The Perestroika movement, its methodological concerns, and the professional implications of these methodological issues

Late in the summer of 2000, a small group of political scientists decided they had had enough. Fed up with what they saw as the narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, and rational choice approaches in American political science and concerned that the American Political Science Association (APSA) system of governance systematically underrepresented critical groups, they established an untraceable email address under the name of Perestroika and issued a call for change. The name Perestroika was drawn from the term in Soviet politics and was chosen to suggest that political science should be more welcoming, as a “warm house” is welcoming, to diverse kinds of political science.  The movement was anonymous because the initial participants feared professional reprisal from an establishment angered at criticism and calls for transforming the discipline.