Showing the Other Side: What Kinds of Empathy Should Political Science Teach?

In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama implored undergraduates at Northwestern to cultivate empathy, and called on the country to address its “empathy deficit.” Empathy is being taken seriously in politics and political science—but what exactly do we mean by empathy? This paper reviews the uses of “empathy” in the political science and teaching and learning literatures in order to identify which of many possible definitions we really mean when we as educators say that we wish to develop empathy as a skill. We identify several different conceptualizations of empathy in the political science and related literatures. We also begin to consider the question of where we go from here—if empathy is a necessary skill for democracy, how exactly can we as educators help our students to develop it?