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'Why should I care what Russian political scientists think about politics?' This question, posted as a comment to my Live Journal blog by a UCLA graduate student (who got his first degree in Russia and is now pursuing his dissertation in comparative political economy),1 is not so trivial. However, political science as a discipline was officially recognized in Russia a quarter century ago (before the Soviet collapse), although there were some initial steps taken back in the 1960s (Brown, 1986). Now, it represents a fairly large segment of Russia's community of social scientists.2 Dozens of specialized university departments across the country produce thousands of B.A.s and M.A.s in political science, hundreds of candidate and doctoral dissertations have been defended,3 and the number of books and articles, seminars and conferences under the label of politologiya (literally, 'political science' in Russian) is virtually countless. While the quantitative output of Russian scholarship in political science is quite impressive, this article seeks a critical reconsideration of its substantive impact on knowledge about politics, both in Russia and beyond. It presents an overview of the state of Russian political science, with emphasis on its major theoretical, methodological, and empirical shortcomings, and offers some suggestions for overcoming them.
IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE: WHO IS TO BLAME?
The best way to assess the state of any academic community is to look at its scholarly journals and its most cited authors. Russian political science has produced many publication outlets (for overviews, see Ilyin and Malinova, 2008; Ilyin et al , 2010), and Politicheskie Issledovaniya ('Polis'), a bi-monthly journal published since 1991, is broadly perceived to be the most important flagship periodical.4 In 2007, this journal published 61 articles produced by Russian scholars (including those co-authored with foreigners).5 Among them, however, only sixteen (less than a quarter) resulted from empirical research. The rest of the articles fell into categories that can be labelled 'stock-taking' or 'review articles' (or both). Five years later, in 2012, of the 59 articles published by Russian scholars in that journal, there were twenty empirical pieces (roughly a third). These figures stand in stark contrast with leading European or US-based political science journals, where the proportion of articles based upon empirical research is...