Political Science, Practitioner Skill, and Public Management.

The article provides a critical assessment of the utility of the dominant intellectual approaches used by today's political scientists. If politics is broadly defined as the processes by which people make and execute collective choices, then the purpose of political science can be viewed as the discovery of true sentences about these processes. Someone unfamiliar with the literature of political science would undoubtedly assume that political scientists devote considerable attention to practitioner skill. Perhaps the inattentiveness to practitioner skill should not be surprising. At the practical level, it is difficult to study systematically. Practitioners such as legislators and public managers participate in complex processes where observers face severe problems in determining the contributions of individuals to outcomes. Political science might contribute to the improvement of practitioner skill by more explicitly considering selection processes as well as the rules and incentives that constrain and motivate practice-this has been one of the traditional concerns of public administration and is the focus of the anew economics" of organization.