Power, politics, and the development of political science in the Americas.

Social scientists tend to think about their disciplines as the objective analysis of society. However, numerous critical theorists such as Edward Said, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse, as well as interpretativists and reflexivists (Jackson 2011; Denzin and Lincoln 2011; Flick 2007) have challenged the notion that knowledge production is politically neutral and argued that, in fact, it is a key component of the broader social and political relations in which it occurs. By taking part in the production of knowledge on society, social scientists participate in the production, legitimization or critique of the social order, social hierarchies, power relations, and political regimes. Several empirical, contemporary phenomena illustrate this idea, and make it particularly topical. Economics notoriously plays a key role in grounding the monetary policies implemented by central banks and the International Monetary Fund (Chwieroth 2010). Social scientists are regularly enrolled by political actors to help design institutions, policies, or electoral programs related to their field of expertise – for example, promoters of European institutions have heavily relied on social sciences to legitimate the integration process (Aldrin 2010; Bailleux 2013; Boncourt 2019). When not seen as a tool, social sciences are perceived as a threat: some increasingly authoritarian regimes like Erdogan’s Turkey and Orban’s Hungary have been taking concrete measures to thwart the development of these disciplines (Paternotte and Verloo 2020). Multiple questions arise from these examples: what is, concretely, the relationship between the development of the social sciences and the emergence of critical or legitimizing discourses on the social and political order? How do social and political contexts and actors influence the activity of social scientists? Why are some disciplines more heavily enrolled by established powers or movements critical of such powers at a given time? What are the profiles and trajectories of the scholars who get involved in the production of legitimizing or critical intellectual tools? What concrete forms do these tools take, from scientific ideas (paradigms, methods, arguments, etc.) to policy instruments (surveys, data banks, etc.)? This special issue contributes to answering these questions by focusing on the case of political science in the Americas. A discipline par excellence concerned with producing narratives on power relations, political science offers an interesting case study for observing the interplay between the development of the social sciences and the production of the social and political order (Ravecca 2019). The articles gathered in this special issue explore how politics and power dynamics affect political science and vice versa. They focus on the relationship between political regimes, contexts, and events on the one hand, and the academic field and the knowledge it produces on the other hand.