Abstract
Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan independence crisis (2010–2018), we demonstrate that in this type of context, (1) political scientists mostly adopt a partisan stance in their public interventions, yet it is also frequent that this is combined with the presence of academic elements in their discourse; (2) demand side factors (media outlets’ editorial lines) reinforce these partisan dynamics. These findings show that opportunities for increasing the social relevance of political scientists in these highly contentious contexts might come at the price of creating tensions that could erode the legitimacy of political science knowledge before the public.
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Source: Authors’ own elaboration
Source: Authors’ own elaboration
Source: Authors’ own elaboration
Source: Authors’ own elaboration
Source: Authors’ own elaboration
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Notes
The survey was carried out in 2018 in the context of the COST Action “Professionalisation and Social Impact of European Political Science” (PROSEPS) (http://proseps.unibo.it/proseps/). The survey was carried out in 37 European countries (plus Israel and Turkey) among academic political scientists. The total number of respondents was 2354.
This would require an entirely different research design, analysing participation of academic political scientists in the context of all the interventions in this public debate. However, this is beyond our purposes in this article.
Spain is classified by Hallin and Mancini (2004) among pluralist polarised systems. These systems “[tend] to be associated with a high degree of political parallelism: newspapers are typically identified with ideological tendencies, and traditions of advocacy and commentary-oriented journalism are often strong.” (2004: 61). Also, “the press is marked by a strong focus on political life (…). Instrumentalization of the media by the government, by political parties, and by industrialists with political ties is common. Public broadcasting tends to follow the government or [parliament] (…). The state plays a large role as an owner, regulator, and funder of media, though its capacity to regulate effectively is often limited.” (2004: 73).
See, for instance, the manifesto of the unitary pro-independence coalition Junts pel Sí (Together for Yes) for the 2015 Catalan election (Junts pel Sí, 2015). Junts pel Sí was integrated by ERC and one of the parties that formed the disappeared CiU, Convergència Democrática de Catalunya (CDC).
We used as a reference the audience surveys produced three times a year by the AIMC (Asociación para la Investigación de los Medios de Comunicación – Association for Mass Media Research) (http://reporting.aimc.es/index.html#/main/diarios, accessed 26/04/2020).
The watershed between both editorial lines was marked by the replacement of the newspapers’ director in December 2013, who two years later founded a new pro-independence newspaper (see “La Vanguardia cambia de director para descolgarse del proceso soberanista”, Eldiario.es, 13/12/2013, available at https://www.eldiario.es/politica/Vanguardia-director-descolgarse-proceso-soberanista_0_206829738.html (accessed 01/06/2020)).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Luis de la Calle, Guillermo Rico, all the participants in the Working Group 3 of the PROSEPS COST Action, as well as the reviewers and editors at European Political Science, for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.
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Real-Dato, J., Rodríguez-Teruel, J., Martínez-Pastor, E. et al. The triumph of partisanship: political scientists in the public debate about Catalonia’s independence crisis (2010–2018). Eur Polit Sci 21, 37–57 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-021-00341-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-021-00341-x