Mark Blyth is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has also been a visiting professor in the UK, France, Germany, and Singapore. He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century and is currently working on three projects: a book on party politics and political economy in advanced welfare states called The New Political Economy of Party Politics, an edited volume on constuctivist theory and political economy entitled Constructivist Political Economy, and a series of papers on probability, randomness, and epistemology in the social sciences, which may or may not end up a book. His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative European Politics. Email: mark.blyth@jhu.edu
I came to the US in 1991, shortly after Francis Fukuyama penned his famous “End of History and the Last Man” essay. Though much contested at the time, Fukuyama’s contention that there was only one option on the menu after the end of the Cold War – capitalism über alles – seemed, from my European…
An oft heard remark about Iraq today (at least where I hang out) is something along the lines of “Well, it may be bad over there, but at least they (the Iraqi people) are better off than they were under Saddam.” Such a response strikes me as simultaneously reasonable (it may be true) and false,…
In my last column I noted how Political Science, along with most social sciences, has a bigger problem with prediction than seems to be generally acknowledged. This is of course hardly unique to members of this particular tribe; the media are even worse. Take for example the US media’s treatment of Bode Miller in the…
Towards the end of this year, The American Political Science Review will publish its 100th anniversary issue. In researching for a submission to this centennial issue, I examined what political scientists have been saying for the past 100 years, and in doing do something very odd struck me: that the arguments that I have been…