Para que serve a ciência política?

Na última edição da American Political Science Association (APSA) a palestrante convidada Jane Mansbridge (Kennedy School) respondeu a seguinte questão "Para que serve a ciência política?". Segundo Mansbridge, a principal contribuição que devemos esperar da disciplina é a possibilidade de encontrar novas formas para o uso (necessário) da coerção publica. Nesse sentido a ciência política seria - mais do que a ciência empírica das instituições e menos do que a crítica radical do poder - simplesmente a arte do autogoverno. É claro que não faltarão críticos às teses de Manbridge....

Leiam abaixo o working paper:

- Mansbridge: "What is political science for?" [working paper]

[...]

Yet if political science is “for” anything, I think it is, and should be, for helping us to govern ourselves.  We don’t actually know very much about how to govern ourselves.  And political science is the only academic discipline specifically organized to study this.  Other disciplines – law, psychology, sociology, economics – make great contributions.  But we, as a discipline, are organized around the question of governing.  Because we have consciously created social structures that let us think together, and because of our specialized toolkits, we -- of all the people in the world -- are the best organized to be of help on this.  And the world certainly needs that help.

What don’t we know about how to govern ourselves?  We know very little compared to our needs.  We don’t know how to coerce ourselves into giving up what we need to give up in order to stop global warming.  We don’t know how to stop nuclear proliferation.  We don’t know how to transition from autocracy to democracy without descending into violence.   Closer to home, we don’t know how to tax ourselves sufficiently to keep our infrastructure from crumbling or to pay for the rising medical costs of an aging population.   We don’t know how to produce laws in a polarized Congress or how to reduce that polarization.  We don’t know how to keep ourselves from drifting into greater and greater inequality.  At this moment of great need and relative ignorance, political science is the one academic discipline explicitly organized to study how we make our collective decisions on these matters, and how we can make them legitimately.