Political Science in Russia: Scholarship without Research?

After several decades of institutionalization of political science as a scholarly discipline in Russia, its quantitative output is quite impressive. This article offers a critical reconsideration of its substantive impact on scholarship in political science – and considers why that output has not been so impressive in terms of increasing knowledge about politics, both in Russia and beyond. It presents an overview of the state of Russian political science, with an emphasis on its major theoretical, methodological, and empirical shortcomings. It also considers the role of historical, institutional, and political factors for its developmental trajectory, and offers some suggestions for overcoming them.