Polish Political Sciences in a Global Context

Abstract

Looking at the contemporary Polish political sciences in a wider international perspective—and specifically analyzing their location within the global hierarchies of academic knowledge production—may not only shed new light on the field but will also provide interesting insight to workings of social sciences in peripheral context. The position of the Polish political science, as measured in terms of international rankings or indexes of citations, is rather low. Moreover, its dominant intellectual schools and most commonly used methodological approaches may be considered old fashioned from the perspective of leading Western centers of the discipline. Descriptive analysis and traditional institutionalism dominate, while more sophisticated behavioral approaches or new institutionalism are rare. On the other hand, the field as such may be seen as quite strong, especially given its visibility in the national media, its considerable institutional and human resources, or high numbers of students attracted each year. Moreover, it can be argued that the field has achieved considerable autonomy from the global political science system and has successfully endured post-Communist transformation, retaining most of its staff and institutional assets from the previous regime (which was not the case in most other central European countries). At the same time, one can find within it a smaller faction of internationally oriented scholars. They contest the dominant, locally oriented majority of the field and are well connected to global academic networks. In effect, an interesting duality within Polish political science may be observed and interpreted as a phenomenon typical for many peripheral countries, understood in terms of the world systems theory. Relying on Wallersteinian perspective on the global system of social sciences coupled with Bourdieusian field analysis allows for reconstruction of the genesis and underlying structures of the contemporary field of political sciences in Poland, which may be interpreted as a case of successful autonomy building of a peripheral field of social sciences.

From Wallerstein to Rothschild

“…Those who left the scientific field were often renowned scholars with significant achievements and international networks. It seems that this factor may explain the decline of many disciplines in Polish social sciences in international rankings that measure publications in recognised journals (Warczok and Zarycki 2018). This sudden and deep crisis in the social sciences and humanities in Poland has sharply reduced their output and international visibility.…”

“…Only those research institutes affiliated directly with the communist party were dissolved. Scholars from the eliminated units were not made unemployed, but trans-ferred to universities and other institutions (Warczok and Zarycki 2018). Moreover, jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2023.1135 academia was given almost full self-governance and autonomy by non-communist authorities (Antonowicz 2015).…”

“…However, much less is known about resultant changes in academic fields, particularly in the social sciences. A well-known exception to this case involves changes to domains directly entangled in the ideological legitimization of communist regimes, in particular political science and research focusing on Marxism-Leninism, the history of communist parties, and the "workers' movement" (Warczok and Zarycki 2018).…”

Untitled

“…While most of the literature dealing with academic career development has focused on Western societies, several research projects have taken a CEE focus (Dobbins and Knill, 2009;Warren et al, 2020). Researchers agree that the development of CEE scholarship has faced a plethora of obstacles, including the formerly mentioned linguistic disadvantages regarding poor English knowledge, from which many were related to the lack of ideologically open research under the Soviet oppression (Karady and Nagy, 2018;Warczok and Zarycki, 2018). In addition, during the Cold War, Western scholarship was considered as suspicious at least, if not banned outright (Dobbins, 2011).…”

“…While ideological rapprochement and the significance of the communist legacy slowly dwindled after the transition to a market economy, economic underdevelopment and the underfunding of higher education remained typical of the CEE region (Karady and Nagy, 2018;Warczok and Zarycki, 2018). However, more recently, many CEE countries have realized that, as they rely on external funding, they should make themselves more competitive (Kohoutek, 2009;Wodak and Fairclough, 2010).…”