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WESTERN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION
2007 ANNUAL MEETING
Las Vegas, Nevada - La Riviera Hotel - March 8 - 10, 2007

The Western Political Science Association will host its 2007 annual meeting at the La Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada from March 8 to 10, 2007. Please make plans to attend and encourage others to join us!

The DEADLINE for submission of paper proposals/program participation forms will be
September 11, 2006. You may complete the proposal on line beginning June 1, 2006, at http://www.csus.edu/org/wpsa/

Peter Steinberger, Reed College
Dean of the Faculty
Reed College
Portland, Oregon 97202
503-777-7257 fax: 503-777-7581
peter.steinberger@reed.edu

THEME FOR THE 2007 MEETING:
“Politics and Luck: Thinking about Government and the State in an
Uncertain World”

Aristotle theorized about luck (Physics II.4), Machiavelli believed fortuna to be the fundamental problem of political life, and Pascal touted perhaps the most famous bet of all time. But it may be that ours is truly the Age of Uncertainty – at least as measured by an apparently unceasing preoccupation with the vicissitudes of pure chance. Hoping against hope, Einstein insisted that God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Heisenberg argued for the fundamental indeterminacy of matter at the most basic level. Today, physicists propose that much of what happens in the physical world is literally chaotic. Meanwhile, ethicists wrestle with the vexing problem of moral luck and managers pursue the art of risk management, while psychologists contemplate the apparent randomness of ordinary decision-making. And indeed, much, perhaps most, main-stream political science relies heavily on either probability theory or the theory of games. Increasingly, our world seems to us not so much a temple or an arena or a stage but a kind of casino; and we’re led thereby to contemplate, among other things, the wisdom of that great American philosopher Fred Astaire, who insisted, in The Gay Divorcee, that “chance is the fool’s name for fate.”

How should we do serious social science when the forces of luck, chance, and sheer contingency – the roll of the dice – seem so pervasive? What are the implications, if any, for the design of responsible institutions of government and the formulation of effective public policy? And how should we understand the putative cultural consequences of a world that seems to us so unpredictable and haphazard: conspicuous consumption operating cheek-by-jowl with desperate poverty; a zealous evangelical awakening thriving side-by-side with the wholesale commodification of human relations; a conception of human flourishing that seems increasingly to rely on some version of winning the lottery?

As we prepare to gather in Vegas, I especially invite papers and panels that consider what the ideology of contingency and risk, chance and fate, uncertainty and luck, might mean – and should mean – for the practice of political science.

Note: All participants in the program are required to preregister for the meeting by early December.