“Professors, We Need You!,” lamented the manifestly well-meaning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in December 2013. Footnote 1 Academics, he warned, had become ever more irrelevant as they walled themselves off in silos defined by rigorous but impenetrable quantitative analysis. One of his key examples was the failure of scholars to anticipate the Arab Spring, because the degradation of area studies into “quantitative models and theoretical constructs” had rendered them oblivious. Kristof’s intervention and the subsequent contretemps for the most part followed a well-rehearsed script, provoking the usual array of outraged protest from political scientists and knowing endorsements from journalists and pundits.
My first response as outraged academics began to vent was a somewhat smug indifference. It all seemed utterly anachronistic. At the time of Kristof’s complaint, I had been blogging and writing for mainstream publications for more than a decade. On Foreign Policy magazine’s Middle East Channel, which I had created in 2010 as part of my Project on Middle East Political Science initiative, I had edited and published more than 450 policy relevant essays by more than 200 different political scientists. In 2012, the Middle East Channel had been named a finalist for a 2012 National Digital Magazine Award for its coverage of the Arab uprisings. That seemed pretty good for a political science community that had supposedly never been more irrelevant and insistent upon avoiding engaging with the public.
Foreign Policy publisher David Rothkopf blindsided me the next day, however, when he took to Twitter to declare that “Kristof gets why we at FP are dialing back academic contributions—too many are opaque, abstract, incremental, dull.” Daniel Drezner and I both left Foreign Policy shortly thereafter. Footnote 2 Yet the sad demise of the Middle East Channel ultimately had little significant impact on the public relevance of the political science community. I moved the Middle East political science content to the top political science blog The Monkey Cage, which had recently itself moved to the Washington Post. Others shifted their focus to rapidly proliferating alternative platforms.
Both the obsolescence of Kristof’s critique and the manifest resonance of his message deserve more inspection from political scientists. The “irrelevance of political science” meme has proven remarkably resilient, despite significant changes in the profession’s practices, norms, and performance. Virtually nothing seems to have changed in the public discourse about the irrelevance of political science since Joseph Nye’s Reference Nye2009 complaint that “the walls surrounding the ivory tower have never seemed so high.” Footnote 3 Noting the reality of greatly improved political science engagement with the public is important, but insufficient. Footnote 4 The endless recurrence of complaints about the relevance of political science itself demands explanation. How is it possible that, as late as 2011, 85 percent of scholars believe that the divide between the academy and policy is growing? Footnote 5 How could senior scholars and well-connected journalists believe that “scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world” at a time when this manifestly has never been less true?
The New Political Science Public Engagement
The rise of political science public engagement has been so massive and rapid that it is paradoxically easy to miss. A decade ago, very few political scientists had either the opportunity or the incentive to engage with the political public in a direct, unmediated way. Today, it would be difficult for a political scientist to not be able to find a platform to publish policy interventions. There is a dense and eclectic ecosystem of political science and international relations-focused blogs and online publications, where good work can easily find an audience through social media. There are multiple initiatives dedicated to supporting academic interventions in the public sphere, including the Scholars Strategy Network, the Bridging the Gap Initiative, and the Op-Ed Project. Footnote 6 Since its launch, the Monkey Cage alone has published more than 8,000 articles featuring nearly 1,500 different political scientists. Virtually every political or cultural magazine of note now offers a robust online section featuring commentary and analysis in which political scientists are well represented.
This has transformed publication for a broader public from something exotic to something utterly routine. In an earlier era, a small number of academic political scientists would serve in policy positions, testify before Congress, appear in the media, or publish Op-Eds in major newspapers. Such behavior was something extraordinary, however, and carried costs within the discipline by potentially marking those who engaged in such practices negatively. The public impact of scholarship was largely felt indirectly, when a major book might catch the attention of influential journalists or politicians. This was the professional equivalent of hitting the lottery: exciting and unexpected for those so blessed, and provoking jealousy and awe in equal parts among the rest. But this mark of distinction no longer really exists. Today, a very substantial portion of the political science profession engages directly with the policy public in some fashion. While there are no solid statistics of which I am aware, I suspect that a majority of political scientists today practice some form of public engagement (even if that is as low-intensity as having an occasionally updated Twitter account). How have these changes affected individual scholars, the field of political science, or the political world with which they have engaged?
Today, a significant proportion of professional political scientists regularly or occasionally engage in forms of online public engagement. This activity is clearly valued and actively encouraged by professional organizations and by the key foundations funding political science research. Footnote 7 Such behavior has become normative, not simply tolerated. In a recent survey of Monkey Cage contributors, two-thirds of respondents believed that the discipline valued public engagement, and three-quarters said the same about their departmental colleagues. Foundation grant applications routinely ask for a section explaining how the prospective grantee will communicate her work to a broader public. Footnote 8 Department chairs and promotion committees expect an ever-more sophisticated set of metrics to demonstrate impact, and while public engagement rarely substitutes for scholarly accomplishment (nor should it), its absence is increasingly noted. In short, the last decade has witnessed an extraordinary experiment in the form and function of political science. This represents an extremely significant change in the identities, norms, and behavior of a major portion of the profession. In late 2014, the innovative new media journalist and founder of Vox, Ezra Klein, devoted an article to exploring “how political science conquered Washington.” Footnote 9
Changing practice has also changed the aspirational norms articulated by major professional associations and foundations. Major plenary sessions at the Midwest Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association have spotlighted the need for more effective public engagement. In a 2015 survey of the APSA membership, 34 percent named “public engagement” as the most important role for the organization, making it the third-highest priority behind graduate student and junior faculty support and providing “focused intellectual networking around shared research interests.” The International Studies Association has an active online engagement caucus, and for several years has announced annual awards for outstanding achievement in International Studies blogging. Major foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Macarthur Foundation, and the Stanley Foundation have devoted significant resources to supporting public engagement by political scientists. Footnote 10 Indeed, many foundation calls for proposals now require a detailed communications and online dissemination strategy, and expect advanced impact metrics in the final reporting. Political scientists are now urged by department chairs, professional associations, newspaper columnists, and their peers to be more engaged with the public—even as an unprecedented number of them already are.
This new political science professional engagement with the public sphere is linked to profound changes in the information environment, particularly the rise of politically-significant and widely-followed online platforms and social media. The early 2000s advent of the blogosphere initiated a broader trend towards public engagement that has brought hundreds of political scientists into the “real time political science” of public and policy engagement. This new political science engagement has had some unintended consequences, some more negative than positive, but all of them having an enduring constitutive effect on the relationship between political science and politics.
I bring my personal experience as an academic, blogger, editor of several key publications dedicated to political science engagement, policy analyst, and director of the Project on Middle East Political Science to bear on the patterns and trends reshaping our discipline. In part, I do this through a close look at several recent examples of real-time political science engagement with policy, including the response to the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the debate over intervention in Syria’s war, and the response to jihadist movements such as al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State. On such issues, political scientists have been deeply and systematically engaged with both the policy community and the broader public. What is more, they have had real impact by providing critical information and context, helping to frame and define the key issues, and offering policy advice that informed administration decisions. They rarely found the experience fully satisfying, however, because of the limitations on their impact and the nature of the public discourse. Many retreated in the face of resistance from entrenched interests, powerful and influential voices arguing for competing perspectives, and the toxic nature of the broader public discourse on the Middle East. This experience of real-time political science offers lessons, then, on both the limitations and the prospects for the engagement priorities that increasingly shape the field.
Public Engagement on the Middle East
The Middle East is arguably one of the domains of the profession where the ethos of public engagement has been most advanced. The extent, nature, and intensity of the engagement by political scientists on the Arab uprisings offers a powerful rebuke to the suggestion that the discipline avoided the public realm. This is a remarkable change. For years, critics accused Middle East Studies of failing to offer policy-relevant knowledge or to effectively grapple with issues of public importance. Footnote 11 Many scholars of the Middle East did indeed refrain from engaging with policy public, whether out of a principled resistance to American policy or out of painful experience with the intense politicization of the issue. Others wanted to engage, but found few opportunities to do so. I created the Project on Middle East Political Science in 2010, partly in order to promote the effective public engagement by political scientists specializing in the Middle East. POMEPS, housed at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Luce Foundation, was well placed to encourage and support the subfield’s public and academic response to the Arab uprisings of 2011.
POMEPS worked across both the policy and the public arenas. To reach policy audiences, POMEPS took advantage of its central Washington, DC, location to put academic speakers directly into contact with policy makers at all levels. To reach the broader public sphere, I launched and edited the Middle East Channel as a dedicated subsection of Foreign Policy magazine’s online magazine designed explicitly to publish timely, relevant, and rigorous essays by political scientists specializing in the region. The Middle East Channel soon gained a wide following within the policy community, giving the political scientists writing about their research clear and direct impact on both internal policy discussions and public discourse. Policy makers often told me that they valued the depth, rigor and dispassionate tone of Middle East Channel articles, which contrasted (in their view) with the policy advocacy and blistering polemics which had typically dominated public discourse about the region. As noted above, in early 2014 POMEPS content moved to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
The Arab uprisings created an enormous new demand among both policymakers and the broader public for informed analysis of the region. Footnote 12 Middle East political scientists eagerly stepped up to take advantage of these new opportunities. Since 2010 I have edited and published more than 750 pieces of public scholarship about the Middle East by more than 300 different political scientists that have received many millions of pageviews (and that isn’t counting my own articles). What is more, the POMEPS publications are only a small slice of the thousands of pieces published on the multitude of other online platforms that have populated the new media landscape. The online platform Jadaliyya and the long-running Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) offered a home for left-leaning Middle East Studies rather than directly policy-relevant content. A wide variety of political science group blogs, including The Duck of Minerva, Political Violence at a Glance, and War on the Rocks, published content relevant to the Middle East. Think tanks established Middle East-focused blogs and publication series featuring content very similar to Middle East Channel essays: Carnegie’s Arab Reform Bulletin and Sada; the Brookings Institution’s Markaz blog; the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Fikra Forum; the Council on Foreign Relations suite of Middle East-focused blogs; the Atlantic Council’s Mideast Source and Egypt Source blogs; and many more. General-interest publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, New Republic, Huffington Post, CNN, and The National Interest significantly expanded their online platforms with a strong Middle East focus. It would frankly be difficult for an academic interested in engaging the public to fail to find the opportunity to do so.
All these new platforms created intense demand for content, which academics had ample opportunity to fill. Where journalists and other voices on the ground were best placed to provide daily updates on the turbulent politics in Arab transitional countries, political scientists had a number of distinctive contributions to offer beyond their credentials. Those who had been working in these countries for years had deep area expertise, and could provide essential background and context that might not be apparent to those new on the scene. Other political scientists could bring to bear their deep familiarity with theoretical models and comparative datasets that could offer perspective beyond a single country’s experience. Such analytical perspectives could escape from the tyranny of partisan divides, DC talking points, and constricted policy recommendations. These political scientists, along with a broader sphere of journalists, think tank analysts, and people from the region, collectively constituted a robust and focused public sphere around the issues related to the rapidly changing Middle East.
Crucially, this political science public sphere was not harnessed to a single political project. Many publications devoted to the Middle East embrace an activist and advocacy agenda tied to a distinct ideological or partisan perspective. The editors of the Middle East Channel and the Monkey Cage worked hard to ensure that contributions stayed close to the research, regardless of ideological orientation, and avoided traditional Op-Ed policy recommendations. There was no imperative to dumb things down, since the rigor and depth of the content was precisely what policymakers and the policy public found appealing. Nor was there a single political stance or advocacy agenda unifying their contributions. Political scientists engaged in this public discourse actively disagreed over fundamental issues such as the possibility for democracy in Egypt, the role of American policy, or the desirability of intervention in Syria and Libya.
This enormous increase in public engagement by political scientists specializing in the Middle East was not uncontroversial inside the field. The avoidance of advocacy rankled those within Middle East Studies who preferred a more activist orientation, which in this context usually implied criticism of U.S. foreign policy and a focus on Israel and the Palestinian issue. So did the focus on engaging U.S. policy concerns, which they felt led to co-optation and self-censorship. Within the broader field of Middle East Studies, the norms surrounding engagement with government have been especially controversial. Footnote 13 Many anthropologists objected to programs such as Project Minerva, Defense Department-funded programs on topics of national security interest, and the Human Terrain System, which sought to use scholars to inform the U.S. military about the dynamics of local communities in support of counter-insurgency operations. Many objected to any form of cooperation with government agencies on principled grounds. Political scientists have generally been more open to various forms of policy engagement, which has facilitated their greater impact on the policy realm but has also magnified divisions across academic disciplines.
The experience of political science engagement has not been completely positive, however. Over time, the novelty of this engagement began to wear off. Exhaustion began to set in among the academic community, along with frustration over the absence of policy influence. The exceptional fervor of the early Arab uprisings gave way to the slower, grinding realities of politics. Egypt’s military coup and the devolution of Syria’s uprising into an armed insurgency proved deeply divisive among academic communities. Many academics blanched at the seemingly endless recycling of the same arguments, or recoiled from the silliness of the debates of the day. At the same time, the advantages of traditional think tanks and partisan punditry began to set in, colonizing the spaces opened up by these new forms of engagement. Few academics could compete over the long haul with think tank experts, who faced different professional incentives and had far greater institutional support for relentless media outreach. Most academics simply did not have the time, resources, or incentive to make themselves available routinely to journalists or television producers, or to write short articles on a weekly basis.
I cannot say with certainty whether the experience of Middle East political scientists has been typical or unique. There are some reasons to believe that their level of engagement has been exceptional. The Arab uprisings presented a unique opportunity, combining enormous policy significance and great public interest with genuine uncertainty and a felt need for academic expertise. The Carnegie Corporation’s early support for the Project on Middle East Political Science meant that an infrastructure was in place to promote and support their efforts to respond to this demand for engagement. The Middle East Channel provided a direct conduit for Middle East focused political scientists to publish for a policy public, which other subfields did not enjoy. Still, the experience of the Monkey Cage, where the Middle East is only one part of a discipline-wide effort, suggests that the general conclusions are generalizable.
Impact: Did All This Effort Matter?
Precisely how to measure the value of all this engagement is not obvious. On many of the issues where political scientists have most vigorously engaged, there has been little noticeable improvement of either policy or public discourse. In some realms, such as Islam, the current state of political discourse frankly seems worse. This failure to deliver substantive improvements, rather than a failure to try, better captures the problems facing today’s political science profession. This, in turn, raises important questions about the reasonable expectations of impact and the different levels at which such impact might be felt. Changing policy is an unrealistic standard. Most policy engagement worth the effort is taking on deeply contested issues with powerfully competing views. I would argue that improving the quality of public discourse and changing norms and practices within the profession are worthwhile forms of impact in their own right.
What kind of impact is reasonable, or for that matter even desirable? The debates over policy relevance often slide imperceptibly between engaging with the broader public sphere and informing policy directly. Engaging both realms is important. Improving public discourse on important topics is significant even if it has no direct impact on policy outcomes. Academics might help to shape policy responses through private consultations that receive no publicity whatsoever. Either way, impact on hotly-contested intractable political and social issues is notoriously difficult to measure. Grant reporting and strategic plans tend to emphasize output rather than impact, because it is easier to quantify the number of articles published or pageviews received than more amorphous and fleeting shifts in the public consensus. Still, I believe that political science engagement has influenced policy debates directly and indirectly, has at times improved the quality of public discourse, and has reshaped the norms of the discipline in positive ways.
Impact is not linear, and we may currently be at an inflection point. The evolving norms of engagement could be pushing scholars into less productive paths. More active involvement in the promotion of engagement by professional associations such as APSA could be more damaging than helpful, while efforts to reward engagement could backfire by codifying quantitative metrics, which become more of a burden. More broadly, the new realities of the evolving online public sphere create very different challenges than those faced by the earlier generation. The problem is no longer creating platforms or encouraging participation—both now exist in vast quantities. The challenge now is more about curation and resilience: ensuring quality within a highly saturated market, while finding ways to sustain current forms of engagement without the heroic efforts of a few individuals.
Policy Impact
Influencing policy is an ambitious goal for any would-be policy entrepreneur, and academics often misunderstand the ways in which they might effectively intervene in the policy process. Footnote 14 As Robert Jervis once wryly noted, “there is nothing government hates more than to be well informed,” in part because such knowledge might require leaders to make unpopular decisions. Footnote 15 The absence of a demand for dispassionate knowledge is a common complaint: “Politicians simply do not like the policies that scholarly research supports, prefer policies (often put forward by charlatans) that better suit their interests, and seek to suppress or ignore evidence-based research that contradicts their own, or their ‘base’ voters’, ideologies.” Footnote 16
These observations, however well-earned by experience, are only true under certain conditions. Where issues are well defined and the stakes clear, academics will be unlikely to have significant impact. What would a politician gain from listening to an academic about Israeli-Palestinian issues, compared with the pressure she faces from multiple highly-invested and powerful players pushing for their preferred policies? Even good ideas must contend with the entrenched realities of electoral politics, bureaucratic inertia, sunk costs, and competing interests. Political scientists really should understand all of this.
Political scientists are also often a bit too quick to assume that their policy ideas are in fact good ones. Too often, academics eager to provide policy advice fail to understand how the policy process works, pitching unrealistic ideas to the wrong people at the wrong time. Have some sympathy for the harried State Department desk officer being told that she can only push Tunisians towards political reform by first resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Grand strategy advice will be of little use to a detail-focused desk officer. The day after the New York Times reports a Cabinet meeting on a topic, which has by that point been thoroughly worked over by multiple agencies and narrowed down to a limited set of options, is not a helpful time to pitch a new idea. Even the most sophisticated academics can overestimate the importance of comprehensive data analysis and innovative methodologies, and underestimate the importance of speed, comprehensibility, proximity, and direct responsiveness to the challenges at hand. Often, they suggest policies that were already tried long ago outside the public eye, or that fail to take into account political or bureaucratic realities. Footnote 17
But there are conditions that make real policy impact more likely. Where there is real uncertainty, as in the Egyptian revolution or the Syrian fiasco, conversations between experts and policymakers may push beyond the ritual outreach sessions. The rapid spread of a massive protest wave across much of the Arab world created a profoundly uncertain environment in which neither the stakes nor the relevant referent points were clear. The U.S. government lacked deep knowledge or internal resources on Tunisia, creating a real appetite for external advice. When I organized a private meeting with policymakers for three political scientists with expertise on Tunisia in January 2011, more than two dozen officials from multiple agencies crowded into the Elliot School’s Institute for Middle East Studies conference room to hear their analysis. Great uncertainty about the prospects for and the implications of the Egyptian uprising later that month inspired an unusual amount of outreach to scholars. In November 2013, half a dozen top policy officials joined a POMEPS workshop on Syria, and the papers written by academics were widely read and discussed inside the government. Footnote 18
Academics need to therefore enter the policy engagement arena with very limited expectations and a clear sense of their distinct value-added. They can provide expert knowledge and raise useful questions, and can offer a useful external, non-partisan, sounding board for policy officials looking for new ideas. The best venue for such engagement is often casual meetings over coffee, not formal State Department outreach sessions or tightly choreographed Congressional hearings. Footnote 19 On balance, academics in the Washington, DC, area will be more easily available for consultations on rapidly developing events, but simply answering phone calls and e-mails promptly can help to mitigate this. Footnote 20
Political scientists should approach the policy process with the same depth and rigor they bring to their field research. Washington is no less complex than Cairo or Sanaa, and academics who hope to have an impact on its workings should take the time to understand it on its own terms. That requires more than just reading the newspapers: it means immersion in the process, the cultivation of multiple contacts, and the effort to master the details of past and current policy efforts.
Even under the best of conditions, academics should not expect to decisively shape policy. But that is only one form of impact. Political scientists who appear in publications like the Washington Post, which are read inside the Beltway or tend to be included into the relevant daily briefings prepared by staffers, will likely be read by individuals working those issues inside the government. Policymakers often look for external validators for ideas they are pushing internally, and political scientists can have a real impact on internal debates by providing them with relevant arguments and evidence. Footnote 21
Policy engagement can also inform a much richer scholarly agenda rather than standing outside the research process. Many Middle East-focused political scientists write about American foreign policy without anything like the level of research and active observation that they bring to their regional cases. But Washington deserves every bit as much ethnographic immersion as does Cairo or Sanaa. Policy engagement is a two way street, and academics have as much to learn from their official interlocutors as the other way around. Meeting State Department or White House officials routinely builds networks of contacts and offers insights into the real concerns and tradeoffs facing the administration that are not always apparent to distant observers. Scholars learn as much from the policymakers as they teach, creating a positive feedback loop that can improve both.
Public Impact
The most direct form of policy relevance is not direct policy engagement but rather publication on platforms that matter for public policy discourse. The academic imperative to have an impact runs up against countervailing political and structural obstacles. Partisan actors or policy entrepreneurs seeking to advance their preferred policies have no incentive to revisit or change their views in the face of criticism. What is more, the voracious demand for content and the need to demonstrate impact to their employers means they have every incentive to publish the same argument over and over again. Academics who deliver a stinging critique of an Op-Ed or rigorously uncover the methodological flaws of a policy proposal are understandably dismayed by the need to then do the same thing repeatedly over the following months and years, to no evident effect. This results in a public sphere shaped by what I call the “Seinfeld Imperative” that guided the writers of the eponymous sitcom: no learning. Footnote 22
That does not mean that nothing changes, though. The remarkable evolution of the public sphere over the last decade provides the structural context for the new forms of political science engagement. Not so long ago, a handful of opinion pages and television bookers largely controlled the terms of mainstream public discourse. Political scientists rightly felt marginalized. When the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq in the summer of 2002, the large number of political science critics had few opportunities to contest the dominant media discourse. The strongest intervention came from a group of Realist scholars who managed to publish an open letter in the New York Times, to little effect (personally, I could only manage a single op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor). Footnote 23 Today, dozens of online platforms and publications, along with user-generated social media, contribute to a much more networked and less hierarchical political public sphere. This is in most ways a golden age for policy-relevant public spheres.
Today’s public sphere poses a problem very different from the one traditionally confronted by would-be academic engagers. The problem is not the unavailability or political closure of relevant platforms. Instead, the problem is an oversupply of policy-relevant writing platforms and a deluge of analysis, information, and argument in which it is not easy for the uninitiated to tell what is good and what is not. Footnote 24 The issue therefore becomes one of curation. Certain types of gatekeepers, such as widely-followed Twitter accounts or the editorial collectives of key platforms like the Monkey Cage, become crucial validators. This influence represents a new form of power, no matter how well-intentioned.
There are also insistent pressures on the platforms themselves. In a hyper-competitive online marketplace, the pressure for pageviews and revenues can create new incentives far from the original imperative of public engagement. Getting a provocative post featured on the Jon Stewart-era “Daily Show” or linked on the “Drudge Report” could be a heady experience and a major source of pageviews. The best research might not be the posts which attract such attention, creating dangerous incentives to produce exaggerated interpretations of data, misleading but eye-catching figures, or counterintuitive findings.
Information does not flow freely through this newly-networked public sphere, though. Instead, social media and online publication have tended to produce ideological clusters into which readers self-select. A political scientist who writes an article concluding that a Western intervention into Syria would likely succeed will find a receptive online community of like-minded analysts and activists. Her articles will be retweeted and praised by this small group, and as she engages in friendly online and offline banter with them she will become increasingly socialized into their group norms, inside jokes, informational networks, and roster of friends and enemies. Once there, she has little incentive to dissent from their analytical framework or policy recommendations—and less ability to speak to a broader, non-partisan policy public. The online public could therefore actually reinforce patterns of groupthink and discourage reasoned consensus formation.
Academic political scientists are generally at a competitive disadvantage in this sort of hyperactive public sphere. Think tanks typically have impressive communications departments, capable of disseminating research to an influential audience through their own platforms or through well-cultivated relationships with editors and television producers. Their fellows and resident scholars are explicitly evaluated on media appearances, blog posts, and other types of impact that would horrify tenured and tenure track scholars. Small wonder that think tank fellows appear so much more readily in the media: they always say yes, because their employers and peer groups value such appearances and their careers literally depend upon it. This relationship does not need to be purely competitive, however. Many think tank scholars produce outstanding research, and many academics have affiliated with think tanks (full disclosure: I was affiliated for many years with the Center for a New American Security, and now work with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Scholars should be willing to learn from the effective engagement practices of the think tanks, without losing sight of their different missions and imperatives.
Finally, it is worth considering the multiple publics within which this new engagement unfolds. Footnote 25 The U.S. government is not the only audience for policy relevance. Responses to online essays often come from a diverse pool of people with a broader range of experiences and insights than might be found in an academic journal reviewer pool. My own public writing has put me in contact with an enormous number of journalists, activists, policy makers, and students not only in the United States but across the region. This can be as uncomfortable for many scholars as it is rewarding. Political scientists accustomed to a certain degree of deference were often taken aback by the vitriol and contempt addressed towards them on Twitter. A public article about the failures of democracy-promotion programs will quickly invite scrutiny by the policy officials who run those programs. A public article about the failings of Egyptian activists will invite direct response from many of those activists. Writing against intervention in Syria invites endless tweets of photos of dead Syrian babies by Syrian activists. Engaging the public sphere really does mean engaging with those publics—not simply finding a bigger audience for pre-packaged arguments.
It is easy for academics to withdraw in horror from the experience of online “trolls” who delight in heaping abuse, diverting conversations, and polluting discourse. But political scientists should not conflate critical responses with trolling. Feedback from others with real expertise from other domains, or from influential voices within diverse discursive clusters, should be received with an appropriate level of humility. Political scientists in the public sphere should be ready to learn, not only to lecture. It would seem to be obviously important to understand how the objects of political science scrutiny view their own actions and causes. The instant feedback from the field should improve scholarship, even if it makes it less comfortable. It pushes against academic groupthink, challenges assumptions, and complicates simple analytical narratives.
There is another dimension to impact on the public sphere which transcends the outcome of any particular policy debate. Cultivating an ethos of engagement and modeling a scholarly public may be the most enduring of these new forms of public outreach. The scholars participating in these new forms of public discourse are changing the discipline through praxis. They could be changing the public sphere itself, by modeling scholarly norms such as the careful consideration of competing arguments and rigorous assessment of evidence within the online public. The best forms of political science engagement epitomize the ideals of rigorous argument, surprising discovery and juxtaposition, and direct conversation. Footnote 26
When Political Scientists Do Engage: Some Caveats
This discussion of the public engagement by Middle East political scientists significantly reframes the problem of the discipline. Rather than a reclusive field shunning the public realm in favor of abstruse modeling, Middle East political scientists have been fully and deeply engaged for the last half-decade in public scholarship. They have published hundreds, if not thousands, of policy-relevant essays derived from their research and aimed at a large public audience. Their efforts have received significant support from foundations, professional associations, and many universities. This has been mostly a positive development, one that has had positive effects on policy, on the public sphere, and on the profession itself. It would be wrong to fail to acknowledge the costs and risks as well, however. Political science engagement creates new norms and incentives which could potentially be challenging for both individual scholars and for the profession.
The first, and most obvious, of these caveats is the risk of politicization. The Middle East is a field that generates enormous passion on all sides, tempers often run hot, and scholars with an online presence run a constant risk of finding one of their tweets or essays at the center of a media firestorm. Footnote 27 The field was badly shaken by the saga of Steven Salaita, who had his tenured job offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn after objections to his tweeting about Israel during its 2014 war with Gaza. While ultimately settled out of court, this egregious violation of academic freedom badly frightened many scholars involved in public discourse, who could all too easily imagine their own tweets having a similarly destructive impact on their careers. This is not a case attesting to the uniqueness of the politics surrounding Israel, but rather indicative of increasingly prevalent trends in political controversy. Footnote 28
A second potential cost is simply the time required for serious public engagement. Time spent on the media or writing blog posts is time not spent writing peer-reviewed journal articles or books. The pressure to stay relevant can lead some scholars to spend more and more of their time on the public scholarship at the expense of other types of writing. I find the issue of opportunity cost a bit exaggerated, however. Footnote 29 Here, editorial collectives and of shared platforms like the Monkey Cage provide a valuable public good to the profession. Few individual scholars will thrive attempting to write a blog post every day or a substantive policy essay every week. But group blogs like the Monkey Cage, with an editorial collective vetting and editing a wide range of guest contributions, mean that a platform is available when events make a scholar’s expertise relevant. When Egypt has a coup, experts on the Egyptian military or on the comparative study of military coups have a ready made platform to publicize their knowledge (as well as editors reaching out to them encouraging them to do so). This model is much friendlier to the traditional academic lifestyle. Contributing the occasional 1000 word essay when appropriate should not be unduly taxing.
A third area of potential concern lies with the mundane realities of power, prestige, and hierarchy. Academia remains a hierarchical place defined by peer review, hiring committees, tenure reviews, promotion reviews, and the delicate political economy of conference and speaking invitations. The online world tends to reward different types of accomplishment and to produce rather different hierarchies. Younger scholars, digital natives accustomed to a socially mediated world, have always tended to do better than senior scholars in this realm. A relatively unknown junior scholar might very easily have 100 times the number of Twitter followers as her department chair, with all the access to media appearances, public attention, and conference invitations this entails. But now, once young scholars (such as, let’s be honest, me) have become senior scholars. The attacks, subtweeting, mockery, and play that is completely normal in online spaces suddenly become treacherous inside the discipline. An offhanded comment making fun of a senior scholar’s article might earn a lot of retweets and affirming Facebook comments, but might be unfortunately remembered when the aggrieved party sits down to write a tenure letter or to decide grant winners. Junior scholars should keep this in mind as they blog, but senior scholars also need to be prepared to show some forbearance. Footnote 30
Fourth, there is a widespread albeit misguided belief that quantitative and formal methods are less well suited to the policy engagement agenda. The impenetrability of mathematically-intensive political science journals usually finds its way into the standardized critique of the discipline. The supposed tradeoff between rigor and relevance is deeply misleading, however. Footnote 31 Economics journals are not known for their sparkling prose or aversion to mathematics. Some of the most important political science interventions in the policy debates about the Syrian war, for instance, derived from highly quantitative and rigorous large-n research about the dynamics of multiparty proxy interventions in protracted civil wars. Footnote 32 It has not been my experience that such research does not do well in the public realm. Footnote 33 Quite the opposite. Quantitative comparative research on insurgencies and civil wars proved extremely influential during my discussions with policymakers on Syria, while the comparative literature on democratic transitions and the quantitative work on military coups factored heavily in academic contributions to the debate on Egypt. Visually effective charts and figures are the lifeblood of the Monkey Cage and other sites featuring political science research.
Fifth, there are ethical implications attached to serious policy and public engagement. Footnote 34 By this I do not mean the ongoing arguments about the ethics of engaging with policy in the first place on the grounds of inevitable corruption by association with power. Instead, I have in mind a more consequentialist ethics: if against the odds a scholar does have impact, how should she assess the potentially negative impact of the subsequent policy outcomes? For example, I advocated for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, for a military intervention in Libya, and against a military intervention in Syria. Does that imply an ethical responsibility for the human costs of the wars which followed? Counterfactual arguments such as a claim that American intervention in Syria or non-intervention in Libya would have made things even worse are rarely decisive. The blood of many thousands of dead Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans haunts me, even if I had only a minor actual impact on events and even if my policy recommendations were in fact useful. With impact comes responsibility. Abstaining from the public realm does not avoid this ethical dilemma, however, since failing to offer advice which might have avoided catastrophe is itself a consequential choice.
Sixth, there is the risk that the demands of policy relevance could subtly shape scholarly agendas. Footnote 35 A desire for policy relevance will point towards certain types of questions. Some Middle East Studies scholars complain that access to the broader policy public requires silence or conformity on Israeli-Palestinian issues, which could in turn mean that the desire for public relevance will reduce attention to such contentious issues. More broadly, items at the top of the governmental agenda and the mainstream public sphere will receive greater attention, with the band of potential answers framed by the limits of acceptable policy debate. Terrorism and the rise of jihadist movements such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State is one powerful example of this dilemma. The challenge to American and global security posed by this jihadist movement ensures that it tops both official and public concerns. An engaged political science that responds to this demand for relevant analysis can and does offer a great deal of insight into the organization, ideology, and strategy of such movements. But this can come at the cost of exaggerating the place of the jihadists within the overall spectrum of Muslim politics, and of accepting, rather than challenging, dominant frames of the nature of the challenge.
Seventh, there are important issues surrounding the treatment of women online that should be part of the conversation about political science public engagement. Footnote 36 It is widely understood that women face disproportionate harassment online. Mainstream public attention to the issue crystallized around the 2014 “#GamerGate” episode, in which several leading female video game designers and journalists were subjected to a highly public campaign of online vilification and abuse culminating in a bomb threat at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards. Footnote 37 Many female political scientists will testify to the stream of sexist abuse and horrifying language they face when attempting to engage on social media. Their experience seems to reflect broader trends. Nearly 20 percent of women responding to a recent study reported receiving a sexually obscene message and 10 percent received repeated pornographic messages from unknown interlocutors. Footnote 38 A Pew Research Study found that one-quarter of young women online had been the target of sexual harassment. Footnote 39 When Jacqueline Gill spoke out online about a controversy concerning reported sexism in the field, she told Nature that “for the next 72 hours I got death and rape threats.” Footnote 40 How should the APSA grapple with the potential tension between promoting public engagement and promoting core values such as gender equality and advancing the professional interests of female scholars? Does the imperative towards public engagement under such conditions put female scholars at unacceptable risk?
The risks highlighted above are real, and should be addressed by the profession in a systematic way. But in the end, the political science profession really has no choice but to actively engage with the evolving public sphere. The profession is being changed through its actually existing, revolutionary forms of public engagement. A large share of the profession is already engaging regularly. If we believe in our research, we have an obligation to try to use it to improve the world. The real question is whether it will be done well or poorly, how much impact the efforts will have, and how the engagement will reshape the discipline. While such public engagement should be valorized and encouraged, it should not be subsumed into metrics-based performance evaluations. The more that scholars push content into the public to meet bureaucratic expectations, the more that it will become onerous rather than emancipatory. It will also be less effective. The online public will not be impressed by dry presentations of incremental research findings. A certain passion and commitment to a public sphere ethos is required to be good at this sort of thing.
Ultimately, the objective of such engagement should be a familiar one to readers of this journal: the cultivation of a political science public sphere that brings the discipline’s methods, findings, and rigor to the big issues facing national and global politics. As Robert Putnam so eloquently put it in his 2002 APSA Presidential Address, our “professional responsibility is to engage with our fellow citizens in deliberation about their political concerns, broadly defined.” Footnote 41 We should both celebrate the reality that we are engaging publicly at an unprecedented level, and are moving ever closer to actually creating a “more public political science.” Footnote 42
