The Tensions in American Political Science, Past and Present

From its inception, the discipline of political science in the United States has been shaped by a desire to be as rigorous a science as possible, on the one hand, and to serve American democracy, on the other. ^{Footnote 7} From the profession’s formation in the early twentieth century, most of its leaders have conceived of science as involving extensive, accurate data collection used for systematic testing of hypotheses derived from theories that generally have taken one or more of the natural sciences, and sometimes economics or psychology, as their models. The object of this work has always been in part, as Charles Beard argued in 1908, “to seek the truth” about politics “simply in the spirit of science.” ^{Footnote 8} But like most political scientists, Beard also contended that such research would enable the “teacher” of political science to convey “necessary” knowledge that would prepare each pupil “as a citizen of this great nation” to engage in wiser “thought and action.” ^{Footnote 9}

In the past I argued that historically, these disciplinary goals have often proven to be in conflict. In fact there have been three conflicts: first, scientific “truth” about politics has often appeared to discredit instead of affirming the feasibility and desirability of democracy; second, scientific truth has also appeared to challenge many of the claims Americans advance to celebrate their country; and third, some political scientists have concluded that serving democracy and serving America are in many ways two very different, sometimes opposed projects. Most U.S. political scientists, however, have still presented themselves as simultaneously seeking to advance science and to serve democratic citizens and American institutions.

For example, after leading a very successful APSA Presidential Task Force, Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs argued that “political scientists have responsibilities and obligations in return for our privileges. One of our responsibilities is to maintain rigorous standards for research … For more than a century, though, political scientists have also appreciated that … (we also) have broader responsibilities to use our research capacities and teaching opportunities to scrutinize the health of our democracy.” They contended it was part of “our duty as citizens in a democracy…to pursue rigor in the service of the public good.” ^{Footnote 10} Like these scholars, many political scientists have not expressed concern that there might be deep incompatibilities in these goals, that the pursuit of rigor might not serve democracy, America, or the public good. I believe they have not focused on such possible conflicts in part out of sincere conviction, in part because they have wished the discipline to appear valuable in the eyes of the American government agencies, private donors, and mass publics that have provided its material bases.

Today, despite its name, the American Political Science Association rarely expresses its aims in overtly American-centered terms, but its basic goals remain the same. Its official “core objectives” begin with “promoting scholarly research and communication, domestically and internationally,” followed by “promoting high quality teaching and education about politics and government.” The objectives conclude with “serving the public, including disseminating research and preparing citizens to be effective citizens and political participants.” ^{Footnote 11} The assumption remains that by discovering and disseminating truth about politics and government, political science research and teaching will in fact serve “the public,” however defined, and equip “citizens” to participate effectively in “politics,” presumably democratic politics allowing for civic participation—rather than discrediting the feasibility and desirability of democratic citizenship. These objectives also express the assumption that political science research and teaching go hand in hand, a long-fragile belief that has further eroded in the last two decades, as I will discuss.

There are two notable patterns in the discipline’s history related to the tensions between discovering scientific truths about politics and aiding American democracy. On the individual level, many leading American political scientists, including Charles Beard (who was president of the American Political Science Association before becoming president of the American Historical Association), Arthur Bentley, Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, David Easton, Gabriel Almond, and Robert Dahl, stressed making political science more scientific early in their careers; but all came to place greater stress on serving democracy later in their lives. ^{Footnote 12} Yet on the collective level, the discipline has over time given greater priority to becoming more truly scientific, rather than to contributing to democracy or America—while continuing to seek to minimize the tensions among those goals. ^{Footnote 13} That trend has persisted despite periodic outbursts of resistance, such as the protests of the Caucus for a New Political Science in the late 1960s. The predominance of the quest to become a true science contributed to the ascendancy of rational choice theory and more sophisticated quantitative analyses through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. ^{Footnote 14} I judged in 1996, however, that rational choice theory was coming to be seen as an important source of “tools and hypotheses” for the discipline, but not as a credible “grand unifying theory” of politics. The profession seemed headed instead into an era of intellectual pluralism in which the strongest emphasis would be on more empirically rigorous testing of hypotheses that were parts of “middle-level” theories of particular political phenomena. ^{Footnote 15}

What has happened since then? At the turn of the century, political science experienced another uprising, this time termed the “Perestroika” movement, protesting what its participants, including me, saw as the discipline’s undue privileging of quantitative methods and rational choice theory over other forms of analysis, and its neglect of important political questions not readily amenable to such methods. ^{Footnote 16} By then I saw a further specification of the tension between the discipline’s scientific and its public service aspirations. Often the only questions that could be answered at what was taken to be the highest level of scholarly rigor were relatively narrow, technical aspects of larger issues—so the discipline ended up saying very little of substance about those issues. ^{Footnote 17}

Robert Putnam’s 2002 American Political Science presidential address, “The Public Role of Political Science,” exemplifies the predominant response of the profession to these concerns. Putnam insisted that various scholars, including me, had overstated the tensions between “rigor and relevance,” and that “scientific rigor and public relevance” were in fact “mutually supportive,” just as “the founders of the APSA” had believed. ^{Footnote 18} But he agreed that “in recent years” the “salience” of the goal of contributing to “public understanding and the vitality of democracy” had “dimmed” in the profession, though he also believed that political science was “nearing the end of a period in which activism has been de-emphasized and even de-legitimated by our professional norms.” ^{Footnote 19} He advised his “more scientific” colleagues, “Better an approximate answer to an important question than an exact answer to a trivial question,” and his “less scientific” colleagues, “More precise is better.” ^{Footnote 20} He called for a political science that used many methods, engaged many disciplines, and that ecumenically included both “problem-driven” and “method-driven” work while returning to “a phase of more active engagement in the world.” ^{Footnote 21}

Putnam’s positions—that early twenty-first century political science did need to seek more active engagement with real-world problems and needed to do so in methodologically pluralistic fashion, but that all scholars should see the quest for scientific rigor, defined chiefly in terms of “counting and modeling,” as overwhelmingly “supportive” of these goals—capture well what I see as the prevailing sensibilities in American political science today. The discipline’s leaders endorse intellectual pluralism and the need to address substantively important questions more strongly than many did prior to the perestroika “revolt,” while largely adhering to the view that formal modeling and quantitative methods, now more often including randomized field experiments, generally if not always represent the most rigorous forms of political science. David Laitin, for example, responded to what he understood to be perestroikan concerns by arguing that narratives had useful roles to play in social science in conjunction with formal models and quantitative analyses, but he cautioned against “a pluralism that sees formal and statistical research as only two of a thousand flowers that should be permitted to bloom.” ^{Footnote 22} They were instead essential to modern social science endeavors. Though many disciplinary leaders agree, a number are more skeptical than Laitin and some influential rational choice scholars have often been about rational choice theory as a candidate for a grand, unifying theory of all politics.

Notable in this regard is Jon R. Bond’s presidential address to the Southern Political Science Association, published in 2007. Bond professed his wholehearted commitment to the scientific method as conventionally understood. But just for that reason, he was “not persuaded that rational choice theory will provide the Newtonian breakthrough for political science” because he saw it as “nonfalsifiable.” ^{Footnote 23} Bond maintained that though we can test whether actors pursue particular goals rationally, we can always imagine an alternate rational choice model in which the actors’ goals are defined as doing whatever they are in fact found to have done. So we cannot falsify the theoretical claim that all behavior can be deemed rationally instrumental to the achievement of some goals. At most we can find that some behavior was not rational for the goals we thought, perhaps incorrectly, that the actors held. While that finding may lead us to reconsider our characterizations of their goals, it leaves the question of whether we should regard their conduct as rational unanswered. Bond concluded that rational choice provides particular models that are falsifiable, but no testable general theory of politics.

Because many of the most scientifically committed political scientists like Bond have now reached this conclusion, and no alternative grand theory of politics has subsequently emerged, the discipline now displays considerable intellectual pluralism, though as much by default as by conviction. Scholars seeking to achieve a more scientific political science have felt compelled to identify that quest simply with the use of scientific methods, not with any particular substantive or theoretical focus. At the same time, those commitments have continued to arouse anxieties that too much modern political science research is purely “method-driven” and so does not illuminate important political problems in ways that can inform and advance debates and deliberation in the public sphere. ^{Footnote 24}

Yet despite Robert Putnam’s hope for an upsurge in publicly-relevant research, and despite general disillusionment with the most sweeping ambitions of rational choice theorists, the different camps are still by no means equal in size or status. Political science has continued to trend toward the predominance of research that is most focused on achieving rigorously specified and tested findings, with only secondary concern for how far those findings are relevant to major aspects of contemporary public issues. That focus may explain why there is a tiny number of contemporary American political scientists whose professional research results have made them prominent contributors to public debates. The best-known political scientists, such as former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and the now-notorious David Patraeus, are famous for what they have done in public service and private life, not for their political science scholarship.

In recent years, the two closest candidates for “public intellectual” standing due to their scholarly contributions were probably Nobel Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom and Putnam himself. As a crude measure of their public impact, Putnam’s most cited work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, has close to 35,000 citations on Google Scholar, while Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action has over 20,000. Yet Bowling Alone primarily addresses the forms of social life that are and are not conducive to the formation of “social capital.” ^{Footnote 25} It rarely directly addresses politics or most public issues, though social capital is found to be conducive to political engagement. The same is true of Putnam’s more prescriptive book, Better Together: Restoring the American Community. Its emphasis is on initiatives by community groups and businesses in civil society, not on government action—not even on why government action would be inappropriate—though it cannot avoid discussing government as a sector pertinent to these initiatives. ^{Footnote 26} In comparison, though Ostrom’s seminal book has a wide audience among scholars and policy-makers, and though it does assess government responses to public resource issues among other alternatives, it has not put a signature idea into public circulation in the manner of Putnam’s “bowling alone” and “social capital” concepts. Insofar as it has had a broader impact, the book has conveyed a similar “civil society” message suggesting that local voluntary associations are often better than national governments or markets for resolving resource development and allocation problems. ^{Footnote 27}

There are, to be sure, a few other political scientists whose ideas published in their scholarly works have affected important public debates. Most notable, perhaps, are the late Samuel P. Huntington, whose Clash of Civilizations book and preceding article together have more than 23,000 Google Scholar citations, and his student Francis Fukuyama, whose End of History book and article have more than 18,000. ^{Footnote 28} But unlike the Putnam and Ostrom books, few regard those works primarily as examples of modern, “professional” political science. And while the New York Times once called Princeton’s Robert P. George “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker,” and George’s ideas are laid out in his books, those works, too, are not seen as exemplars of modern political science, and in comparison with the writings of Putnam, Ostrom, Huntington, and Fukuyama, they are not read nearly so widely in the profession. ^{Footnote 29} George is most influential due to his advisory roles with Catholic leaders, government agencies, and the Federalist Society.

Apart from Putnam and Ostrom, the work of “professional” political science that may have had the greatest public impact in the United States since 2000 is Donald Green and Alan Gerber’s Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Your Vote Turnout, which has become the Bible for contemporary campaign organizations. ^{Footnote 30} But this book, with roughly 420 Google Scholar citations (though their related scholarly articles add close to 1500 more) has influenced the tactical conduct of political professionals far more than it has public understanding of politics. Even so, by getting campaigners to knock on doors and talk to people instead of running more television ads, it may have done more than most academic works to inspire active participation in democratic self-governance.

Not only is the list of American political scientists whose professional scholarship has had a substantial public impact very short; it also has a political tilt that is understandable but disturbing. Even though the authors of these works are by no means all conservatives or neo-conservatives—only George and at times Fukuyama have been politically active in those circles—their messages have nonetheless been broadly consonant with the conservative tide in American politics over the past generation. These works tend to celebrate many traditional American values and institutions, to express concern about loss of older civic virtues, and most importantly, to favor decentralized, civil society solutions to common problems—not big government, certainly not any radical egalitarian reform agendas. It is not surprising that political science scholarship that is more in keeping with the dominant political mood of an era should attract more attention than work that is out of step. But if one believes that there are at least aspects of that mood that warrant criticism, then it is questionable whether these patterns show that modern professional political science is doing all it ideally should to improve public life.

To be sure, the still-recent creation of this journal, Perspectives on Politics, has provided a venue in which political scientists often draw on their professional research to highlight its pertinence to major public issues in accessible fashion; and political scientists are also contributing to the ever-burgeoning blogosphere, sometimes influencing discussion in the mainstream media and broader public debates. ^{Footnote 31} But these impacts still appear limited. They have not visibly altered the predominant tendencies in most published political science research.

The patterns I discern in recent American political science fit broadly with the global trends portrayed by John E. Trent in his 2009 presentation to the World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Santiago, Chile. Trent, a former Secretary General of the IPSA, based his remarks on his work as co-editor of a book series on the state of political science around the world and on papers presented at a 2008 IPSA conference in Montreal devoted to the condition of international political science.

Trent argued that, globally, twenty-first century political science benefits from much better databases and improved quantitative methods than in the past. But rather than being entirely devoted to such quantitative work, the discipline still displays “an eclectic, pluralistic set of approaches to political analysis.” ^{Footnote 32} There is neither methodological nor theoretical consensus. Trent perceived that in particular “rational choice theory was generally condemned” as a candidate to be an overarching theory of all politics, and he also saw “appreciation of historical sociology and normative theory” on the rise. ^{Footnote 33} Nonetheless, Trent reported that more generally, “almost all the political science research paradigms are severely questioned,” and tensions “run deep between ‘scientific’ and ‘political’ orientations,” with a “mainstream/non-mainstream division and deprecation between quantitative (e.g., empirical/scientific) versus qualitative (e.g., philosophical/institutional) practitioners.” ^{Footnote 34}

Overall, Trent portrayed a fragmented, over-specialized “discipline in search of its soul and out of touch with the real world of politics.” He called for political scientists to have a greater sense of their responsibilities to be relevant to the concerns of “the public and the political class, society and democracy.” ^{Footnote 35} He also thought, however, that these difficulties were mainly with “the theory and research side of the discipline, rather than our teaching.” ^{Footnote 36}

His presentation drew a sharp response from former IPSA president and leading German political scientist Max Kaase, who noted that “many important scientific inventions were initially made without any concern for any broader social relevance” and that “differentiation and specialization lead to both academic and human progress.” ^{Footnote 37} He thought any undue emphasis on quantification was primarily a North American, not a global problem, and he did not see it as a great problem anywhere, because he saw “research specialization” as “a conditio sine qua non for progress in political science knowledge creation.” ^{Footnote 38} Yet Kaase also stressed, contrary to Trent, that the growing numbers of university students in many places, combined with the need for specialized research, was “probably increasing the distance between teaching and research.” Specialization, while good for “the development of the field,” was “clearly a challenge to teaching.” ^{Footnote 39}

The Trent-Kaase exchange suggests that the trends discernible in American political science are more than simply a U.S. phenomenon. It also raises the vital issue of whether teaching is endangered by these trends; and though I am in many ways sympathetic with Trent, here I think Kaase’s perception is correct. More than I recognized twenty years ago, developments in higher education are producing new challenges in all disciplines to older models of professors as both researchers and teachers. These developments appear particularly threatening for the research and teaching contributions of the discipline of political science, in ways that may well be damaging for the profession’s contributions to the public sphere. To understand why, it is useful to review some of the recent transformations in higher education that are becoming all too familiar.

The Transformations in Higher Education and Implications for Political Science

The most important transformations are, first, the expansion of modern higher education that has fostered increased teaching needs at precisely the same time that more and more colleges and universities have sought to become research centers, not just teaching institutions. ^{Footnote 40} Second is the potentially lethal combination of higher university costs and declining public funding. The resulting revenue challenges have produced cutbacks in non-income-producing programs and much higher tuition rates—accompanied by increased reliance on potentially lucrative university-corporate partnerships and an embrace of bottom-line focused corporate managerial styles within universities. ^{Footnote 41} Third, and most notorious, is the increased reliance on adjuncts, graduate students, and other sorts of lesser paid, non-tenure track faculty members to do the bulk of the instruction in American research universities and even many American teaching-oriented institutions.

At the same time, within the ranks of tenured and tenure track faculty, fissures are deepening. Often because cutbacks in faculty size have accompanied rising number of students, many state universities and community colleges are requiring their standing faculty to teach more, even as they also increase adjunct and graduate student teaching. But scholars in more affluent research universities (including me) are being asked to do less teaching than in the past. ^{Footnote 42} Such research scholars are, however, often expected to do more to win grants from foundation, corporate, and government research funding programs, even as most of these are shrinking. So many scholars devote their time chiefly to income-generating centers rather than to classrooms or to forms of research that do not attract large grants. ^{Footnote 43}

As Joanna Scott and I have stressed, these transformations are massive in scale: in 1960, three-quarters of college instructors in the United States were full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty. By 2009, only 27 percent were, with adjuncts and graduate students providing most of the rest of the teaching. ^{Footnote 44} And in the last 30 years, the full costs of four-year public universities in the United States has risen almost 500 percent, while the main source of student financial aid for these institutions, Pell grants, rose much more slowly—so that these grants only cover 33 percent of public university costs, versus almost 70 percent in 1980. ^{Footnote 45} As students and their families have paid more and more for less and less teaching by senior tenured faculty members, sharp criticisms of the costly scholarship and teaching being provided by modern American colleges and universities and calls for substantial restructuring including elimination of tenure have mounted. Strikingly, the authors of many of these critiques are themselves leading university administrators and academics. ^{Footnote 46}

These transformations pose major challenges to all disciplines and all institutions of higher education, even though there are important variations: top private universities and a few elite public research universities are less burdened than most public institutions. Scholars in the STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—disciplines, along with health researchers, are faring better than most in the humanities and social sciences. But throughout higher education, trends are working against maintaining the “symbiosis of multiple purposes” long achieved by having scholars who were both researchers and teachers, with great academic freedom to do both, as the typical faculty members in post-secondary institutions. ^{Footnote 47}

There are good reasons to think that increasing the distance between research and teaching has real costs. Even in the STEM fields, one recent study found that graduate students who taught displayed greater improvement in their research skills than graduate students who did not teach, as evaluated by how their research proposals improved over time. A qualitative survey of economists produced a similar finding. ^{Footnote 48} But many education reformers, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank associated with former Texas governor and recurrent presidential candidate Rick Perry, have argued that “transparency and accountability” can be improved by instead “emphasizing teaching and research as separate efforts in higher education.” ^{Footnote 49} They are thereby adding political reinforcement to the modern patterns in which more academics are becoming either researchers or teachers but not truly both.

Even so, it is chiefly market competition for top research scholars—competition that education scholar Roger Geiger terms “the arms race”—that has generated the trends toward providing the most prestigious researchers with reduced teaching. Of course this means that often demands for college-level instruction are met by assigning to other scholars teaching loads so great that doing serious research becomes difficult if not impossible. ^{Footnote 50} And the comparatively light teaching duties at top American research universities are being achieved and preserved through more visible embrace of ties to wealthy donors, corporate and individuals on which universities feel they must rely. For example, the leading public university political science department in the United States at the University of California–Berkeley is now officially the “Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science,” named for an alumnus donor who made a fortune in mineral development. A top private university, New York University, houses “The Wilf Family Department of Politics,” named for a family of real estate developers and businessmen that includes several NYU alumni. Undeniably, both public and private universities in America have always partly depended on gifts from wealthy alumni, often recognized in the naming of buildings and endowed chairs. But the recent overt identification of prominent departments with particular private donors symbolizes how this reliance is becoming a yet more significant part of modern American university life.

Although these developments affect virtually every facet of academia today, they interact with the traditional and still-present tensions in political science in ways that are distinctively consequential. However its goals may be conceived, political science is the one discipline above all that cannot avoid being “political.” Politics is our profession’s subject matter. Whatever methods its practitioners employ, whatever the particular substantive foci of their research and teaching are, political scientists are always likely to produce results that are controversial from some political point of view—either because the results question aspects of the political status quo, or because they affirm aspects of the political status quo, or simply because they emphasize some aspects of politics and neglect others. Even attempting to do “apolitical, pure science” research on politics involves making a sharply contested political choice. There is no safe option.

These realities have been dramatized for political scientists in recent years by the repeated and partly successful efforts of conservative members of Congress to reduce or eliminate National Science Foundation funding for our discipline. ^{Footnote 51} Journalists have perceived these initiatives as hostility to studies “tainted by left-wing biases.” ^{Footnote 52} That may well be true; but their largest target has been the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies, the survey research many regard as the bedrock of “professional” quantitative political science. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn claims that even such work has “little, if anything, to do with science,” and he has urged that NSF funds go to “finding solutions for people with severe disabilities, or the next generation of bio-fuels, or engineering breakthroughs,” leaving “political science” to “pundits and voters.” ^{Footnote 53}

The American Political Science Association has responded in various ways, including its Task Force on Public Engagement appointed by President John Aldrich and chaired by Arthur Lupia, on which I had the pleasure to serve. ^{Footnote 54} Its report includes many salutary recommendations, including creation of an Outreach Director and Outreach Committee, new public education ventures utilizing modern media, and strengthening writing in the discipline. But change will be difficult. And this recent history confirms that whenever scholars discuss politics in any way, there is always the inescapable risk of upsetting persons in power. Again, that is a risk that political science, more than any other discipline, cannot avoid without ceasing to exist.

I have also long contended that precisely because governments, major media firms, private corporations and non-profit think tanks of various stripes can and do hire skilled researchers to document and analyze politics, the profession of academic political science should see itself as having special responsibilities that only heighten these risks. ^{Footnote 55} The intellectual agendas of all researchers employed outside academia inevitably reflect the interests of the government agencies, media outlets, corporations and think tanks that finance their studies. If academic political science is to make a distinctive contribution, its agenda should therefore be different from the work that such non-academic researchers are doing. That often means asking questions powerful interests do not wish to see pursued.

For even if academic political scientists simply strive to provide value that others cannot, they will often feel compelled to question the empirical and normative assumptions and the adequacy of the data and analyses offered by these other, often more “public” researchers, along with those of scholarship generated within the discipline. And when academics seek to explore significant political topics that non-academic researchers neglect, much of their research will turn out to focus on the circumstances of those who are not wealthy, not powerful, and not socially influential—because those groups are not able to commission research in non-academic venues. But if political scientists pay special attention to the poor and to marginalized communities, they are likely to be accused of, at best, not addressing what better-off Americans sees as the nation’s most pressing concerns, and of, at worse, doing nothing beyond spouting liberal biases.

Yet even though political scientists should nonetheless address such neglected subjects, let me emphasize that academic political scientists should also feel a special responsibility to pursue many topics that are already standard fare in mainstream “professional” political science. Some political research questions are neglected by non-academic researchers because they present rarefied technical challenges that can be overlooked when the push is to get quickly to “useful” results. Other political science projects address historical issues or require extensive data collection that government agencies, corporations, and think tanks may not see as sufficiently connected to their immediate agendas to warrant support. I have long believed that political scientists should see themselves as “gadflies” in the tradition of Socrates, asking uncomfortable fundamental questions. But it would be wrong to deny that much irreplaceable work is done and must be done by academic political scientists who seek instead to be professional “worker bees,” industriously contributing to the collective project of building up a body of reliable scientific findings about politics. The lesson of the NSF controversy, again, is that current trends endanger both political science worker bees and gadflies. To many politicians, all the buzzing of all the different types of academic insects sounds the same—and they just start swatting.

Nevertheless, the fact that even “mainstream” quantitative political science is coming under criticism only shows further how the longstanding internal tensions in American political science, and the trends in the discipline’s responses to those tensions, are now interacting with external developments in American higher education in ways that justify concern for the profession’s vitality. The contested but predominant internal trend to give priority to the goal of becoming more scientific has been bolstered by the external trends separating research from teaching, and by the increasing need to rely on non-governmental research funding, which goes primarily to what is seen as more “scientific” work. But the profession’s research contributions may well prove to be narrowed and skewed by these developments. As top research scholars are increasingly relieved of many of their teaching responsibilities, it becomes easier to pursue highly technical, often esoteric dimensions of the discipline’s internal theoretical debates, since those topics are generally not suitable for undergraduate courses. At the same time, however, pressures to focus on dimensions of their research agenda that have value in the eyes of private individual and corporate donors may mount. These conditions increase the risk that research will be excessively tied to donor agendas, or unduly remote from any major substantive political debates, or perhaps even both.

And though political science courses remain popular at most American universities, fewer and fewer political science instructors are now having their teaching fueled by the insights gained from designing and executing significant research projects on a continuing basis—even as the work of research scholars in political science is becoming less informed by experiences of learning student concerns, of seeking to have something to say to them, and of finding how to communicate that content effectively. Widely publicized recent controversies such as the uproar over the University of Illinois’ revocation of a tenure offer to Steven Salaita also suggest that non-tenured teachers of political topics, and indeed many of the tenured faculty members who work at financially-stressed public institutions, may be endangered if they teach about politics in unpopular ways. ^{Footnote 56} Those anxieties matter, because as is true of political science research, any political science teaching worthy of the name must examine controversial political matters and must present unpopular views concerning those subjects. The more teaching about politics is done by teachers who feel themselves to be in highly vulnerable positions, wary of offending taxpayers, governmental officials, or corporate donors, the more likely it is that political science teaching will be done in ways that simply canvass conventional perspectives, rather than promoting wide-ranging critical reflection and deeper public understanding of important political concerns.

I do not wish to exaggerate these dangers. My perception is that most political scientists in America today still feel very free to pursue the research that they regard as important, while most teachers of political science in modern American higher education classrooms, regardless of rank, still feel they can challenge students with a range of critical perspectives. But it is entirely possible that for many of us, these beliefs are already partly a form of denial, because at some level we know that we run risks if our research or teaching goes very far in unpopular directions. It also seems likely that if current trends continue, these pressures on political science research and teaching will loom larger. It is notable that one of America’s leading beneficiaries of higher education, President Barack Obama, is now among those most vociferously championing new rules to make institutions of higher education more accountable for their performance. ^{Footnote 57} The chorus of criticism is broad and growing.

The Road Ahead for Political Science?

In many ways, to be sure this is healthy. These heightened criticisms of higher education are being accompanied by initiatives to improve the accessibility and resources for higher education in important regards, such as President Obama’s proposals to fund enrollments in community colleges. ^{Footnote 58} And I wish to stress that it is not only politically unrealistic, it is not defensible for political scientists or other academics to seek to be wholly immune from accountability to the governments, private donors, and citizens who supply the resources that enable us to do the research and teaching that we do. Being a professor of political science or anything else is not a matter of divine right. But it also remains true that to study and teach about politics well, political scientists must be conscious of the dangers of having their agendas or their messages dictated closely by any powers that be, including government officials, wealthy corporations, foundations, or individuals, or even democratic public opinion. Political science’s contribution to the public sphere must not become only the provision of an echo chamber for the voices of the powerful, rather than the supplying of valuable new political facts or freshly conceived ideas.

Yet if political science is to fare better in fulfilling its core missions, the road forward cannot simply be a road back. The trends I have sketched are largely not reversible, nor would many types of reversal be desirable. Although I do not agree with David Laitin’s suggestion that all political science research should include formal models and statistical analyses, he is right that it is silly to disdain statistical empirical work and formal modeling. Over the years I have come to believe that political scientists can better serve themselves and others by reflecting more than we often do on how we can combine and build on different sorts of work, instead of arguing about which sorts are better. In recent writings I have suggested that political scientists of all methodological stripes should bear in mind the larger “spirals of politics” in which their studies fit—the paths of political development in which contexts first generate ideas for change; then movements and coalitions form to achieve those changes by gaining control of governing institutions (or tearing down some and creating new ones); and then the policies and institutions of governing coalitions reshape contexts, often generating new political conflicts and developments. ^{Footnote 59} Perhaps too optimistically, I think that by attending to how the subject matters of our particular studies fit into broader patterns of political development, we can see more clearly how research projects that utilize different methods and that focus on different phases of politics can nonetheless inform each other and collectively contribute to cumulative advances in understanding politics. At a minimum, I suggest that both the discipline’s intellectual quests for rigor and significant findings, and its mundane quests for material support, counsel in favor of exploring vigorously how different types of work in political science can be combined to amplify the discipline’s overall contributions.

If that message makes me sound like a recent convert to a (very hard to achieve) kind of disciplinary ecumenicalism, I also still insist that such amplification requires us to recognize that scientific rigor is not defined by systematic data collection and hypothesis testing alone. Just as fundamentally, rigor requires intellectual honesty about the presumptions that drive our research, about how certain our findings really are, and about what bearing the substance of our research really has on the important substantive political concerns that it is the discipline’s mission to address. The intellectual honesty that is the heart of true science also involves communicating the aims and results of our work, in our scholarship and in our teaching, in terms sufficiently comprehensible to our various audiences so that they can judge whether we are doing work that matters in their eyes. Our research must be presented in ways that at least have the potential to be understood, assessed, and utilized productively in the public sphere. For if the reality is that what we are doing, accurately understood, simply does not matter for the public sphere in the eyes of virtually all its participants, it is likely that we are deceiving ourselves about whether the political knowledge we are providing is really worth our efforts, or anyone’s support. Self-deception is not good science.

Yet seeking to insure that our work is communicated effectively may well only intensify the pressures arising from external trends. Many in the public may be even more dissatisfied with us when they really comprehend the sorts of questions we are pursuing and the sorts of findings we are producing—particularly when our questions and findings are highly relevant to them, well-conceived and executed, and deeply disturbing. The main response of contemporary American academics to these risks, apart from ignoble choices to write on obscure topics in impenetrable fashion, is to seek to protect academic freedom by maintaining the institution of tenure. It appears increasingly likely, however, that we American academics will not be able for too much longer to continue to justify having jobs for life, without even mandatory retirement, when no other sector of the American economy enjoys such privileges. If so, our battle will have to be not for tenure but for long-term contracts that can protect academic freedom without seeming to evade accountability.

But more fundamentally, we have to use our professional protections and privileges well. This means doing our research in ways that do more to unite the contributions of different flavors of political science and that also address more effectively topics that matter to participants in modern public spheres. It also means something else. In America today, perhaps much more than in other nations, political scientists particularly need to resist the pressures and temptations to move further away from the researcher/teacher model of academic life and toward disciplinary segregation into those who are almost exclusively researchers and those who almost exclusively teach. Despite the volley of recent critical studies, the evidence from enrollments is that many parents and teachers still greatly value political science teaching in institutions of higher education, probably more than they value the great bulk of our research. Many seem unconcerned if our teaching raises serious questions about American institutions, values, and practices, so long as we teach in ways that are informative and thought provoking, not heavily polemical and one-sided. Most value the development of capacities for critical, independent thought, and most recognize that this goal requires challenging inquiries into conventional ways of conducting politics. At the moment, most in the American public are not too happy with the state of contemporary American politics—so many are receptive to hearing at least some critical perspectives. And in an era of declining resources, political science sorely needs the public support that teaching helps to generate.

Indeed, given the limited public impact of most late twentieth-century and twenty-first century American political science scholarship, it is possible, even likely, that today we American political scientists contribute to the public sphere more extensively and distinctively through our teaching than we do in any other way, just as many in the public appear to believe. As I have suggested, there is also good reason to believe that combining teaching and research, difficult as it can be to do, ultimately strengthens both—meaning that if we in American political science strive harder than we have been doing to resist recent trends and maintain, or indeed strengthen, our commitment to being active researchers and active teachers, then both our research and our teaching may become more valuable to more people. If for much of the twentieth century, leading U.S. political scientists decided late in their careers that the quest to be more scientific should not in the end take priority over the quest to strengthen democracy in America, then early in the twenty-first century, it may be time for political scientists to decide humbly that the best path to strengthening our contributions involves not only doing more rigorous, more interconnected and cumulative, more substantively significant, and more accessible scientific research. We must equally strive to maintain and strengthen our teaching, seeking to combine and do both teaching and research as well as we possibly can.