The Caucus for a Critical Political Science (CNPS) was founded in 1967 as a caucus within the American Political Science Association for the purpose of challenging the myth of a value-free and politically neutral social science. It became an Organized Section of the APSA in 1992 and continues to organize panels at the APSA’s annual meeting. However, as early as 1969, leading members of the Caucus proposed that insurgent political scientists should join forces with their more numerous colleagues in other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and radical political economics, as well as with progressive colleagues in other nations, to establish a new flagship journal and to create a new interdisciplinary professional association of radical scholars.

The purpose of the journal was to provide a platform for a new critical political science unhindered by the ideological and methodological restrictions of mainstream journals. This type of interdisciplinary association, with its own flagship journal, might eventually generate the critical mass to confront existing disciplinary associations with the specter of a dual power configuration. It was not until a decade later, in 1979, that the Caucus for a Critical Political Science was finally institutionalized as a separate and independent organization outside the American Political Science Association with New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture as its official journal. 

A major purpose of the CCPS biennial conference, which began in 2017 on the organization’s 50th anniversary is to once again promote the growth of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science outside, but parallel to the American Political Science Association (APSA) with a competing vision of political science.