Überblick
"(...) One of the signs of weakness in contemporary American political science is its susceptability to invasion from other disciplines. To say this is not to argue that any academic field should ignore developments in other fields . and not be subject to cross fertilization with them, any more than any nation should seek to hermetically seal itself off from outside cultural influences. But just as national identity and ultimately national power can be threatened by cultural conquest from the outside, so can academic disciplines lose their bearings and integrity by adopting paradigms from other fields which may not do justice to the nature of their own data or help to answer the questions they seek to resolve. A case in point in contemporary political science is research and teaching in the area of the politics of "developing" nations. In the post World War II period, discussion of comparative politics was overwhelmed by the belief, adopted from economics, that there were such things as "underdeveloped" (actually a euphemism for poor or backward) countries with special characteristics as defined by the discipline of economics. Faced with the problem of enlarging their focus from the nation states of Europe and North America in order to deal with a horde of "new nations," students of comparative politics
allowed themselves to assume that there must be common political characteristics of these "underdeveloped" nations which correlated with their economic characteristics (...)"