The Rhetoric of ‘Political Science’ in Parliamentary Debates

There is an interesting mutual suspicion between political scientists and politicians worth a more detailed analysis. As academics political scientists do have a certain tendency to look von oben at acting politicians, as ‘mere practicians’ who do not take a notice of the insights of academic research. As professional politicians who claim ‘to know the practice’, parliamentarians have long time ago lost the deference towards scholars and resist the patronising academic attitude towards themselves. An excellent justification for this is that: questions on parliamentary agenda are always specific, related to the item on the agenda and the ongoing debate on it, and they cannot be resolved in terms of general principles. The digitalization of parliamentary debates provides allow us to look for references either to contemporaries or ‘classics’ of political science (on Max Weber quotes in a number of parliaments see Palonen, Max Weber als Begriffspolitiker, Nomos 2019, 233-261). Quentin Skinner put the point in the Preface of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978): the “political live itself sets problems for political theorists”. This thesis also shapes the agenda of my paper. When a large number of post-war parliamentarians has studied political science at the university and also others recourse to the scholarship on the field, it is interesting to notice, how. when and by whom political science and its representatives have been referred in parliamentary debates. Parliamentary sources have been digitalised in most European countries under recent years. They offer new resources for reading and analysing politics in both historical and inter-parliamentary perspectives. So far they have hardly been used in political science, although they are well suited for conceptual and rhetorical analyses. With simple word searches all kind of features of debates can be identified and compared, which would be all too complicated with the printed versions. At the same time all digitalised debates require experiments in the reading and analysing tactics, also due to the different systems of digitalisation between the parliaments. In this paper I shall look at British and (West-)German parliamentary pleanary debates from the post-WWII period (available online) regarding –how “political science”, “political theory” or similar expressions have been referred –who are the named authors and their text passages that have been mentioned – how the quoted authors/passages have been interpreted – which aspect of politics (polity, polity, politicking, politicisation) has been thematised.