Members of the academic profession of political science may notice some eerily familiar feelings of anxiety as they read James T. Hamilton’s book about investigative journalism. The lingering impacts of the financial crisis of 2008, the promise and perils of technological change, the flourishing of words like “monetizability,” the sense of a time-honored vocation under siege—all these themes run through this book, much as they have been bouncing off the walls of academic offices and conference halls in recent years.

The professional anxieties in question have to do with the economic self-interest of individual professionals in both academia and journalism, of course, but they are also rooted in a sense of civic purpose. Scholars, teachers, and reporters generally view their vocations as revolving around the provision of public goods—knowledge and the ability to make use of it—which are traditionally considered essential to the operation of political democracy. Providers of public goods need and expect public support, whether in the form of subsidy, patronage, or even mere esteem. In an era when all things public seem to be in passive decay (at best), the media and the universities are often actively targeted for sectarian scorn and political retribution.

What makes the linked fate of political science and investigative journalism all the more poignant today is the fact that academics in the social sciences have long harbored a superiority complex with respect to their journalistic cousins. Generations of graduate students have learned that the social sciences are somehow truer and more complete than the gathering of news and comment in mass-circulation venues.

A thoughtful reassessment of this superiority complex is long overdue. Democracy’s Detectives can help, indirectly, as an effort to diagnose the troubles facing investigative journalism and to imagine its road to recovery. Written by a prolific career academic in the fields of economics and public policy, it will strike some readers as reinforcing, more than reassessing, the academic superiority complex because it appears to usher journalism down a number-crunching road to redemption. But it also offers essential food for thought for scholarly practitioners of social and political research, of all methodological stripes, who suspect that humility would constitute a positive step toward their own future.

This review considers Hamilton’s study of investigative reporting and its role in American democratic life before exploring the methodological affinities, often overlooked, between political journalism and political science. By looking more deeply at the history of muckraking journalism in the United States, it is possible to imagine that university-based scholars might fill a niche that professional journalists are increasingly leaving vacant.

As sobering as it is for university faculty members to follow the steady trend toward converting tenured and tenure-track positions into part-time, untenured, and otherwise precarious positions, Hamilton reminds us that the world of journalism has been hit even harder by the financial crisis of 2008. The number of full-time employees at daily newspapers in 2014 was 40% lower than in 2007 (p. 8). The introduction of legislation to abolish academic tenure, as in Iowa in 2017, is harrowing. Yet university faculties, many of which enjoy a splendid isolation from state governments’ reach, have not yet suffered the kind of decimation that has occurred in many newsrooms across the United States.

Hamilton’s book reviews some of the main economic and technological trends responsible for the journalistic profession’s current plight, offers a snapshot of how the landscape of investigative reporting in particular has changed since 2008, and attempts to paint a portrait of investigative journalism’s enduring value and evolving role in the media environment. Chapter 1 covers basic concepts and trends in the economics of journalism. Chapters 2 through 6 report a series of quantitative analyses of American newspapers and their coverage, beginning with an ambitious effort to chart the ebbs and flows of distinctively investigative practices in reporting since the Civil War (ca. 1870) and proceeding through content analyses of prize submissions for investigative journalism from 1979 to 2012. Chapter 7 provides an in-depth case study of one unusually productive newspaper reporter, and Chapter 8 concludes with a hopeful exploration of the potential of “algorithmic” or “computational” methods to sustain democracy’s detectives into the ostensibly bleak future.

The underlying economic and technological story of the newspaper business in the early twenty-first century is an important one, and it may loom ever larger as future generations look back at the “onlining” of human civilization that has occurred in recent years. Hamilton indicates the main outlines of the story without offering much texture or focus. The availability of information on the World Wide Web offered the potential to lower operating and distribution costs but also made it harder to capture revenue. The rapid and cheap dissemination of news online prompted newspapers to localize, specialize, and personalize in order to retain old readers and attract new ones. It has been a difficult adjustment, to say the least, but investigative reporting has suffered in particular because it is much more costly than aggregating content from elsewhere or feeding on information given freely by official sources. The entire mission of democracy’s detectives is to supply public information for holding powerful actors accountable, and public goods are especially hard to monetize and prone to free-riding (p. 24). Moreover, investigative reporting, by definition, faces off against the interest in secrecy of those who have the power to raise the costs of investigation through obstruction (pp. 26–27).

At this point, some analysts would be tempted to pause, perhaps even attempting to muckrake the newspapers’ decline itself by asking questions about the role that economic and political decision makers played in this story, as opposed to the agentless forces of technological change. Later, Hamilton does offer a stark indictment of the American federal government as a major force driving up the costs of investigation: The Internal Revenue Service refuses to recognize many journalistic organs that attempt to register as educational nonprofits (pp. 289–90), and the Obama administration was dismally effective at obstructing reporters’ Freedom of Information requests (pp. 281–84). Mostly, however, the author leaves deeper analysis to others. His preferred method is dropping figures rather than connecting dots. The quantitative analyses that occupy the bulk of the book, nonetheless, are not complicated efforts to tickle causal relationships out of tangles of numbers. His analytic goal is mere portraiture: to show where investigative reporting has been and where it is now. The resulting picture could have been captioned “down but not out.”

Particularly likely to attract attention—and in tune with the mind-set of academic administrators and state policymakers in times of austerity—is Hamilton’s effort to quantify the monetary value of investigative journalism. Having alluded to economic theories about the difficulty of paying for public goods through contributions from their beneficiaries, the author may be covertly advising editors and reporters on how to plead their case to other sources of support. He uses three case studies in Chapter 4 to estimate the value added by civic journalism, and his in-depth look in Chapter 7 at reporter Pat Stith, of the Raleigh News and Observer, also considers the issue of quantifying outcomes. In an era when university presidents like to quote estimates of their institutions’ economic impact on the states whose governments partially fund those institutions, Hamilton’s figures could be useful, in a similar fashion, to publishers and editors who increasingly rely on philanthropic foundations, rather than subscribers, for their operating budgets.

Getting to the bottom line, one newspaper series on probation reform is estimated to have saved eight lives (netting $62.1 million dollars, based on the federal government’s valuation of a “statistical life” at $9.2 million) (p. 119); a television exposé of health-code violations likely saved $150,000 in hospitalization fees in the first year after it ran (pp. 123–24); and a newspaper series on police shootings led to policy changes that may have saved another eight lives (netting $69.4 million) (p. 128). Hamilton estimates Stith’s total compensation from the newspapers that employed him across 42 years of work and figures that the new state laws passed in response to his reporting came at a cost of $139,500 per law, and that the mean price of his “change stories” was $27,200 (pp. 275–76). Stith’s career, as told in admiring detail by the author, is indeed exceptional. Some university faculty members have already been pondering how to conjure up similar sets of numbers on their own behalf, anticipating questions already asked in the state of Texas, for example.

Some may be tempted to ask, “What price, democracy?” For his part, however, Hamilton is more interested in taking on the brave new world of Big Data. The concluding chapter is likely to prove the most controversial part of Democracy’s Detectives. Hamilton outlines a manifesto for “data journalism,” in which computational methods play two main roles (pp. 304–5), and do so very cheaply. First is what might be called the “story-finding” role: Algorithms can be used to search for patterns in databases that might indicate unusual activity behind the numbers, leading reporters to story ideas that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. Second is the personalizing role: Algorithms can tailor the presentation of information online to an individual user’s particular interests, thereby increasing journalists’ ability to monetize the experience of consuming news. The second tool seems to be needed to pay for the first, which in turn drives the pursuit of investigative journalism’s essential mission of assisting the provision of the public good known as democratic accountability.

Hamilton’s call for “data journalism” is congruent with a broader movement by social scientists to get journalists to buy into quantitative methods. This is an important and multifaceted trend whose ramifications have yet to be fully developed. It has implications for the discipline of political science as well, which has at times been conceptualized as simply journalism plus quantification (Blondel Reference Blondel1981, 109). But this trend is also parasitic on political science’s old superiority complex with respect to journalism, which in turn demands a reexamination requiring broader horizons than those of Democracy’s Detectives.

In response to the massive new role of Internet-based communications in public discourse, some scholars have urged political journalists and bloggers to make greater efforts to submit to the wisdom of political science (Noel Reference Noel2010, Nyhan and Sides Reference Nyhan and Sides2011).¹ In an effort to build that kind of bridge themselves, two political scientists wrote The Gamble, a book about the 2012 U.S. elections that was partly serialized on a blog to engage journalists and other nonacademics (Sides and Vavreck Reference Sides and Vavreck2013). A review of The Gamble dutifully nodded toward the presumed inferiority of the audience: “[W]hile journalists and others writing for a market strive to be accurate, they are biased toward stories that attract audiences, which means fresh stories that focus on conflict, are dramatic, and stress the campaign horse race” (Shapiro Reference Shapiro, Sides and Vavreck2014, 752).

Leaders of recent efforts to standardize procedures of “data access and research transparency” (DA-RT) are also responding to the power of the Internet and the influence of journalists. A central concern in this effort is about the need to demonstrate the academic discipline’s superior “capacity for honesty” or “openness,” explicitly by comparison with “news reports” (Lupia Reference Lupia2014, 3). The underlying hope is that DA-RT standards will both enable and require scholars to provide the public with “information that is distinct from media commentary” (Lupia and Aldrich Reference Lupia and Aldrich2015, 1). The “fake news” scandals of 2016 are likely to reinforce this conceit. The appeal of the academic superiority complex ranges widely across political science, including not only the positivist’s posture of contempt for “mere journalism” (Niou and Ordeshook Reference Niou and Ordeshook1999, 96) but also the more general notion that “scholars study causes, journalists look at outcomes” (Hochschild Reference Hochschild2015, 115).

The academic superiority complex has not always been dominant. For an earlier generation of political scientists, the assessment of journalism itself was less negative. Ithiel de Sola Pool placed journalism and the social sciences on a par as professions sharing the same goal of offering practical advice to policymakers, as well as a shared reliance on case-study methods (Sola Pool Reference Sola, de and Rogow1969, 215–17). Harold Lasswell viewed political science as pursuing a more systematic style of inquiry than journalism, but believed that an intermediate genre was both possible and desirable (Laswell 1963, 189–93). Both Lasswell and Sola Pool identified Walter Lippmann as the model for (some) political scientists to follow (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1963, 206; Sola Pool Reference Sola, de and Rogow1969, 215). Lippmann, of course, was renowned as a public intellectual who had made original contributions, from outside the academy, to the study of political psychology and public opinion. His first job out of college was as a muckraker’s research assistant (Steffens Reference Steffens1931, 592), and he devoted a book chapter to the new investigative journalism’s influence on the 1912 election (Lippmann Reference Lippmann1961, Chap. 1).

The apparent shift from parity to superiority in political science’s self-image in relation to journalism in the last 50 years may be a function of significant changes in both professions. The “echo chamber” (Jamieson Reference Jamieson2008) and “infotainment” (Thussu Reference Thussu2007) aspects of political journalism are unappealing to the academic researcher, who thinks of political science primarily as a knowledge-building enterprise. They are fit for the purposes of promotion and amusement but not for a genuine effort at understanding. Yet precisely here—the disdain for promotion and amusement—lies the basis for a possible reconciliation of political science with investigative journalism. Both professions are seeking to provide essentially the same kind of public good, namely, the antithesis of “fake news.”

Those who try to imagine a plausible future for academic political research could, therefore, profit from reconsidering the presumption of investigative journalism’s inferiority. There seem to be two compelling and eminently practical problems prompting such a reconsideration. First, academic political science has an acknowledged problem with public relevance and public legitimacy, which in turn poses long-term threats to its public funding. Second, investigative journalism is hampered in its ability to produce public goods by an acknowledged problem with financial sustainability. If thousands of professional political scientists—enjoying salaries, research resources, and job security that many journalists can only dream of—were to adopt a posture of vocational humility, and to reorient themselves toward the goals and methods of investigative reporters, could we not arrange for the profession of political science and the public good of political knowledge to save each other at the same time?

Such a move would have a certain historical resonance. The American Political Science Association was founded in 1906, the same year in which Theodore Roosevelt gave “muckraking” journalism its name. Therefore, the need for simultaneous affinity and differentiation with respect to investigative journalism may be considered foundational to the discipline of political science. One way of getting over our superiority complex would be to return to those years for alternative methodological standards and practices.

Lippmann’s first employer and early mentor was Lincoln Steffens, the most famous of the muckrakers in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was hired in 1910 to help with work on Steffens’s most ambitious project to date, the “It” series (Hartshorn Reference Hartshorn2011, 185–86). Steffens’s objective with this project was to present a series of case studies and thought experiments designed to characterize a large, abstract, impersonal system of financial and political power. The first article, “The Boss of All the Bosses” (Steffens Reference Steffens1910a), offered an account of how J. P. Morgan had come to be “king of Wall Street.” The third article, “The Power of the Money Power” (Steffens Reference Steffens1910c), pursued a thought experiment about how much credit any businessman anywhere in the United States could or could not get if Morgan and other top financiers chose to intervene. The fifth and sixth installments (Steffens Reference Steffens1911a, Reference Steffens1911b) offered detailed case studies of a rogue vice president of a life insurance company in New York who controlled the firm through “dummy” directors, and of an Illinois railroad’s negotiation of a below-market land purchase from the state legislature. The second (Steffens Reference Steffens1910b) and fourth (Steffens Reference Steffens1910d) items in the series were more synthetic in nature, using a variety of interviews to reflect broadly on the nature of the American financial system, and more specifically on the politics of corporate governance.

Steffens’s overarching thesis was that the seat of American sovereignty was Wall Street, not Capitol Hill (Steffens Reference Steffens1910a, 292–93). Explaining how and why this dislocation had taken place required constructing a complex causal story out of numerous disparate facts about wealth and power. When trying to explain impersonal systems, however, abstract analysis could not do without narrative and imagination. “I am addressing the imagination,” he told his readers, “deliberately and rather boldly. I must. The eye cannot see this Thing; only the mind can picture it, and the mind perceives only when the imagination is stirred. So I would stir all men and women to look and to look hard” (Steffens Reference Steffens1910a, 293). Steffens’s case studies and thought experiments, then, were attempts to enlist the power of stories in a campaign of abstract analysis.

The “It” series, therefore, belies any notion that muckraking journalism was the product of brute empiricism. Although the muckrakers were obsessed with the power of facts (Tichi Reference Tichi2004, 69–72), the conceit that they were “naive realists” who “let the facts speak for themselves” (Crick Reference Crick1959, 83–86) puts too much credence in their rhetorical style and too little in their methodological substance. Combining imagination and detachment, narrative and data, may not come easy to most writers, academic or otherwise. But this combination is precisely what we should remember muckraking for: not merely telling stories but telling causal stories about the real world.

In his Autobiography, Steffens reflected that “facts have had to beat their way into my head, banging on my brain like the bullets from a machine-gun to get in; and it was only by being hit over and over again that I could let my old ideal and college-made picture of life be blown up and let the new, truer picture be blown in” (Steffens Reference Steffens1931, 238). In 1915, Max Weber described a similar process in the essay “Politics as a Vocation” when he claimed that “what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face up to such realities and to measure up to them inwardly” (Weber [1946] 1958, 126–27). Steffens’s thought and practice strongly suggest that the muckraking journalists of his era should be viewed by political scientists as much closer to Weber than to Matt Drudge.

Some practical steps could be readily taken toward a muckraking model of political science. In the realm of graduate-level instruction, methods courses might expose students to Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (Tarbell [Reference Tarbell1904] 1925) and Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography; in the latter, several unpublished research projects (e.g., on municipal government in Boston and Greenwich, Conn.) are discussed in detail (Steffens Reference Steffens1931, 592–97, 604–11). A few smatterings of the muckrakers’ work have been collected in modern editions (e.g., DeNevi, Friend, and Bookout Reference DeNevi, Friend and Bookout1973), but a new and more comprehensive edited volume for a graduate-student audience, including the “It” series, would be salutary. A graduate-level methods sequence might also incorporate segments on narrative style and audience awareness, whether through the muckrakers’ texts or those of others.

We currently inhabit a profession in which the “journalistic dimension to research has almost disappeared. Instead, most research is done entirely from behind a computer. . . . Unrealistic images persist in the literature because common sense, general knowledge, or field observation have lost the authority to discredit them” (Mead Reference Mead2010, 454). One possible response to this view is to move political science closer to the realm of investigative journalism which commercial media have increasingly been leaving unoccupied, thereby accenting the discipline’s public relevance and strengthening its case for public support. As investigative journalists whose purposes and methods bore some similarities to those of social scientists, the muckrakers offer a model of how to turn political realism into antischolastic practice. Those members of the profession who retain privileged access to resources such as academic tenure and research funding are perhaps better placed than anyone else in human history to realize such a model in practice.