About the PSO

The Policy Studies Organization

The Policy Studies Organization (PSO) is a publisher of academic journals and book series, sponsor of conferences, and producer of programs.  It seeks to disseminate scholarship and information to serve those making and evaluating policy.  It was founded as an outgrowth of the American Political Science Association, for those in a variety of fields who were interested in how public policy and organizational policy were being studied and discussed.

The Policy Studies Organization – a related society of the of the American, Midwest, Southern and International Political Science Associations, as well as of the International Studies Association – grew out of a concern that there was a need for more emphasis on (as one member put it) the “coal face”. In other words, research knowledge had to be effectively disseminated and had to reach those who actually set policies. This was not a call for any sort of strict utilitarianism, but simply a feeling that much good could be done by bringing together people who felt that policies (and not just government policies, but policies of companies, of universities, and indeed of all kinds of institutions) should be informed policies.

An early member writes how she was “astonished when I was doing my doctorate that, for example, the Park Service was unaware of watershed research, and that professors were unaware how the Park Service felt about forestry practices.” PSO has always had a geographically and occupationally diverse membership, and never had been limited to government issues or to those in higher education. Its founders avoided naming PSO the “American” Policy Research Organization, because they had an ecumenical and eclectic view of the association.

PSO includes senior executives, undergraduate and graduate students, state legislators, architects, judges, military officers, interested in policy studies, environmentalists who want to “green” decision making, NGO executives who worry about the future of volunteerism, professors who are working on curriculum revision, government officials in numerous agencies — in short, PSO is for intellectually active people of all persuasions.

PSO publishes numerous journals that have won wide respect. PSO members serve as editors, reviewers, members of the editorial board, and in the other jobs necessary to produce what are described as “major resources” in the field. All full PSO individual members receive the journals. Membership confers the privilege of submitting papers and panels for all the PSO events throughout the year. Go here to see more information on each of these events. PSO subscription publications are donated to universities and libraries in over 80 developing countries through a program with Wiley Blackwell. In addition, PSO cooperates in programs with number of library consortia, in keeping with our central propose of supporting objective research.

The increasing assets of the PSO are in its journals, books, and conferences. This is encapsulated in the burgeoning Westphalia Press catalog, the expansion of the number of journals from one to several dozen, and the increasing use being made of its conferences as video teaching aids. Our headquarters in Washington are of course a source of pride because of their collections and history, but our intellectual assets are by far the largest part of our patrimony.

The Policy Studies Organization acknowledges that its Washington D.C. headquarters is on the ancestral lands of the Anacostans, and neighboring Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples.

Map of PSO Offices Worldwide:

The Roosevelt Institution and PSO

The Roosevelt Institution is an undergraduate organization with chapters on many campuses, debating public policy and encouraging the publishing of policy papers by gifted students. PSO wholeheartedly supports this and carries news of Roosevelt meetings and activities in its journals, inviting Roosevelt members and their faculty associates to participate in PSO activities. See the Roosevelt Institution online.

PSO affiliation with ISA approved

The board of the International Studies Association has approved the affiliation of Policy Studies Organization with ISA. This link is similar to our affiliation with the American, Midwest and Southern Political Science Associations and gives us the privilege of panels as well as other advantages.

PSO Finances

The Policy Studies Organization is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization. The PSO Federal tax number is 23-7163011. The treasurer is Rex Kallembach, CPA. All subscription and membership monies for the journals are handled by Wiley-Blackwell. Subscriptions to World Affairs are handled by SAGE. All book sales are handled by Rowman & Littlefield. For books published by Westphalia Press, a PSO imprint, please visit www.westphaliapress.org

What is Policy Studies?

by Paul Rich

I.  Know Thyself

It is important to engage in self-examination, not out of insecurity but just to be sure the course one has charted is on course, avoiding possible pitfalls and blunders. So such an examination should be regarded as showing strength, not weakness. That applies not only to individuals but to institutions. An examination here of the history, activities, and direction of the PSO is well in order.

An initial very important observation is that emphatically policy studies is not anything new, either as a subject or a matter of research. This mistake about its origins is because of its affiliations with universities.  Until the nineteenth century the curriculum of most universities in the Western world was dominated by the classics, with Latin and ancient Greek taking a large part of the studies.  This had much to do with the ties between the established churches and education, and the need to matriculate candidates for the priesthood. In fact, Nonconformist students could not take a degree at Oxford for most of the nineteenth century. Harris Manchester College, and presently connected with PSO leadership, is one of the component and constituent colleges of Oxford, and was founded because of that restriction and only became a full member of the university a few decades ago.

In consequence, so-called “new” knowledge of all kinds was often studied through learned societies, which proliferated in the Victorian era. They permitted exchanges of information about research, observations and criticisms that were absent from universities. Masonic lodges figured in this, as they could avoid censorship. The scholar Margaret Jacob has done much to document their role. She and other scholars of the phenomenon, including Brent Morris and Pierre Mollier have had close associations with PSO  in recent times, appearing at PSO conferences and contributing valuable articles.

Bearing this out, when Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, was appointed professor of modern history at Oxford, the Times newspaper politely wondered what there was to teach. This was not at all impertinent; it reflects the prevailing view that the subjects of study at university were the classics (my first Harvard degree was in Latin. It was the last year diplomas were in Latin). Arnold died in 1841, shortly after taking up his chair and before he could make the major contributions he might have contemplated.

So one will look in vain for anthropology or sociology or any other staple subject on the schedule of the universities of that era. New subjects were often included in the philosophy department for lack of a better place to put them. Such was the case with political science, of which more later. A recent example of the way studies evolve is the teaching of subjects about gender, the subject of a recently founded and highly successful PSO journal. Obviously issues related to gender go back to Adam and Eve and are not a novel new creation.

Of course then the content of policy studies includes subjects as old as the hills. Its formal organization is separate from the vast corpus of accumulated knowledge which is part of its heritage, much of which still is waiting to be mined. That it has emerged as a subject with departments and faculties does not mean its “discovery” is really that; its content  in ways is not anymore new than the rocks that geology studies. The pharaohs faced policy questions.

Nobody today would argue that history or geology should be subordinate to the philosophy department.  Perhaps historians and geologists could benefit from philosophy courses, but they have their own worlds to explore. Gradually but inevitably the study of  reputedly new subjects has expanded, acquired academic apparatus, found both teachers and students, and in many cases created opportunities for business and employment.

So it is, that in the case of the PSO we have a good case of growth of a seed that was there before it started growing,  As we will demonstrate, this was a seed both for policy studies and for the Policy Studies Organization.  

The word “organization” is very appropriate because although it is in certain ways a society and association, it is most importantly  the organizer of a field of knowledge, the organizer of studies and research and of people who wish to know about and advance its insights. The word organization among other things implies a duty to find ways for classification, identification, and clarification. Hence from its inception the PSO has made publishing a central part of its job.

The founders, as our account will very clearly show, did not want an American Policy Studies Association. They were thoroughly internationalists and rejected the idea of the organization being dubbed American. They certainly expected to study American concerns, but at the same time they wanted an open door to the world. They also wanted to interest young people, and so early on decided to award scholarships and organized a Greek honor fraternity (it’s last chapter lingered on into the 2020s, when the remaining faculty sponsor retired). How well their various hopes have been realized will be part of this account.

II. Enter Stage Right: Viscount Bryce of Dechmount

 To provide an analogy for this explanation of the formation and heritage of policy studies, medicine is an umbrella term that includes cardiology and leprosy and diet. Moreover it grows in its extent and inclusiveness as new knowledge accumulates. It was practiced in prehistoric times.  An analogy to policy is apt.  Policy studies is necessarily never going to be static and certainly existed as an aspect of leadership and of management and of politics long before its organization as an academic subject.

Considering policy studies as somehow completed as a subject would mean those who need it for honing their judgement would be robbed of the insights that continuing developments constantly produce. To confine it to one book or one journal or to one conference or activity  is defeating its purposes. How for example could comparative studies be considered a completed field when many countries a few decades ago simply did not exist? How would the condrums of countless situations be met without the greatly increased study of gender? Do events like deadly viruses and the Russian invasion of the

Ukraine have no input on our thinking?

This realization of the profound influence of changing circumstances on all education is not a new concern. As separate scholarly fields proliferated, the debate over how they should be organized was vigorously and sometimes acrimoniously pursued. There were those who wanted subjects to be international and to avoid nationalism. There were those who thought that to speak of science was a misnomer in many fields that by their nature lacked and would continue to lack many “facts’ and would deal with “factoids”.

When the American Political Science Association was formed at the start of the twentieth century, a number of roads were considered but not taken — recalling Robert Frost’s poem. Eventually this would lead to other independent societies to compensate for the divergence from what were claimed to be the original intentions. The original debate over directions and purposes involved the association’s early leadership and that leadership and presidency of the APSA in the person of a British lord.  APSA would do good things, but perhaps not follow a path he would have chosen.

Few today realize that an early and very important president of the APSA was a Scot-Irish  aristocrat  Viscount Bryce of Dechmount in the County of Lanark, president of the British Academy, Justice of the international Court at the Hague, major voice in founding the League of Nations, British Ambassador to the United States, made a member by King Edward VII of the the ultra select Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, active in the House of lords, He founded the Sociological Society in Britain, was an accomplished alpinist, and had the time to mentor droves of young students.

Viscount Bryce was ecumenical in his approach to life and scholarship, and extremely suspicious of the efforts to overly specialize or to think science will answer all problems and all questions. In his remarkable two volume study, Modern Democracy, he warned,  “Nihil humani nobis alienum. We are so influenced, consciously  or unconsciously, in our reading and thinking, by our likes and dislikes, that we look for the facts we desire to find and neglect or minimize those which are unwelcome. The facts are so abundant that it is always possible to find the former, and so obscure that it is no less easy to understand the latter”. (Modern Democracies, Vol. I, Macmillan, New York, 1921, 15.)

The PSO’s Westphalia Press is happily bringing back into print Lord Bryce’s works, which frankly are better written than most new books, and we will give attention here to his views found in those forthcoming editions and tp how they relate to the evolution and organizing of policy studies.  They are relevant to discussing the determinedly eclectic nature of policy studies and throw light on why members left the APSA to form the International Studies Association, the Policy Studies Organization, and other groups, and provoked the disastrous perestroika wars. (“The Perestroika Movement is a loose-knit intellectual tendency in academic political science which seeks to expand methodological pluralism in order to make the discipline more accessible and relevant to laypeople and non-specialist academics. Established in 2000, the movement was organized in response to the perceived hegemony of quantitative and mathematical methodology in the field. Such dominance breeds academic isolation and poor scholarship, the movement’s leaders contend.”  Wikipedia entry, acc.march 19, 2022.)

Bryce strenuously advocated what today we call liberal learning and its fruits. He writes approvingly of Prime Minister William Gladstone, who met his criteria for leadership; “His activity spread itself out over many fields. He was the author of several learned and thoughtful books, and of a multitude of articles upon all sorts of subjects. He showed himself as eagerly interested in matters of classical scholarship and Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical history as in questions of national finance and foreign policy.”  (William Ewart Gladstone, Century, New York, 1896, 1-2.)

A great traveler, Bryce shown brightly as a comparatist. His monumental study of South  Africa (1900) should  be reclaimed after more than one hundred years as a necessary title for study of the country, and is marked by  prescience and extraordinary foreknowledge. He writes about the racial situations, citing the American South, “The experience of the Southern States is too short to throw much light on this problem. It is, however, a painful experience in many respects, and it causes the gravest anxieties for the future. Similar anxieties must press upon the mind of any one who in South Africa looks sixty or eighty years forward…”. (Impressions of South Africa, Third Edition, Century, New York. 1900, 484).  Equally remarkable are his farsighted observations in his exhaustive  South America (Macmillan, New Rotk, 1914, see 424-453). Bryce was convinced that broad and varied knowledge was key to leadership in any field. In a book review of Henry Potter’s The Scholar and the State, he writes “There is a long line of brilliant examples, from Pericles to Mr.Gladstone, to show that the man of large knowledge and finely polished mind may render to the State services of the highest and rarest kind.”  (‘The Scholar and the State’, The Book Buyer, Vol.XV No.6, January 1898, 637. And in Social institutions of the United States (Grosset & Dunlap, NewYork, 906, ) he writes “In America there is much to make men apt to think only of the Present, and forget that is the outcome of the Past.. he ought to treat of the Past as if it were the Present, and the Present as if it were the Past.”

The original membership of the APSA of which Lord Bryce was president was cosmopolitan and wide ranging, and almost too varied to categorize,  including judges, civic reformers, industrialists, state legislators — in short anyone interested in civic education, its place in society and especially in schools, and scholarly effects on leadership of all kinds. Gradually this membership changed into a professional society of political scientists, and its programs more and more reflected this. Interest in student scholarships for example waned. The place of Lord Bryce in the association’s beginnings was neglected and possible influence on international matters and policy studies became perhaps less central to its purposes. As to why Lord Bryce was chosen to lead an American institution, one simple fact is that at the time he showed all the qualities of leadership and versatility that he thought the new society should encourage.

 One  possible key to his thinking is found in some of his remarks at the University of Chicago: “Euclid’s geometry is interesting as a model of exact deductive reasoning. One remembers it with pleasure. A man who has some leisure and some talent in this direction  may all through his life enjoy the effort of solving mathematical problems. But has any one at a supreme moment of some moral struggle ever been able to find help and stimulus in the thought that the square  described upon the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle  is equal to the squares  described on the other two sides thereof?”  (“What University Instruction May Do”, June 11, 1907. University and Historical Addresses, Mcmillan, New York, 1913, 24.)  The point is well taken, although Enlightenment figures like Locke and Hobbes used the Pythagorean proof as a symbol for truth.

III.

In dwelling so much on the expansive scholarship of Lord Bryce, we are not criticizing or condemning scholarly specialization. After all, continuing the medical analogy, we do not expect our internist at our annual checkup to perform cataract surgery or install a pacemaker. Do not expect that your cardiologist will deal with your incipient diabetes.  There should be need enough and room enough for everyone.

We do however take great exception to an erroneous and much repeated misconception that policy studies are a subset of political science. That erroneous view can be easily reversed and one can contend that political science contributes to policy studies, as do the insights of sociology, history,  economics,  geography and myriad other subjects. Certainly as far as curriculum and formal education is concerned, what is a salient question is what are the proper areas to explore in preparing to be a leader. Students should have a right to know what their studies fit them for. For Bryce’s views of what constitutes good leadership, his biographical studies are a gold mine, and his own life is possibly the best example… (Studies in Contemporary Biography, Macmillan, New York, 1903.)

Policy studies in the view of some at its best requires a certain eclectic mind cast. a multi-disciplinary approach and an overview that is often missing in would be leaders. For all his affection for America,  Bryce concluded that the American mind was afflicted by busyness.  To be thoughtful was the good intention, “But  in America it is unusually hard for anyone to withdraw his mind from the endless variety of external impressions and interests which daily life presents and which impinge upon the mind, I will not say to vex it, but to keep it constantly vibrating to their touch. Life is that of the squirrel in his revolving cage, never still…” (The American Commonwealth,Vol.iii, Macmillan, London, 1888, 559.)

Whether the pursuit of a much broader scope for political science would have been practical or could have been possible, energized by Bryce and his both voluminous and brilliant books, will be only speculation. Perhaps in hindsight it could have been expanded in scope and made a much more important discipline on campuses. This all remains debatable. The road diverged and an unease about the usefulness of political science has been an unwelcome companion that has grown through the years. The APSA has done many good things, but this discussion of how the winds took it is somewhat explanatory of the history and purposes of the Policy Studies Organization

The reality today is that given a choice between political science and policy studies majors, students have increasingly opted for policy studies as offering more opportunities as a preparation for  their future careers. They also have shown a marked enthusiasm for international studies, something policy studies always needs to note if it is to continue its progress. Ada Snell of Mount Holyoke College wrote, “The most important source of Mr.Bryce’s knowledge, the one which has furnished the material for nearly all his books, has been his first-hand observation and study of many countries.” (Abyda L.F. Snell, Introduction, James Bryce, Promoting Good Citizenship, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1913, x.)

The inherent problems with the approach which (although we are aware of the risks of generalizing) that political science took certainly contributed to the ultimate decision to create a separate movement with its own publishing, scholarships, and meetings. Some of those involved were senior professors with years of describing themselves as political scientists. Others attracted came from  outside academia, including conservationists from the National Park Service, lawyers, historians — in short, a decidedly mixed lot.  

This took place with a backdrop over the years of  many discussions, intriguing relationships, and important friendships.  Bryce for example was the friend of another figure in policy studies and president of APSA, Harry Garfield, president of Williams College and son of United States President James Garfield. Harry Garfield  ran celebrated summer meetings at Williams that involved important policy makers and attracted Bryce. But we must hasten on, as  these ties would easily become a consuming preoccupation.

We move then to the actual formation of PSO after years of informal gatherings. Prominent among the figures involved was Aaron Wildawsky, like Lord Bryce and Garfield a president of the APSA, as well as president of PSO and certainly one with some unusual interests: Wildavsky wrote a series of highly unconventional books and articles that examined the Biblical patriarchs Joseph and Moses and their leadership qualities. “These writings represented a rekindling of interest in his own Jewish ancestry.The aim of his studies was to see what we can learn about contemporary leadership by studying these patriarchs. Wildavsky regarded Moses and Joseph as imperfect leaders, but he believed that they had learned from their mistakes as much as from their successes. Moses in particular had the ability to teach people to lead themselves, something displayed in his capacity to “find judges” from amongst the nation of the Israelites.” ( “Aaron Wildavsky” Contemporary Thinkers. https://contemporarythinkers.org/aaron-wildavsky/introduction/ acc.March 19, 2022.)

The decision by people of the calibre of Wildavsky to create a separate structure for policy studies was not one made lightly, and as will be seen here it would have lasting and very significant consequences

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