Drixler and Matsuzaki’s “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan” (2024) addresses a puzzling empirical phenomenon: how could Japan’s high-capacity Meiji state allow pervasive infanticide to persist under the guise of stillbirths, and even record it statistically without intervention? The article challenges standard accounts of state-society relations by offering an interpretive theory of "façade fictions" - a mode of performative politics that reconciles conflicting normative orders through tacit cooperation rather than coercion. Drawing on Japanese notions of omote (façade), naibun (interior), and naishō (tacit agreement), the authors develop a novel framework that decenters state control and instead emphasizes negotiated autonomy within the household. Their counterintuitive finding, that falsified statistics were not signs of state weakness but expressions of a collaborative political settlement, forces a rethinking of state building, capacity, and legitimacy. Methodologically, the paper exemplifies interpretive political analysis through its close reading of silences, spatial metaphors, and semantic practices in archival and statistical records, offering a model for how deeply contextual cultural concepts can generate translatable theoretical insights.

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.