Today’s election will provide fodder for generations of political scientists looking to understand American democracy. So we’re watching with interest the candidacy of Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of government at Harvard University, to serve on the governing council of the American Political Science Association. Members of the association have until tomorrow to submit their ballots in this other contest. Mr. Mansfield is a leading scholar of political theory and a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville. Yet his politics have not always won him the respect of colleagues. Mr. Mansfield’s candidate statement gives one a taste for the political biases regnant in academe. “Some people, with some reason, call me a conservative,” he writes. “That’s not the reason I am running for this office, but I mention it out of honesty as a defect you would have to overlook.”

Mr. Mansfield represents a movement, nicknamed “Perestroika,” that seeks to make political science more relevant to actual political life. If, three years after September 11, academic political scientists haven’t done much to help us understand the challenge America faces, it’s because a generation of political scientists, raised on rational choice and statistical modeling, don’t pay attention to history and culture and religious belief – in short, the actual substance of political life. So the study of politics has become ever more estranged from the experience of politics. Traditionally, candidates for the APSA leadership have been carefully chosen by an appointed committee and stood for election unopposed. “They don’t like it when somebody sticks his nose in and actually runs for the office,” Mr. Mansfield says. His candidacy represents a chance to start a process of change and openness in the profession of those who claim to practice political science.