The Monkey Cage

I’m not sure who are “the top 25,” but Larry Bartels redistricted New Jersey, right? Steve Ansolabehere has been involved in voting technology, and Walter Mebane and others have been involved in election disputes. James Q. Wilson has been influential on crime policy, I think. Do any of these count as policy experience?

As a IR graduate student (in Brazil), I would like us to be more like political science (I mean, mor academic oriented) and less like business.

Science is science, not policy.

Well in the past administration, Condi Rice was a political scientist as was Krasner (head of policy planning). Dick Cheney never finished his poli-sci PhD but has an APSR article and had lots of high-level poli-sci advisors (like Aaron Friedberg) as there were in other parts of government. Was the involvement by these political scientists really a good thing?

I think you’re missing the distinction between policy focused and policy relevant . There is sufficient overlap between policy making and political science that to the extent that political science is in fact based on valid and relevant observation of politics it would be policy relevant, regardless of the opinions of policy makers or if it was intentionally focused on policy.

If you conclude political science is policy irrelevant, it seriously calls into question the validity of the political science.

I only have a B.A. in Poli. Sci. and I’ve been extensively involved in state and local politics (campaign and advisory) since I graduated. I think the key consideration here is that there are no journals (that I know of) wherein a policymaker could find peer-reviewed research with direct applicability to policy making. That is, none that are written with the high-level policymaker (or, more likely, his/her advisor) as the end consumer of the research. If the policymaker or advisor is not academically inclined (i.e., doesn’t hold an MPA), they end up reading popular historians (e.g., Kearns-Goodwin) or the more elite members of the commentariat such as David Brooks, Fareed Zakaria, or Tom Friedman. They’re smart and far above rifraff like Ann Coulter, but they’re still just pundits.

For example, popular pundits were smitten with the idea that Obama was assembling a “team of rivals” for his cabinet. Regardless, is there any research aimed at White House officials (governors and mayors) as to who make the best appointees to cabinet level (or under-secretary) offices? Who can best translate the executive agenda into bureaucratic action? A checklist of attributes for fast action during a transition? I think that sort of thing could bridge the relevance gap between academia and practitioners.

Political Science, to be sure, is a discipline that developed in the service of policymakers (see Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 treatise on the Science of Administration) but Nye’s observation, that many political scientists currently shy away from making explicitly policy-related studies or engaging directly with present policy problems is not incorrect. It does, however, proceed from a null hypothesis we can reject. It’s this (H): if we’re not seeing political scientists contribute to the policy debate, it must be because they don’t want to. What I want to suggest, and something Nye does not really take into account when he critiques the world of think tanks as offering a less-than-neutral viewpoint on policy issues, is that academic political scientists are not part of the debate, but not because they have, of their own desire, receded into the backrooms of the academy to develop purer theoretical approaches. Rather, we should consider the demand side of the equation. Would policymakers, if presented with political science research (albeit repackaged to suit their tastes), use it?
What I’d like to offer, in response to Joseph Nye, is that many political scientists do in fact produce research that policymakers ought to consider. It does not take the quick, stylized form of a policy brief. It is not airport reading. It is often challenging and critical scholarship that does not provide a list of recommendations in its final chapter (or, god forbid, in an executive summary). In short, it requires more on the part of the policymaker, who, though laden with responsibilities, is not without some staffers to help her out. We live in an age when the value of the academy is being reappraised weekly. What its critics usually fail to point out is that, those who could arguably assign it greater value (policymakers, opinion leaders, and others) , now face more structural constraints (faster issue cycles, a public primed for dreck, a media system that cannot possibly be burdened by debates about policy) on the use of academic research than ever before. “Getting back in” won’t be as easy as writing the next trade paperback on social security.

Henry said: “In top ranked departments in American political science, political theory, and to a great extent in comparative, there is no disciplinary incentive whatsoever for junior scholars to get engaged in policy debates. ”

I’d be interested in hearing if other Monkey Cagers and department chairs agree with this statement. (Although “top ranked” is less interesting to me depending on the number of departments that are in his definition of “top.”) I’ve heard from sociologists that do “applied work” on anti-discrimination policy that this is true (published research, teaching, and service to the school or discipline is appreciated when tenure is up and in that order with a big gap between the first and the second; service to society is not on the radar screen and may even count against you as “light weight” or too “political”). Is this as true in poli sci? I fear it is true, but would like to know if people agree with Henry.

I sense that more colleges and universities are sponsoring public policy majors, concentrations, minors and graduate degrees (MPP/PhD in policy). Perhaps this is where poli sci folks who also do “practice” can locate themselves.

Or perhaps they have to avoid poli sci degrees and enter other fields? I just came from an event where I was seated on all sides by Harvard grad school graduates or drop outs that do interesting political research, but none of them have, or completed, poli sci degrees (“Government” at Harvard, not to be confused with KSG).

What’s the deal with the surge in filter-evading spam comments? I’m seeing this on my blog too.

Andy, we’re getting a lot of those spam comments in the last couple days. I deleted the ones above your post. Our spam filter did catch this one thought: “Interested in Granny boot? Right place for it! Masturbation lubricities!”

That’s just disturbing John.

Though I recognize the possibility of unfortunate people like me - by which I mean people who are more interested in political science than they are in politics - being the exception rather than the rule, I don’t really see any reason to believe that there is a hidden legion of young scholars who really want to participate in policy debates but are prohibited from doing so due to institutional barriers.

However, to the extent that people are prohibited from doing so, isn’t this just a result of ye olde fallacious belief that to be scientific you need to be objective, and to be objective you need to value neutral? Hence, anything that even smells clearly articulated values is discouraged, lest the discipline risk losing its scientific status and the copious amounts of respect it brings. Though it’s not entirely clear to me who (except for political scientists, of course) exactly respects political science right now, but I suppose that there might be some form of illuminati out there that I’m unaware of.

Either way, I’d be interested in hearing if this is largely an American phenomena, since we do not seem to have this “problem” in Scandoland to the same extent. At least not yet, anyways.

I go back and forth on whether or not there really is such a problem; it seems there are plenty of “academics” commenting on, writing about and working/helping even without a journal (but there certainly are mags, and now blogs). Plus, there are plenty of people with advanced degrees doing good analytical thinking, writing, and sometimes even working for governments outside of academia.