A Glass Half Full: The Growing Strength of French Political Science

Andy Smith (1, 2)

1 CED - Centre Émile Durkheim
2 Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques [FNSP]

It is hard to remain positive at a time when our discipline is experiencing a considerable reduction in new jobs, when far too many of our young doctors are struggling to get by on temporary and futureless contracts, the physical conditions within many of our organizations are deteriorating due to budgetary cuts and the differences in resources between them are increasing (Déloye & Mayer, 2018). Nevertheless, despite all these serious issues and the pressing need to address them with policy and political changes, it is important to recall and underline some of the key qualities of contemporary political science in France, and indeed the strengthening it has undergone over the last three decades. This exercise is valuable not only to remind ourselves, and others wishing to understand and susceptible to supporting us, just how far we have come over the past 50 years. It is crucial if we, as a discipline, are to continue to believe in what we do and how it contributes to the production and dissemination of knowledge within the social sciences, but also considerably beyond it. For these reasons, this paper successively presents three sets of data and analysis which are all harnessed to argue that today’s political science in France has considerable strength, i.e. a solid base from which it is more than conceivable that its scientific and societal impacts can further increase in the future. In this country, the discipline’s first strength is its institutionalization as a profession, a phenomenon which goes hand in hand with a capacity to generate robust, and most often collective, research projects, data and results. Secondly, the data I mobilize shows that although the internationalization of French political science does not necessarily take the shape of publishing in English and, in any case remains uneven, it has nevertheless significantly increased over the last two decades. Thirdly and finally, unlike some other national equivalents, this professionalization and internationalization has not been paralleled by a clear-cut separation between our science and the rest of the society. On the contrary, as section 3 will show, whilst publishing increasingly in refereed journals and publishing houses, many members of the French political science community have continued to contribute to public debates in a variety of ways.

Mots clés: French; political science; social science; profession

Domaines: Science politique

Andy Smith. A Glass Half Full: The Growing Strength of French Political Science. 15e Congrès de l’AFSP, Association française de science politique, Jul 2019, Pessac, France. ⟨halshs-02167923⟩