confrontation, and suggests that his opponents have a leftist bias:
“The debate over area studies is often exacerbated by debates over the
merits of the market, the state, or the impact of the West, with those
who endorse area studies viewing those who use rational choice the-
ory as being pro-market, anti-state, and given to applying historically
contingent categories in a universalistic manner.”^77 The accusations
of area studies specialists can indeed be explicitly political. They
sometimes suggest that their opponents are inspired by the market
model of the “Chicago Economics Department,” and generally con-
tend that rational choice work reflects “the particular parochialisms of
American culture.”^78 Theoretical work, they add, should be “a means
to understanding real-world problems of significance, rather than an
end in itself.”^79
Similar debates have developed about the study of gender and
race. Scholars seeking to revisit political science from a feminist
perspective or from a standpoint more sensitive to “racial ordering
and its consequences” have regularly denounced the tendency to
reduce gender and race to simple variables in otherwise unchanged
mainstream accounts, and criticized an “excessive reliance on the
discipline of economics as a source of methodological and theoretical
inspiration.”^80 In the study of American politics, the dominance of
rational choice models and quantitative methods has similarly been
associated with a lack of attention to the most important substantive
issues, and in particular to a neglect of the “massive and growing
economic and political inequalities” that plague the United States.^81
(^77) Robert H. Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?,”PS:
78 Political Science and Politics, vol. 30, no. 2, June 1997, 166–69, p. 169.
Chalmers Johnson, “Preconceptions vs. Observations, or the Contributions of
Rational Choice Theory and Area Studies to Contemporary Political Science,”
79 PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 30, no. 2, June 1997, 170–74.
Atul Kohli, “State, Society, and Development,” in Katznelson and Milner
80 (eds.),Political Science: The State of the Discipline, p. 116.
Michael C. Dawson and Cathy Cohen, “Problems in the Study of the Politics of
Race,” in Katznelson and Milner (eds.),Political Science: The State of the
Discipline, pp. 488–89; Helene Silverberg, “Gender Studies and Political
Science: The History of the ‘Behavioralist Compromise’,” in Farr and
Seidelman (eds.),Discipline and History, pp. 372 and 378.
(^81) Paul Pierson, “The Costs of Marginalization: Qualitative Methods in the Study
of American Politics,”Comparative Political Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, February
2007, 146–69, p. 166.
220 Left and Right in Global Politics