Political Science and the Internet Author(s): Max Kaase Reviewed work(s): Source: International Political Science Review

/ Revue internationale de science politique, Vol. 21, No. 3, CyberPolitics in International Relations. CyberPolitique et relations internationales (Jul., 2000), pp. 265-282 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1601236 . Accessed: 02/03/2013 17:52
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review(2000), Vol 21, No. 3, 265-282 InternationalPoliticalScience

Political Science and the Internet

MAXKAASE

ABSTRACT. The Gutenberg invention of printing has been a major precondition for the development of present-day science and the science system. With this historical analogue as a starting point, the article addresses the present and future impact of the emergence of electronic communication networks as epitomized by the Internet and the World Wide Web on the future organization and operation of the science system, including political science and the effects that can already be found in the science system. The analysis finds that the impact of electronic communication is already strongly felt in the "hard"sciences, but much less so in the humanities and social sciences, although its potential there is also large. Electronic communication is a field where the social sciences should engage much more in research than is presently done. Electronicpublishing * Informationtechnology * Internet * Social Keywords: sciencesystem

The Gutenberg Galaxy at the Crossroads

The agent of changewill be the Internet,both literally and as a model or The Internetis interestingnot only as a massive and pervasive metaphor. global
network but also as an example of something that has evolved with no apparent

designerin charge,keepingits shapeverymuch like the formationof a flowof ducks.Nobodyis the boss, and all the pieces are so farscalingadmirably (Negroponte,1995:181). Electronicpublications are likelyto become an essentialcharacteristic of the work of scholars. environment Those who adaptwillflourish;thosewho resistare likely to be left behind in the dust (acob, 1996:208). There is little disagreement in the literature that the multimedia emergence thriving on microchips, electronic networking, and on the digitalization of all PoliticalScienceAssociation 0192-5121(2000/07) 21:3,265-282;013085? 2000 International SAGE Publications(London,ThousandOaks,CA and New Delhi)

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

266

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

kinds of messages-be they audio, visual, audiovisual or print-because of its farreaching, penetrating effects constitutes a true cultural revolution. Biuhl (1995: 51) is mindful of the fact that the largest library before printing-located in Alexandria-contained the wisdom of the world on half a million ancient rolls of script; today, there are thousands of libraries, each of which holds more information. Fruihwald (1997; 1998), in stating the end of the Gutenberg galaxy, reflects both on the socio-cultural and the technological conditions which made that galaxy blossom, as well as on the consequences for science of its emergence. He emphasizes that in medieval times, before Gutenberg, it was not the individual author, but the "productivewriter"who was at the center of the written culture. The keepers of the flame were the cloisterers, the dominant language of the intelligentsia was Latin, and the couple of hundred books a medieval library possessed were reproduced by hand (Kaltwasser,1997: 13). From those days the German verb verballhornen originates, referring to the "productive writer"Johann book" let a rooster Ballhorn, who in the sixteenth century in copying an "ABC an and the claimed intellectual produce egg property rights to this imaginative change by noting "embellished and improved by Johann Ballhorn" (Fruhwald, 1998: 316). Given this situation before printing, the Gutenberg invention certainly can also be called a cultural revolution. It effectively challenged the dominance of the Latin language by permitting regional languages their representation and by thus pulling into the social communication process parts of the populace who for sheer language reasons had been previously kept out, although illiteracy remained a limiting factor for quite some time. But there was also a major impact of printing on science, as Fruhwald, based on Elisabeth Eisenstein's (1979) work, points out. The multiplication of printed products led to their standardization and to the need to clearly define their identity. A printed statement gained a special, enhanced authority over the spoken or handwritten word; at the same time, printing gave handwritten documents the dignity of the original. Printing became a technology devoid of a special intellectual quality; printing "invented"the role of the author, and with it the emphasis on intellectual property and on copyrights; and printing, with its growth of scholarly output, invented for the science system the logic of peer review, which challenged the "natural" authority of printed scientific material. Among the main factors making the Gutenberg invention so consequential in the long run were, in the nineteenth century, the development of powerful printing presses for mass production and also the technical process by which paper became abundant and at the same time affordable, a prerequisite for mass printing. Affordable, of course, at that time did not imply that books were to be found in every household. Rather, books belonged to the social and cultural elites, and it is not by chance that the rising social groups struggling for recognition around the turn of the nineteenth century created a broad variety of cultural offerings for their growing memberships, including book clubs which made it at least possible for working class households to own such a commodity (as well as giving access to the writings of working class protagonists like Marx, Engels, Kautsky,and others). Without specifying the complex set of factors and their interaction determining the growth of science since the eighteenth century as a societal subsystem with its own rules and procedures, literacy as a result of the rise in mass education, the economics of industrial society, and the logic of rationality as a consequence of the

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

267

Enlightenment have all contributed to the development of the science system as it now stands. One of its key features remains its disciplinary organization with special internal cognitive and social hierarchies (Nowotny, 1999: 67). However, the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial, knowledge-based society (Kaase, 1999), particularly in the OECD countries, is challenging this disciplinary orientation, and again a variety of interacting factors has triggered this challenge: the enormous economic growth after the end of World War II, with the ensuing explosion of investment in institutions of higher learning; the disciplinary differentiation of the science system after an initial phase of increasing resources, which now begins to overcome disciplinary boundaries; the acceleration of all social processes through new means of mass communication (telegraph, telephone, fax, electronic mass media, travel); the growing understanding of the complexity and interrelatedness of problems in modern societies, leading to a shift from linear to nonlinear scientific thinking; and the resulting change from discipline-oriented to problem-oriented research agendas-what Gibbons et al. (1994) describe as the transition from mode 1 to mode 2 knowledge production. These processes have developed over some time; the question to be taken up here is to what extent the new information and communication technologies such as the Internet have left their individual marks on the science system and whether political science as a discipline is also affected by them. While in the long run these changes will have a worldwide impact, they are presently most visible in the OECD countries. Accordingly, I will concentrate on these countries. The Economic Dimension of Information and Communication Technology Latzer (1997) has analyzed in detail the elements in and conditions for the emergence of the information or knowledge society. He describes two major steps in the process: (1) the fusion of telecommunication and computing since the 1970s into telematics, and (2) the fusion of telematics and the electronic media (radio and television) into mediamatics, which will result in a broad variety of multimedia services. This development has been triggered both by technological innovations (the microchip and electronic networking, to name just two), and by a reduced role for the state, especially in Europe, in framing the telecommunications sector. In the German case this is indicated by the establishment of private radio and television since the mid-1980s (dualization), and by the opening up of the telecommunication market to competition in the context of the EU's initiative on "Europe's Way to the Information Society" which, starting in January 1998, has cleared the way for economic competition in this area (Kaase, 1999: 529-531). The EU's emphasis on fostering the "Information Society" shows the economic and political importance assigned by the European Commission to ICT.According to a publication of the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF, 1999), the G7-marketturnover for ICT products was worth about 2.3 billion DM in 1996. In terms of the world market, in 1997 the United States had a 35 percent share, Europe a 30 percent share and Japan a 14 percent share; this leaves the rest of the world with 21 percent (Kaase 1999: 540), thereby emphasizing the role of the us-Europe-Japan "triad" for that market (see Latzer, 1997: 88-94 for further details). Almost everyone working in this field agrees that ICTis an important, probably

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

268

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

TABLE1. Multimedia Market1992-96 in G7 Countries (in billioneuros).

Market Elements

Years 1992 in billioneuros % 90 176 12.2 22.4 30.1

35.3 100

1996 in billioneuros % 140 266 369

392 1167

Percentage points change +41 +51 +56

+42 +49

Construction elements MMend products(suchas consumerelectronics)

12.0 22.8 31.6

33.6 100

(mobilephones, Networking datacommunication) 277 Content(suchas software,

games, Pay Tv;CD-ROMs) Total 237 780

Source: German Federal Ministryof Education and Research (BMBF,1999) http://www.iid.de/bah/BAH_zusammenfassung.html

the most important, growth market in the future for products and services in postindustrial societies. It is difficult to find reliable longitudinal statistics on that market because definitions differ of who and what belongs or does not belong in it. According to the above BMBFpublication, a comparison of various elements in the multimedia market shows an unmistakable growth potential, with an average 10 to 11 percentage points annual increase (see Table 1). However, these dynamics must not be misread as an indication that ICT is already contributing massivelyto the gross national product in the G7 countries; its share is still below 10 percent. On the other hand, studies have shown that the growth of the telecommunications market is an important incentive for overall economic growth (Kaase, 1999: 540-541). The impact of ICTon the labor market is similarly multifaceted. Not the least because in many European countries telecommunications was for years in the hands of the state as a monopoly, privatization and growth of ICT have at best led to a neutral balance in employment effects, and often in fact to an initial reduction in overall employment through market-induced rationalization. Only as new services develop can a positive employment balance of ICT be expected. These findings show that the revolution, with the Internet as the epitome of ICT and multimedia, is just beginning, although at a tremendous pace. Given the anticipated pervasiveness of this development in the state, for business and in private homes, it should surprise no one that the process is accompanied, like globalization, with many hopes, but with at least as many fears (see for instance Dertouzos, 1997; Webster, 1995). The speed of these changes makes it difficult to assess their consequences for the social, cultural and political order (for a collection of ambivalent voices see Leggewie and Maar, 1998). Dertouzos, similarly to Negroponte (1995), with slight reservations offers a very positive vision: ... these imperatives to reuniteour humanity withour technologyare not easy tasks,because they call for wholesale change in human thinking and in a behaviorthathas takenhold of us for severalcenturies.It will takegreateffort

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

269

and perseveranceto undergo these changes.But it's worthit. Unified, we shall thrustourselvesand our world forwardin waysthat will satisfyand pay tribute to the newwholes thatwe willbe. Then this new Age of Unificationwill rejoinwithin us faith, reason, nature, and humanity,paving the way for the Fourth Revolution, beyond human artifactsand their consequences, aimed inward at understandingourselves (Dertouzos,1997:316). The Internet It would be interesting to look in detail at how the Internet came about; this cannot and must not be done here. What is probably most telling is that the initial concept, in particular its decentralized structure, was developed for the us Department of Defense and other related agencies. Its genesis was systematically integrated by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and its Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). The resulting and is generally regarded electronic communication network was called ARPANET as the first forerunner to the Internet (for details see Dertouzos, 1997: 35-43; Cailliau, 1998; Leib and Werle, 1998). The Internet is characterized by its decentralization (this was a core feature especially for military use, to make it less vulnerable to external attack) and by the fact that it is used by commercial and scientific institutions as well as by private citizens. It is a network linking computers with each other; these host computers individually permit access to the Internet for a large number of other computers, and estimates by the American "Network Wizards" were that in January of 1997 1998: 12-15). about 16 million Internet hosts existed worldwide (see also OECD, While the terms "Internet"and the "WorldWide Web" (www or 3w) have come to be publicly used almost synonymously, they are not at all the same thing: "... think of the Internet as a postal system for shipping raw information among the world's computers. And think of the Web as a specific way of using this system to view and visit information on distant sites by clicking your mouse" (Dertouzos, 1997: 18). Caillau (1998) has described the genesis of the World Wide Web, which he designed with Tim Berners-Lee for CERN(Centre Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire, near Geneva) as a network-hypertext project for the field of highenergy physics. After CERNin 1991 offered the first "Line-mode" browser for the Internet free of charge, more and more institutional users became interested in the technology, and in 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); by the end of 1997 it had almost 250 members (Dertouzos, 1997: 6). This consortium is responsible for all www regulations. One of the properties of the www is its hypertext capability, which easily directs users from one website to another through links. What is increasingly important for the science system at large and also for the social sciences is the possibility to integrate multimedia, text, and static graphic displays such as photographs and tables, as well as dynamic visual presentations and sound. (This capability of the www is, for instance, more and more used by television stations, which put complete offerings such as newscasts on the Net on a regular basis.) For the humanities it will become very attractive to join textual, audio, and visual information, thereby opening up completely new avenues for scholarly analysis and reproducibility of findings by other researchers, as in content analysis of visual information.

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

270

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

Given the attractiveness of such Internet services, its novelty, the growing ease of usage through browsers and search machines, and the ever-decreasing hardware cost, it is little wonder that at least in the OECD countries the Internet has become a widespread commodity, estimates pointing to a magnitude of about 160 million users in 1999. In the science system, for quite the same reasons Internet access has become, again at least in the OECDcountries, almost universal (OECD 1998: 12-15); in fact, the coverage is so widespread that presently new, improved technologies are designed to make Internet use more efficient in time, potential, and cost. These include Internet 2; Very High Speed Network Backbone Service Next Generation Internet (NGI);Trans-European Network (TEN34); and (VBNS); national networks like the German "Breitband-Wissenschaftsnetz" and Super-Janet in the United Kingdom (OECD, 1998: 15-17). However, one of the problems here is that, very similar to the knowledge gap hypothesis in mass communication research (Bonfadelli, 1994), there are obvious disparities in access by scholars in different parts of the world to this resource (UNESCO, 1999). In this context, another problem also surfaces which is very consequential for international scholarly discourse, namely that the predominance of English on the Internet not only requires language capabilities but also forces a certain way of languagerelated thinking onto a broad variety of national scholarly cultures. The Internet, Multimedia, and the Science System General Considerations In the section on the Gutenberg galaxy, it was argued that the invention of printing not only led to deep cultural and social changes, but was also instrumental in the emergence of the social subsystem of science as it is known at the end of the twentieth century, and that the emergence of new information and communication technologies (ICT)is, jointly with other factors, contributing to an acceleration of social processes; whereas a letter from Europe to the United States, even when sent air mail, used to take up to two weeks for delivery, an e-mail exchange between, say, British and American scholars can now go back and forth many times during a single day. Acceleration is mentioned here also for a more systematic reason. Given the speed of the ICTdevelopments, the question is whether they have already been subjected to systematic social research, especially with respect to their eventual effects on the structure of the science system at large and of individual disciplines. This question would require a much more detailed search than is possible for this article; checks in libraries and with scholars competent in this field seem to indicate, however, that results of systematic research on this topic are not yet available (Wiest, 1998: 299). The Growthof Science and of ScientificInformation Growth and differentiation are the main factors characterizing the development of education and science in the contemporary OECD countries. For instance, in West Germany the percentage of youth formally qualified for a university education rose from 5.6 percent in 1960 to 27.8 percent in 1988, and university staff grew between 1970 and 1980 by 46 percent. It is argued that with the numeric growth of the science system its output of research findings and publications to

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

271

carry them to the community of scholars has necessarily followed suit (in fact in an exponential curve: see de Solla Price, 1974: 13-42). Coakley and Doyle (1996), for example, come up with a list of more than 300 political science journals published in Europe in 1995. Unfortunately, there is no longitudinal analysis available of how these numbers developed over the last 40 years, but there is every reason to assume that the increase after 1945 is not equally distributed over the whole span of time but was concentrated in the last 20 years. Clearly, it is impossible for any individual political scientist in Europe to become familiar with the content of all of those European political science journals, not to speak of important related fields like sociology, economics, mass communication, and social psychology, nor those pertinent political science journals published outside of Europe, such as the AmericanPolitical ScienceReviewor the American However, there are at least three other structural Journal of PoliticalScience. limitations to be considered when it comes to coping with information growth. First, it is common knowledge by now that university libraries can no longer afford to buy all the journals on the market for the various disciplines; thus, choices have to be made, and access in many instances becomes, if not impossible, at least time-consuming and cumbersome (as through the inter-university library loan system). Secondly, while it may be impossible to familiarize oneself with all the articles published in the journals of the relevant discipline-the problem of the vastly increasing number of monographs and edited volumes is not addressed for the time being-it is at least conceivable to look at the tables of contents (this has been effected the hard way by some institutions of higher learning which routinely supply researchers with this photocopied information; however, the Internet here is opening up new, faster options). Then there is, thirdly, the language problem, especially in Europe, with its cultural, social, and political diversity. Many European political scientists who publish only in their own language have found that, however relevant their research may be for the discipline, native English speakers and writers in their field often ignore their findings when published in languages other than English. This problem is reinforced by the fact that the language capabilities and inclination of many native English-speakers regarding other languages are, to put it politely, usually quite limited. This is the reason why in Europe professional journals over the years have increasingly decided to publish either all or some articles in English, or are at least have discussed such a transition. Some of those problems, depending on the specific context, are either enhanced or partly resolved through the digitalization of information and through modern electronic networking, which lead to the increasing availabilityof information at the researcher's workplace. Is ThereAnything Special About the Social Sciences? When it comes to the impact of ICT on the science system, one particular example is routinely put forward: the E-Print-Archive Forum of The American Physical Society, which (with its associated Los Alamos National Laboratory Preprint server) was pioneered by Paul Ginspang at Los Alamos in the field of high-energy physics almost a decade ago (Wiest, 1998: 286-287). The total number of admissions to the archive in April 1999 had gone beyond 100 000, and Figure 1 shows that since the start of the archive in 1991 the number of monthly submissions has increased continuously and regularly.

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

272 3000

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

J
J JJ

2000
j a

1500
J

J
a

1000

500

-A

J a
2

Last 103months '00total = 123,286) (7 Feb

(Number of new submissions received during each month since August 1991). Source: http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions

FIGURE 1. MonthlySubmission Rate Statistics,E-Print-Archive

Thus, a major impact on high-energy physics of the new mode of scholarly communication is obvious. However, the fact that at this website preprints are made available at the time of submission reflects very much the specialty of working with a limited number of expensive instruments and therefore cannot be generalized across other fields (OECD, 1998: 54; the OECD describes in detail the impact of ICT on a variety of fields especially in the natural sciences). But what about the social sciences? Hobohm (1999), in his analysis of social science information and documentation for UNESCO'S World Social Science Report 1999, gives various reasons why ICT as of now has not become as consequential for the social sciences as for other disciplines. Probably the most important point made in his chapter is that the social sciences are not cumulative and at the same time selective, as are other fields: they lack the generally accepted scholarly criteria by which research findings, such as in the natural sciences, can be eliminated if according to the present state of the discipline they are no longer valid (see also Kaltwasser, 1997: 14). Thus, in the social sciences not only is there an information overload, but there is also an element of arbitrariness immanent in scholarly debates: in principle, anything goes. Nor are there institutionalized penalties for ignoring previous evidence and research, and so the accumulation of knowledge is slow and cumbersome, if it takes place at all. A problem here is that social phenomena are so diverse that it is difficult to aim for and to achieve the kind of theory-based generalized knowledge known from the natural sciences (Mayntz, 1995). How have social scientists tried to cope with the increasing problem of information overload? Based on his research, Hobohm (1999) argues that many social scientists (this is apparently even more true for the humanitiesGeisteswissenschaften) start their research with the information available in their

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

273

immediate surroundings, even if this is only their own personal collection of books, articles, and papers. Those are convenient to use, familiar, and often assembled according to the research specialties a scholar has established over the years. For the reasons given above, there is little incentive in the humanities and in the social sciences to give up these traditional ways of collecting information, even if more and more resources to ease access and to broaden the knowledge base become available. In part, this is still a resource problem (Hrachovec, 1996: 377; UNESCO, 1999); in the literature one also frequently finds the argument that their more competent and easy-going approach to the new resources of the younger scholars will enhance their position vis-a-visthe older scholars and will in the long run, at least to a certain degree, reduce status differences in the science system (seeJacob, 1996: 208; Schmitz, 1997: 87; OECD, 1998: 24; Wiest, 1998: 292). One development that may well accelerate the use of ICT services in the humanities and social sciences is the multimedia properties of the World Wide Web (Hrachovec, 1996: 382-383). Its capability to integrate textual, audio, and visual information is likely to change the presentation of research on cultural, social, and political phenomena in a basic fashion. Qualitative analysis of written texts derived from oral history reports, as is traditionally done, or integrating audiovisual reports into a published document, will not only give flavor and substance to an argument but will also at the same time help to evaluate critically the interpretations and conclusions derived from such material. This example is a very simple one in the wide array of integrated, complex presentations of research findings. In sum, then, there seems to be no question even regarding the social sciences, that ICT and the resulting services provided by public institutions like libraries, academic data archives, and commercial firms will at least revolutionize access to information and to data, and will even change the structure and makeup of some fields of research. Whether these trends at some time in the future will also have an impact on the social sciences, either positive or negative, must at this time remain an open question. The most serious argument against better research quality based on more information and easily accessible data is, as mentioned in the beginning of this section, the lack of criteria for eliminating outdated theoretical approaches and faulty data and empirical findings; there is every reason to believe that information overload under such circumstances will immobilize researchers if they do not become even more selective-which in many instances may mean more idiosyncratic-in their choice of material. One way out of this dilemma for the scholarly associations is to create a reward system for scientists who at regular intervals do stock-taking studies of research in special subfields of social science disciplines; such studies could enormously profit from the availability of recent, reliable, and reasonably complete information (Wissenschaftsrat, 1992: 32-33, 47). What's Going On Right Now? The 1998 OECD report scrutinizes a variety of topics, among them the communication between scientists and the eventual emergence of new, IcT-induced kinds of research collaboration, as well as the educational system, with particular emphasis on the universities. These points will be only briefly discussed here because they are not central to our main topic, ICT'S impact on the social sciences, and on political science in particular. The change in the market for printed

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

274

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

products, especially the digitalization of scholarly journals for online publishing and the emergence of electronic journals, is our main focus, to be examined in greater depth below. Communicationand CollaborationbetweenScholars. There is no question that communication among scholars has been eased and intensified by the e-mail facility of the Internet. According to OECD (1998: 12), by 1994 in the United States 75 percent of the sociologists and 67 percent of the political scientists in universities communicated through e-mail. This percentage in the United States has certainly increased since then, and while no precise figures exist for the OECD countries, it can be safely assumed that there, too, e-mail is now widely used for scholarly communication, for sending and receiving data to speed up collaboration in empirical research projects, for writing co-authored papers within as well as across countries and continents, and for simply exchanging notes which were previously sent out as letters. An interesting question is, to what extent has electronic mail measurably speeded up research and improved scholarly cooperation across universities and other research sites? To generalize from personal experience and from the observation of colleagues, the effects of electronic communication are substantial and mostly positive. This is buffered by data indicating that between 1981 and 1991 in the United States, in the natural sciences and in engineering, international collaborative publications increased on the average from 8.8 percent to 11 percent (OECD,1998: 20; unfortunately, the document fails to establish the causal link between network access and use and enhanced international coauthorships. Furthermore, the argument rests on the assumption that international co-authorship per se is a good thing). Especially in the natural sciences, ICT networks have obviously enhanced systematic cooperation between research sites and laboratories in research. This has resulted in "a new form of scientific work... the 'extended research group.' This is typically a large, unified, cohesive, co-operative research group that is geographically dispersed, yet co-ordinated as if it were at one location and under the guidance of a single director. It provides access to colleagues and to equipment, software and data bases that are traditionally part of laboratory organisation, without regard to geography" (OECD,1998: 19, 44-46). The virtual arrangements are called collaboratories, or centers without walls, and have become effective, indispensable research structures, for instance in atmospheric and space science, biology, chemistry, medicine, and physics. How these collaboratories actually operate and what their assets are, as well as their potential pitfalls, has not yet been demonstrated by empirical research, other than what happens when private companies link laboratories across countries (Brockhoff, 1998). Brockhoff demonstrates that both the linkage and its study are rather complex matters which do not lend themselves easily to explication. To what extent ICT has stimulated national and particularly international cooperation in social science research is difficult to say, since this kind of research meets many obstacles on other than technical grounds; it will require more time and systematic observation to reliably assess this matter. However, there is no question that ICThas considerably eased cooperation in general, especially with regard to joint publications by scholars in different locations.
Teaching in Universities and Beyond. By the mid-1990s ICT had started to influence

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

275

the shape of teaching at universities. According to a 1995 survey conducted at all German universities by the Conference of German University Rectors, at that time in about half of all disciplines some ICT was in use for teaching, and many of the universities planned to increase their ICT teaching resources (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, 1996; 1997). These reports also note a great deal of variance among universities and disciplines in ICT application for teaching and student use, with political science holding the sixth lowest position among 35 disciplines (much lower than psychology, economics, and sociology). Certainly, these data reflect but one point in time, and one would need a detailed comparative analysis of the role ICT is now playing in university training to come to a valid assessment of the situation. Also, universities in the mid-1990s seemed to be in the phase of innovation diffusion, where much depended on individuals and groups who engaged in ICT implementation and use (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, 1996: 8; OECD 1998: 58; this factor should at least in part explain the observed variances among universities and disciplines). But data from the United States indicate that there ICT use in teaching is in the process of becoming firmly established on the educational agenda, as shown by Table 2. On a different dimension of education, ICTwill probably become even more important for distance teaching and virtual universities than for on-location teaching. As OECD (1998: 62-64) observes, in the long run the "virtualclassroom" bears the promise not only of higher cost-effectiveness, but also of higher resulteffectiveness because of the interactive and self-instruction multimedia potential of ICT. For instance, more and more distance-teaching takes place in medicine, where for example young scholars around the world can participate audio-visually in complicated operations performed by first-rate teachers in first-rate medical centers. There is no reason why an equivalent approach to distance-teaching should not be possible for the social sciences. Furthermore, while OECD notes quite a few differences in the use of distanceteaching in Europe, the existing open universities are increasingly applying ICT for their teaching (for the German Fernuniversitat Hagen see Schlageter and Mittrach, 1999). Finally, ICT distance-teaching is bound to open up new avenues for helping effectively to achieve the goal of life-long learning, a goal that has been consensually put on their political agendas by the OECD countries. In sum, ICT has already had a major effect on university teaching; variants of distance-teaching will spread further and will in the long run change the face of universities. With respect to political science, especially regarding empirical research, sooner or later ICT's effects on teaching, too, will be felt. Whether the basic structure of the discipline will also be affected is not quite as clear. The same, however, cannot be said for the next topic to be discussed: publishing. Electronic Publishing.Online publishing opens up direct access to a broad variety of pertinent information for scientists through electronic networks and powerful personal computers; offline publishing, in which information is stored on CDROMS, while easing access to and usability of information, is clearly secondary to online publishing in its impact on the science system. In an article in the German newsmagazine Die Zeit, Zimmer (1997) stated that for German university libraries about 20 000 scholarly journals were relevant. The Bavarian Regensburg University in a pilot project has assembled electronic information from 43 libraries on about 6 200 journals, among them 110 in

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

276

International PoliticalScience Review21(3) TABLE 2. Results (in percent). from the USSurveyof IT Usein HigherEducation 1994 1995 1996 43.4 28.1 1997 48.4 28.9

Planning Strategic plan for role of IT Financial plan for IT purchase and replacement1 Technology use Proportion of courses using IT resources E-mail Computer classrooms Computer simulations/exercises Presentation handouts Commercial courseware Multimedia resources
CD-ROMbased material www pages

22.0

22.0

8.0 16.0 9.0 15.1 11.0 4.0 4.0

Internet resources

20.1 24.0 14.0 25.7 18.5 8.4 9.0 6.2 10.9

25.0 24.0 14.4 28.4 18.5 11.0 8.9 9.2 15.3

32.8 22.6 14.5 33.0 16.9 13.4 11.4 24.0 24.8

In institutions: www and Internet On site Plan for use in instruction Plan for use in distance education Plan for use for off-campus promotion (marketing) Recognizing IT in tenure & promotion committees Mandatory IT requirement for all students2 Considering Internet2 access essential by 1999 Universities 2- and 4-year colleges Single most important IT issue confronting institution over the next 2-3 years Assisting faculty to integrate IT into instrumentation Providing adequate user support Enhancing/expanding user networks Financing the replacement of hardware & software Using ITeffectively in distance education Providing universal access to the Internet Mandatory technology/computer fee for students Campus systems connected to the network 1. 15.1in 1990. 2. 31.4 in 1992.
Source: OECD (1998: 59).

55.2 24.4 12.5 38.1 33.1

79.4 30.1 17.5 56.8 12.2 40.0

34.2 24.8 58.3 12.2 40.3 >50 <33

27.3 24.1 17.6 17.4 4.1 5.8 28.3 62.5 36.9 70.8

29.6 25.0 11.8 20.4 11.8 3.4 38.5 81.1

political science. Here, for about one-third of these journals the content is fully accessible without charge; the remaining two-thirds can only be accessed through a special account. However, based on the analysis by Coakley and Doyle (1996), in Europe alone more than 300 political science journals are regularly produced. Taking the Regensburg data base as a paradigmatic case, this indicates that using electronic university library services does not at all cover the complete journal production in a given field. Therefore, trying to access journals electronically either through

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

277

publishers' websites (which, of course, offer only their own journals) or through organizations like ECO (Electronic Collections Online, with 2 211 titles available for online research as of August 1999; of those 28 were in political science) is a useful addition to such searches (Luther, 1997). If one considers that in 1995 and in 1996 only a little more than 10 percent of the political science journals published in Europe were available with complete or some information online (Coakley and Doyle 1996; 1997), it is clear, though, that we have not yet reached the point where complete information on all journal publications is reliably and quickly available through the Net-at least not in political science, although making this information more and more accessible electronically is certainly an ongoing process. Up to this point online publishing for journals has been considered under the assumption that both an electronic and a printed version of a journal are produced by the publisher. In this sense access to journals is primarily a matter of resources, completeness of information, ease and speed. As was mentioned before, however, ICTis growing in importance given the fact that journals have become so numerous and expensive that libraries can no longer afford to have complete holdings (OECD, 1998: 51). The cost factor in particular has triggered a vivid discussion in the United States, and, among other implications, in 1998 led to the establishment of "The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition" see Johnson, 1999) which in particular participates in the us discussion to (SPARC; move scholarly publication away from the publishing industry and back into the university system and to individual scholars (Jacob, 1996: 206-207; this consideration is generalized in Arnold's [1995] criticism of present university press practices to books and monographs). This is not the place to go deeper into these debates; the point is that such initiatives would not have been possible without the spread of ICT. One important aspect of online processing which will in the future become even more important, is the emergence of the e-journal: an electronic journal without printed versions, such as the aforementioned E-Print Forum of The American Physical Society. In the natural sciences, in medicine, and in engineering research findings are often so consequential for other research and for practical applications in society that long delays from submitting a paper to a journal, getting it accepted, and finally getting it printed are simply intolerable. While scholars in the humanities and the social sciences frequently suffer from the same squeeze, it appears that they are much more lenient in this matter than scientists from the "hard"sciences. The question, however, is, whether turning to ejournals will solve the time-lag problem. In an expert study for the OECD, Kling and McKim (1997) analyzed various scenarios to assess how much was gained in time when the production process for scientific journals was speeded up through electronic networking. The results of this analysis deserve full representation (see Table 3). What first catches the eye is the large variance the authors found in the time required for packaging and production of a journal issue before printing. The OECDreport does not comment on those differences, which obviously hold a high potential for acceleration through online publishing by, for instance, giving up the concept of having to produce complete packages to fill a journal issue. There is also some potential for shortening the peer review process electronically, but this is much smaller than one might have expected. In sum, ICT does not matter a lot for online publishing as long as the standard features of scientific journals-peer

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

278

International PoliticalScience Review21(3) TABLE 3. TheSpeedof Scientific Communication underDifferent Scenarios' (in days).
Conven- Courier E-mail tional scenario attachment scenario scenario Electronic Pure electronic journal, packaging with individual articles 2 47-77 30-120 2 47-77 0 Pre-print system, article sent at time of acceptance 2 47-77 0 Pre-print system, article sent at time of submission 2 0 0

journal, with issue

Transmission of manuscript2 Peer review3 Journal issue packaging4

10 63-93 30-120

4 51-81 30-120

2 47-77 30-120

Journal
production Delivery of

20-80
5

20-80
5

20-80
5

20-80
1

4
1

0
1

0
1

journal5 Total 128-308 107-287 104-284 100-280 54-84 50-80 3

the sending of an article by the author to ajournal and its delivery in published form to the author. The scenarios assume that the paper is accepted by the chosen journal. 2. This combines the time from author to the editor, and that from the editor to the production manager. 3. This measures the time between the editor's receipt of the manuscript and its acceptance. 4. This is the time taken by the journal editor to produce a sufficient package of articles and send them to production. 5. This measures the time it takes for a subscriber-or the author-to receive the final journal issue. OECD Source: (1998: 53).

1. The tableshowsan illustrative scenarioof the impactof electronicpublishing on the timebetween

review and issue packaging-are maintained. By far most attractive is a situation like that in high-energy physics, where a preprint system is effected, with publication at the time of submission. This, of course, raises the principal question of the scholarly control over output from the science system which has been an essential condition for the emergence of modern science; here the system of peer review comes to the fore. For most of those who argue in principle in favor of positive effects of the ICT revolution on the science system, the fears frequently voiced in view of these changes are overstating the case: "The emphatic insistence on qualities of the traditional, customary operation of science emphasizes the role of martyrdom just as the media philosophers assume the role of prophets.... But also offers the chance to crusted institutions. Nothing justifies networking bypass the presumption that unconventional interventions and unqualified contributions signal the end of serious research" (Hrachovec, 1996: 380, 385 [translation M.K]; see alsoJacob, 1996; Wiest 1998: 292-293). While this optimism may be well-founded, a look at the growth of e-journals, peer-reviewed or not, provides at least some justification for those who have expressed concerns in this matter. In its 1997 edition (the most recent one available at the time of this writing) of the Directory of ElectronicJournals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists put together by the Association of Research Libraries

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

PoliticalScienceand theInternet KAASE: TABLE 4. ElectronicJournals (1999). Fields Peer-reviewed abs. % 334 81.3 (75.6)a 18.7 (63.1)
-

279

Student-reviewed Non-reviewed abs. abs. % % 7 9 43.8 (1.6) 101 36 73.7 (22.8)

All

Scientific/Technical/ Medical Humanities

Political science Sociology

442

77
2b 4c

56.2

(7.3)

26.3

(29.6)

122

Id

Total (a) Rowpercentages

411

(72.9)

16

(2.8) 137

(24.3)

564

Source: http://www.edoc.com/jrl-bin/wilma/hpr

(b) EducationPolicyAnalysisArchives, Journal of PoliticalEcology e Politica, Sociological Revistade Sociologia Research Online, Socioroute (c) ElectronicJournal of Sociology, (d) SocialScienceJapan

more than 1 400 electronic journals are listed, of which 69 percent are peer(ARL), reviewed. Unfortunately, the Directory does not distinguish between e-journals and journals available in both electronic and printed format. Another source for 1999 lists 564 pure e-journals, of which a little less than a quarter are not peerreviewed, with little difference between the hard sciences and the humanities. Thus, there may indeed exist an emerging element of the anticipated "junk" problem, but it is not signalling an erosion in e-journals of the peer review system, which is uniformly regarded as indispensable for acceptance by the scholarly community (see WeiBbach and Poy, 1995: 226-228; Jacob, 1996; Wiest 1998: 292-294). In addition, a 1996 analysis of the impact of selected e-journals indicated that it was negligible at the time although there was promise for the three e-journals scrutinized (Harter, 1996). Futhermore, if the data retrieved from the Net are valid, certainly no problem for political science lurks around the corner (see Table 4). Finally, as the high-energy physics case indicates, there might even be good reasons to set up a non-peer-reviewed e-journal. All available evidence points to the fact, however, that ICT has already changed the face of science publishing and will do so even more in the future. There is little reason to expect that these dynamics will not include publishing in political science, even if their impact has not yet been felt very much by political scientists around the world who are, as in other disciplines in the social sciences and world. humanities, notoriously slow to adapt to the new ICT In Lieu of a Conclusion In the summer of 1999 a respected German national newspaper (FAZ,1999) reported the following case. A Japanese customer had bought a Toshiba video recorder but again and again found the instrument not functioning properly. When he talked to the customer service of Toshiba on the phone, he was-in a departure from the famed Japanese politeness-even verbally attacked. Since the customer had taped the telephone conversation with the Toshiba employee, he
It is not easy to summarize the findings from this analysis of online publishing.

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

280

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

decided to design a Web page describing and documenting his case. Within one month, the Web page was addressed by interested users more than six million times. Toshiba then went to court, but was bombarded with complaints about its poor handling of the case by so many people on the company's website that they withdrew the court case and publicly apologized to the customer. This may sound like a slightly strange, irrelevant story. However, it very tellingly and signals the potential impact of the Internet on all areas of life. Regarding ICT the science system, the situation certainly is more variegated, but the main the science process has already been changed in many message is that through ICT ways and will in the future change even more dramatically,as more advanced ICT becomes available and scholars learn to fully exploit its potential. As this development is in flux, so is its evaluation by participating observers. In that respect, three points will be made here. First, ICT is not only interesting in its own right, but because of its potential impact on the science system also is a legitimate topic for the sociology of science and knowledge-research. The fact that the spread of ICTis taking place gradually and almost as a "normal" part of changing life circumstances may cloud the view of the long-term impact of this process and may in part explain why so far not much research seems to have been conducted on the matter. A pertinent analogy is the spread of television which was taken up as a research field only after the diffusion process had already come to an countries. Second, one question repeatedly raised is end, at least in the OECD whether electronic communication by computer and, as multimedia applications spread, through television screens, will lead to the end of printed products, which if true would be an obvious loss of cultural heritage. Here Riepl's "law" of complementarity may offer consolation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he had argued that throughout history no established mode of communication has ever completely disappeared, but-while adapting to circumstances-has always been complemented by the more recent modes (see also Schmitz, 1997: 85). Thus, it is difficult to imagine that printed products of the science process will ever be fully replaced by electronic equivalents. Third, the ICT revolution raises a wealth of new social questions, among them the problem of rising inequalities between those who can manage the new technologies and those who cannot; the impact on the political process, for instance through intranet party communication which strengthens the influence of the party centers on their periphery; on the organization of work places-the list is infinite. Returning to the science system and especially to political science, ICTmay in the long run indeed deterritorialize the science system, but only because it helps to deterritorialize the nation-state as the core entity which still, despite globalization, frames most of people's lives and also most of the scholarly work of political scientists. That the nation-state is presently challenged on many dimensions no one can seriously question, although it may have carried the argument a little too far when Jean-Marie Gu6henno (1994) relates the consequences of ICTto the end of democracy. Furthermore, it should be recalled that especially in Europe nation-states constitute the quasi-laboratory of institutional, social, and cultural diversity on which multi-level comparative political science thrives. Thus, while the Internet may have broken down many existing boundaries of communication in science, at least for a while it seems that ICTwill not deterritorialize political science.

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

KAASE: PoliticalScienceand theInternet

281

References
Arnold, K. (1995). "The Body in the Virtual Library: Rethinking Scholarly Communication." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 1(1). http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ works/arnold/body.html BMBF (1999). "Durchbruch Multimedia. Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich." http://www.iid.de/bah/BAH_zusammenfassung.html Massenmedien und gesellschaftliche Bonfadelli, H. (1994). Die Wissenskluftperspektive. Konstanz: Olschlager. Information. and Development. Berlin: Springer. Brockhoff, K. (1998). Internationalization of Research An der Schwellezur Informationsgesellschaft. und Technologie. Bihl, W.L. (1995). Wissenschaft G6ttingen: Verlag Otto Schwartz & Co. Cailliau, R. (1998). "ZurTechnikgeschichte des Internet. Stichworte eines Surf-Pioniers."In zur Beteiligungsdemokratie?, Internet& Politik. VonderZuschauer(C. Leggewie and C. Maar, eds), pp. 70-81. Koln: Bollmann. Coakley,J. andJ. Doyle (1996). "Developments in West European political science journal literature during 1995." European 29: 509-550. Journal of PoliticalResearch, Coakley,J. and J. Doyle. (1997). "Developments in West European political science journal and electronic literature during 1996." European 31: 533-555. Journal of PoliticalResearch, de Solla Price, DJ. (1974). LittleScience, zur Grofjforschung (first Big Science.VonderStudierstube published in English in 1963). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dertouzos, M. (1997). How theNew Worldof InformationWill ChangeOurLives. San Francisco: HarperEdge. and Cultural Eisenstein, E. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Communication in EarlyModernEurope(2 vols). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Transformations FAZ (FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung) (1999). "Ein defekter Videorekorder zwingt einen Konzern in die Knie", 18 August. an derSchwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Frfihwald, W. (1997). Zeitder Wissenschaft: Forschungskultur Koln: DuMont. Frfihwald, W. (1998). "Das Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis. Uber den EinfluB des Mediums auf den Inhalt wissenschaftlicher Publikationen." Leviathan,26: 305-318. Gibbons, M. et al. (1994). New Productionof Knowledge: Dynamics of Scienceand Researchin Societies. London: Sage. Contemporary Munchen: Artemis & Winkler. Guehenno,J.-M. (1994). Das Ende derDemokratie. Harter, S.P. (1996). "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, 7 (5). Analysis." http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5.html Hobohm, H.-C. (1999). "Social science information and documentation." In WorldSocial Science Report1999 (UNESCO),pp. 172-181. Paris: Elsevier. Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (1996). ModerneInformationsund Kommunikationstechnologien Dokumente zur Hochschulreform 111/1996. Bonn. (NeueMedien)in derHochschullehre. Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (1997). "Neue Medien in Lehre und Studium". Beitrdgezur 6/1997. Bonn. Hochschulpolitik Hrachovec, H. (1996). "Zweimal fiinf Prognosen zur Forschung in Computernetzen." Universitas.Zeitschriftfiir 51: 375-385. interdisziplindre Wissenschaft, 77: 204-209. Jacob, H. (1996). "The Future is Electronic." SocialScienceQuarterly, R.K. to Kostelnik and "SPARc Bensman." (1999). Johnson, replies http://www.lib.unc.edu/ prices/1999/PRIc218.html Kaase, M. (1999). "Deutschland als Informations- und Wissensgesellschaft." In Eine lernende Demokratie.50 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland. WZB-Jahrbuch 1999 (M. Kaase and G. Schmid eds), pp. 529-559. Berlin: Edition Sigma. 99: 12-19. Kaltwasser,F.G. (1997). "Ein Spielplatz namens Internet." Borsenblatt, Kling, R. and G. McKim (1997). "Electronic Media and Scientific Communication: Opportunities, Complexities and Limitations." OECD report, Indiana University School of Library and Information Science (September), mimeo.

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

282

International PoliticalScience Review21(3)

Latzer, M. (1997). Mediamatik-Die Konvergenz von Telekommunikation, Computerund Rundfunk.Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Leggewie, C. and C. Maar (eds) (1998). Internet& Politik. VonderZuschauer-zur BeteiligungsK6ln: Bollmann. demokratie? Leib, V. and R. Werle (1998). "Computernetze als Infrastrukturen und Kommunikationsmedien der Wissenschaft."Rundfunkund Fernsehen 46: 254-273. Luther, J. (1997). "Full Text Journal Subscriptions: An Evolutionary Process." http://www.arl.org:591/luther.html derSozialwissenschaft. und das Erkldrungspotential Mayntz, R. (1995). Historische Uberraschungen F. Bd. 9. C. Mfiller Universititsreden, Heidelberger Verlag. Heidelberg: Negroponte, N. (1995). Beingdigital.London: Hodder and Stoughton. Nowotny, H. (1999). Es ist so. Es kinnte auch anderssein. Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp. OECD(1998). "The Global Research Village: How Information and Communication scs/prod/ Technologies Affect the Science System."http://www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/s_t/ global.pdf Schlageter, G. and S. Mittrach (1999). "Der virtuelle Campus. Universitat im Internet." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,24 August. Schmitz, W. (1997). "Neue Medien und Universitat." Transit,13 (Summer): 82-93. UNESCO SocialScience Report1999. Paris:Elsevier. (1999). World London: Routledge. Webster,F. (1995). Theories of theinformation society. WeiBbach, H.-J., and A. Poy (1995). "Technische Vernetzung, funktionale Differenzierung Trends in der Gesellschaft und neue kulturelle Integrationsmuster."In Netz-Spannungen. von Arbeit (J. Fischer and S. Gensior, eds), pp. der sozialen und technischenVernetzung 213-234. Berlin: Edition Sigma. Wiest, G. (1998). "Elektronisches Publizieren in der Wissenschaftskommunikation." 46: 283-301. Rundfunkund Fernsehen, und Forschung durchwissenschaftliche Wissenschaftsrat (1992). ZurFirderungvon Wissenschaft Koln: Wissenschaftsrat. Fachgesellschaften. Zimmer, D.E. (1997). "Die Macht des Papiers. Warum Wissenschaftler nur mit Vorbehalt elektronisch publizieren." Die Zeit,2 October.

Biographical Note MAX KAASE has been Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim the centre for since 1980. From 1974 to 1979 he was executive director of ZUMA, in he has been and Mannheim. Since October 1993 methods, analysis polling, research professor for the Comparative Study of Democracies Project at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin. He is a vice-president of the European Science Foundation and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association. ADDRESS: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, ReichD-10785 Berlin, maka@medea.wz-berlin.de] 50, [e-mail: Germany. pietschufer

This content downloaded on Sat, 2 Mar 2013 17:52:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions