Who Owns the Study of Democracy? Sociology, Political Science and the Interdisciplinary Promise of Political Sociology since 1945^♦

Interdisciplinarity is the integration of two or more disciplines that produces emergent, original, interesting and useful knowledge; it is most promising when the relationship of the integrated disciplines is strong and symmetrical. Political sociology was once considered to be a natural bridge between the disciplines of sociology and political science. Yet, in various bibliometric measures from the Web of Science citation database from 1945 to 2013, we find that the relationships between sociology and political science grew weak and asymmetrical exactly in the core areas of political sociology: democracy, political participation, civil society and social movements. As of 1970, political science began to own the study of democracy, and some of the core areas of political sociology besides. Political sociology has become a case study in how great promise for interdisciplinarity falls short. In this article, we demonstrate this empirically, and address why.

Political sociology; Interdisciplinarity; Democracy; Disciplinary popularity and ownership