Political Scientists Quotes

Analysts can choose the problems that they want to study whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him.

Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

Empirical evidence collected and analyzed by political scientists demonstrates that judicial pensions are the most important factor in a Justice's decision to retire, far more important than the party of the President or which political party has control of the Senate.

At a time when politics has become an almost minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign.

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations - clubs, associations, political parties, unions - to which politicians were responsive.

Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.

Many studies or theories by political scientists fit some subset of cases that a court decides, but literally no theory can account for all of them, particularly when it comes to studying a complex institution like the Supreme Court.

There is no clear relationship between a president’s performance and his well-being. For instance, Dwight D. Eisenhower had a series of medical issues while in office, including a heart attack, a bowel obstruction and a stroke. But historians have written approvingly of his presidency and his ability to achieve consensus. In a 2015 ranking of the presidents from a survey of political scientists, he came in seventh. Perhaps one of the sickest presidents in the country’s history was John F. Kennedy, who suffered not only from a failure of the adrenal glands, known as Addison’s disease, but also from debilitating back pain. A physician, Janet Travell, treated Kennedy with narcotics, stimulants and various hormones. Most worrisome, Kennedy retained the services of a shady physician named Max Jacobson, who injected him with amphetamines. Yet while some of Kennedy’s decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, involved poor judgment, Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek found no definitive evidence that the illnesses or medications were the cause. And historians have praised many aspects of Kennedy’s tenure.

What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.

One cannot deal with present day Islam by simply repeating the linear chronological account of its historical spread, the theological-juridical frames of its articulation as a system of beliefs and non-beliefs fixed by God, dedicated to the pious observance of the faithful, and the no less conformist and repetitive transcriptions of the Islamicists which have been adopted by political scientists to describe present-day Islam.

The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.