Building off Ezra Klein's column on the recent American Political Science Association meeting, Steven Hayward suggests that political science shouldn't endeavor to be economics:
The real problem with academic political science is its insistence on attempting to emulate the empiricism of economics and other social sciences, such that the multiple regression analysis is considered about the only legitimate tool of the trade. Some regressions surely illuminate, or more often confound, a popular perception of the political world, and it is these findings Klein rightly points out. But, on the other hand, I have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty.
Bernstein takes aim at another leg of Klein's argument.