Bridging the gulf
Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic blogs …
No Offense To Political Scientists…But the gulf between academia and practitioners of politics is very wide. Too wide.
So why the heck would the American Political Science Association hold their annual convention during the Democratic National Convention…
… in Boston?
Want to bridge the gap? Try holding the conference in the same city as a convention…the week before the convention.
Well, none taken. But the problem is that APSA (a) always has its conference on Labor Day weekend, and (b) decides where the conference is going to be several years in advance. Indeed, at the moment there’s a heated debate over whether APSA did the right thing in planning to have the 2012 conference in New Orleans (there are issues with non-gay friendly statutes in the state of Louisiana). The Democratic National Convention, as best as I know, neither has a fixed date nor a policy of planning out meetings very far in advance, for all the obvious reasons. So the conclusion is clear: if we seriously want to bridge the gulf between practitioners and political scientists, it’s the practitioners who need to plan their meeting around APSA, not APSA who needs to plan their meeting around the practitioners. As to why the practitioners have failed to take advantage of the collective wisdom of umpteen thousand political scientists gathered together in their badly-fitting blue suits at a single spot this summer, I’m at a loss to say.
Comments
And, of course, there are TWO major parties. While a majority of political scientists may side with the Dems, we’re actually kinda sensitive about keeping our work non-partisan (even if some observers think we fail to do so…the insinuation hurts)
Posted by: Matt Jarvis | August 21, 2008 05:06 PM
Not to mention the issue of hotel space.
Posted by: Jose Marichal | August 21, 2008 11:20 PM
Political science is not all about elections, and certainly not all about US presidential elections.
Posted by: anon | August 22, 2008 03:46 PM
On the issue, those who use the results in American political science (e.g., studies of what drives turnout) have had great success. Karl Rove reportedly reads APSR, and for a reason.
I was once at a talk on a study of the cost of voting, in which the author during Q&A noted that half of the good scholars on voter turnout were in the academy … and the other half worked for the Republican Party.
The problem is not the scholars. The problem is ignorant (Dem) consultants.
Posted by: Funkhauser | August 22, 2008 04:26 PM