Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award Honorable Mention 2025: Tamir Moustafa, for "Political Science as a Dependent Variable.”

Honorable Mention: Tamir Moustafa (Simon Fraser University) (2024), for "Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline." Perspectives on Politics, 1-21.

Tamir Moustafa

Tamir Moustafa’s article reconstructs the transformation of American political science over the 20th century, arguing that the discipline must be understood as a product of political and institutional forces. Drawing on a dataset of nearly three thousand NSF-funded projects over the 55-year life of the political science program, alongside APSA’s historical records, the article documents how material forces shaped knowledge production. The analysis reveals the NSF’s instrumental role in mainstreaming behavioralism, formal modeling, and statistical methods, while marginalizing non-positivist approaches. It shows that work advancing normative, critical, or interpretive perspectives received virtually no support. The article demonstrates that the ascendance of scientism in political science was not simply the result of intellectual evolution, but of concrete decisions by gatekeeping institutions and the active policing of disciplinary boundaries. The long-term effect was a narrowing of what counted as valid knowledge and the silencing of critical and interpretive approaches. By exposing the historically contingent and politically structured nature of the field’s methodological commitments, Moustafa’s article presents a powerful call for a more reflexive and inclusive vision of political science.

Committee Members:

Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS University of London, Chair)

Martha Belaguera Cuervo (University of Toronto)

Egor Lazarev (Yale University)