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Political Science in Russia: Scholarship without Research?

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Abstract

After several decades of institutionalization of political science as a scholarly discipline in Russia, its quantitative output is quite impressive. This article offers a critical reconsideration of its substantive impact on scholarship in political science – and considers why that output has not been so impressive in terms of increasing knowledge about politics, both in Russia and beyond. It presents an overview of the state of Russian political science, with an emphasis on its major theoretical, methodological, and empirical shortcomings. It also considers the role of historical, institutional, and political factors for its developmental trajectory, and offers some suggestions for overcoming them.

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Notes

  1. See http://grey-dolphin.livejournal.com/610918.html (accessed 8 June 2014).

  2. The list of individual members of Russian Political Science Association comprises 819 names http://www.rapn.ru/in.php?to=membership&d=mem (accessed 9 June 2014), but the overall number of Russian political scientists is probably much higher.

  3. Russia employs a two-tier system of academic degrees, Candidate and Doctor of Science (the latter is somewhat similar to German habilitation).

  4. See www.politstudies.ru (accessed 8 June 2014).

  5. By ‘Russian scholars’, I mean here those who stated their affiliation with Russian scholarly institutions.

  6. This index included all Russian scholarly journals as well as some books. See www.elibrary.ru (accessed 8 June 2014).

  7. On Dugin’s transformation from a marginal activist to a mainstream figure of Russian scholarship, see Umland (2010).

  8. According to a 2007 survey of the Russian Political Science Association, ex-philosophers represent the largest share of political scientists in Russia, although migration of scholars from other disciplines (most notably, history) into political science is also visible (Ilyin et al, 2010).

  9. According to a cross-national analysis of twenty-eight countries, by 2008 the average salaries of Russian university teachers were among the lowest, comparable with Armenia but well below China, Kazakhstan, and even Ethiopia (Altbach et al, 2012).

  10. Although some Russian political scientists have conducted notable comparative cross-national studies of global political phenomena, such as party systems (Golosov, 2010, 2011), they are rather exceptional.

  11. In 2008, I produced an article on Russia’s party system, where Russia’s political regime was described as ‘non-democratic’: it appears both in Russian and in English (Gel’man, 2008). The chief editor of the Russian academic journal asked me to avoid the use of this label, arguing that in this case the journal could lose its official state registration. I insisted on publication without any changes, and the editor, in his introduction to the journal issue, warned authors against ‘overly critical and emotionally dense materials’, instead suggesting ‘professional academic approaches’ see http://grey-dolphin.livejournal.com/219381.html (accessed 11 August 2014).

  12. This notion was first formulated by the famous nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev as ‘who would grasp Russia with the mind/for her no yardstick was created/her soul is a special kind/by faith alone appreciated’, and has remained the mantra of Russian intellectuals.

  13. For a complete list of his publications, see http://golosovpubs.ucoz.com/index/nauchnye_publikacii_na_anglijskom_jazyke_political_science_publications_in_english/0-5 (accessed 8 June 2014).

  14. Some publications by Russian scholars in leading political science journals (Egorov et al, 2009; Gehlbach et al, 2010; Petrova, 2011) belong to economists rather than political scientists. Symptomatically, all but one of them recently fled the country.

  15. Given the low level of academic mobility, most Russian universities hire their graduates, who, in turn, teach in their respective departments for a lifetime.

  16. Still, the overall number of Russian political scientists who published in the English-language Web of Science/Scopus journals more than once does not exceed fifteen to twenty names.

  17. The experience of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, established by the Higher School of Economics under the academic supervision of Ronald Inglehart, is indicative: it has conducted several major research projects and offered quantitative training for young scholars across Russia and other post-Soviet countries (see http://lcsr.hse.ru/en/ (accessed 8 June 2014)).

  18. Some moves in this direction in Russian academia were made recently in economics and, to a lesser degree, in sociology. Political science might follow these examples a little later.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Mikhail Sokolov for useful comments to the earlier version of this text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg, 3, Gagarinskaia ul, St. Petersburg, 191187, Russia

    vladimir gel'man

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gel'man, v. Political Science in Russia: Scholarship without Research?. Eur Polit Sci 14, 28–36 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2014.33

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