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Political Concepts
A Working Paper Series of the Committee on Concepts and Methods
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| Ian S. Lustick, "Taking Evolution Seriously," October 2009 |
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| Abstract | | Social science in general and political science in particular have been resistant to the mobilization of evolutionary and specifically Darwinian ideas for analytic and explanatory purposes. This paper uses a special issue of the APSR on the “evolution” of the discipline of political science to illustrate the general lack of sophistication among political scientists when it comes to evolutionary theory. Key concepts in evolutionary theory are then used to translate work by historical institutionalists that, absent the kind of general theoretical context evolution can provide, too often operates in an ad hoc and reinvent-the-conceptual-wheel mode. Comparative historical institutionalism is in particular poised to benefit from disciplined evolutionary thinking because of its emphases on time, sequence, unintended consequences, and the relationship between agency and structure. From this perspective work by a number of historical institutionalists, including Gellner, Thelen, Ertman, Gottshalk, and others is analyzed. |
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C&M
The Committee on Concepts and Methods
International Political Science Association (IPSA)
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