Politics, American style

One thing that I’ve come to learn pretty fast since beginning a Master’s in Political Science at Columbia University, is that the American approach to the study of politics is radically different to the British approach. And not in a way that a History graduate would find particularly friendly. At least half of the graduate courses available to me, perhaps more, are heavily quantitative. I can chose between “Game Theory”, “Models for Panel & Time Series Cross-Section Data”, or how about “Multivariate Political Analysis”? Game theory sounds intuitively fun (it involves games, right?), but a preliminary scroll of game theory on Wikipedia convinces me early on that I would be best to avoid it like the plague.

Perusing the reading list for my class, “Theories of International Relations”, I suddenly feel much more at ease. Hobbes (tick), Kant (tick), Fukuyama (tick). At last, a comfort zone! There are some good professors at universities in the UK, the professor explains in his opening to the first class, but he’s never much cared for the British approach to political science. What he said next was a profound shock: British scholars emphasise ideas because the UK lacks military and economic might (‘the British army does, you know, a good job, for its size’…); American scholars emphasise economics and realism because the US is a hugely powerful country with hugely powerful capabilities and is forced to deal with ‘the reality’.

So, there it is, in a nutshell. I come from a little country with a little army that America could squash in a heartbeat, and this apparently also explains why I know nothing of game theory or calculus. Thank God for the special relationship…