarship increasingly made it hard to say anything about "the development of the American polity overall."3 In response, without offering a "full-blown theory of Amer ican political development," they sought to lay out "the ground on which theory building might now profitably proceed."4 Soon after Desmond S. King and I contended that the APD literature especially lacked "theoretical frame works adequate for analyzing race." Drawing on Orren and Skowronek among other scholars, we sketched what we see as a promising approach, focusing on the role of

tioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline’s more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. 2 Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments. Despite what some may fear, an increased focus on how political identities are formed and on their behavioral and normative significance need not mean abandoning aspirations to do rigorous social science in favor of purely thick descriptive or subjective accounts. Political scientists who study problems of political identity should still be able to develop less abstract theoretical frameworks that can help us to discern and explain both the origins and transformations of particular political identities and near-universal patterns of political conduct. We may also be able to develop some supra-historical theories about the means and mechanisms of consequential historical transformations in political affiliations and behavior. Even in our interpretive and contextual characterizations, moreover, we still have to conform as rigorously as we can, as King, Keohane, and Verba have rightly urged, to a unified “logic of scientific inference,” although we should not equate that logic with the particular statistical techniques, all necessarily limited, that are commonly used to approximate it at any given time. 3 If we are to judge, for example, to what conceptions of their identities and interests particular political actors are giving priority, we need to form some hypotheses based on what we think we know about those actors. Then, we define the different implications of alternative hypotheses. Finally, we look for observable data about their lives that we can use to falsify some of the hypotheses. That logic is constant, though the techniques of falsification will vary with the types of problems particular data present and with the tools currently at our disposal. Yet though the challenge of drawing reliable inferences is universal in social science, the most crucial work in analyzing political identities must often be done by immersing ourselves in information about the actors in question, and using both