WHAT ROLE FOR EXPERTS?

Scholars of public opinion have long noted that mass-public attitudes are shaped by elites but filtered through how much information is received (Lenz Reference Lenz2012; Zaller Reference Zaller1992). In the foreign-policy realm, in which I work, we might expect these effects to be especially strong, given the lack of information and the distance from ordinary lives. An experimental paper by Guisinger and Saunders (forthcoming) found across a range of issue areas that elites can shape public attitudes. When opinion is polarized along party lines, people tend to rally around the position of their party. When elites are united in their views, informational effects tend to dominate. This suggests a role for experts, particularly in areas that have yet to be firmly politicized on partisan grounds. (However, this is slight solace for those like me who work on climate change, which has become a “political football.”)

In most of these accounts, the elites that do the persuading are politicians, not experts. However, in their work on political anxiety, Albertson and Gadarian (Reference Albertson and Gadarian2015) showed that when people are fearful, they also gravitate toward those with expertise, such as the Centers for Disease Control in the midst of a health crisis. However, for political scientists, it is unclear whether we have a recognized skillset to which the public will turn during crises. (If the public thinks our main stock in trade is predicting electoral outcomes, we are doomed!)

HOW MIGHT WE COMMUNICATE WITH THE PUBLIC?

In recent years, several factors—such as universities seeking to build prestige and junior scholars searching for visibility—have led more political scientists to share their research findings with the wider public. Perhaps most important has been a cultural shift within the discipline to be relevant to policy and the wider public through efforts including the Bridging the Gap initiative. ^{Footnote 2}

Social media—and blogs in particular—is at the heart of that enhanced public engagement (on the increase in blogs in political science, see Drezner Reference Drezner and Yoder2008 and Drezner and Farrell Reference Drezner and Farrell2008). I started blogging in January 2005, joined Facebook in October 2007, and joined Twitter in September 2010. All three have served as important social-media platforms for dissemination of academic work as well as public engagement as a citizen.

On each platform, I have a slightly different persona, given the nature of the medium and the audience with whom I interact. My blog is a professional outlet directed mostly to professional audiences. My voice on Twitter and Facebook has evolved in the past year: Twitter has become more of a platform for political expression and Facebook is an outlet for more targeted efforts to combat fake news and political incivility.

COMMUNICATING VIA BLOGS

In 2005, I started blogging with several friends on the politics and policy surrounding the global AIDS crisis. Given the niche topic, our blog had a limited audience. In those pre-Twitter days, blogging was mostly about fostering a conversation with commenters and trying to have our work noticed and mentioned by other blogs.

I found my voice through blogging, tested out new ideas, collected data points for subsequent research, and weighed in on current policy issues. Because HIV/AIDS was a new area for me, blogging served as a learning device. Whereas placing opinion pieces had been time-consuming and often unsuccessful, blogging allowed me to immediately reach an unknown audience without an editor.

Blogging obviously has changed significantly. A decade or so ago, there were many independent blogs on which bloggers wrote freewheeling posts in response to events and whatever caught their fancy. For junior academics, there was some associated stigma because time spent blogging meant less time for peer-reviewed publications.

Since then, blogging has become more formalized in traditional journalism and a more accepted part of the academic portfolio. Indeed, with the emergence of high-profile outlets such as the Monkey Cage—what a friend described as the American Political Science Review of blogs—blogging has become an almost expected complement to academic research, especially for junior scholars.

With the line between journalism and blogging blurred, blogging for more established outlets became more like placing an op-ed piece. An idea must be pitched and the piece must be accepted and then revised with significant editorial guidance. Moreover, as blogging became more established and visible, mistakes could be costly to an academic reputation.

In a traditional academic blog like the Duck of Minerva, for which I write, the readership tends to be fellow academics. The comments sections are more focused on scholarly debates. Even for an established blog, the readership is usually small, except for an occasional post that is referenced by more established bloggers, journalists, or those with a large Twitter following. It is public engagement of a sort, but it is largely limited to specialized audiences.

After mainstream media outlets brought blogs into their fold through in-house hosted writers and partnerships with blogs such as the Monkey Cage, the audience and visibility for some blogs expanded dramatically. In 2014, the Monkey Cage estimated its page views at a million a month, soon after it migrated to the Washington Post (“Inside the Monkey Cage” 2014). To put this in perspective, during the past year, the Duck of Minerva’s total page views reached about 440,000.

The mainstreaming of blogs has somewhat tamed the medium. With competition from Twitter, diminished novelty, and the integration of blogs and the blog ethos into journalism, it seemed by 2015 that independent blogging had become tired. Many long-time bloggers felt burnt out.

The 2016 election changed that. The rise of populist nationalism, including but not limited to Donald Trump, has made blogs relevant again as scholars and the public grapple with the significance of recent events. Although Twitter has an immediacy for breaking new stories, an informed appreciation of an issue simply cannot be developed in 140 characters or even a threaded series of tweets.

At the Duck of Minerva, for example, we have seen renewed interest by both readers and contributors in coming back to blogs to understand the rise and significance of Trump as well as similar political figures in Turkey, the Philippines, and beyond. The simultaneous increase in nationalism in multiple country contexts also has encouraged subfield and disciplinary cross-conversations in a way that has not been seen in some time. The United States is perceived as an example of a wider phenomenon and not a unique subfield.

Whereas all of these issues can and will be explored in peer-reviewed journals, blogs allow people to work through the topics, apply insights from previous research, and post their ideas quickly. In the two years it may take for peer-reviewed articles to be published, there may be dramatic, even existential changes that affect the liberal order, American democracy, the European project, and more.

Blog posts will continue to serve as important teaching tools for our colleagues. The application of scholarly ideas in short form to contemporary events is ideal for students who sometimes fail to see the relevance of more esoteric theoretical arguments. In that sense, our blogging is performing a public service.

However, if the goal is to influence the wider debate as a public intellectual, the impact of an occasional blog post is unclear. Page views, likes, and retweets should not be confused as a proxy for influence, except on the margins of public debate. This might be enough for many, but the tendency is to pursue self-promotion as an end in itself rather than a means to an end.

COMMUNICATING VIA FACEBOOK

With scholars using blog posts on the Monkey Cage more as a way to disseminate findings from their long-form research, I have seen the migration of more people to Facebook as a medium for give-and-take discussions with small groups of those they know. The advantage is that people can have more private, candid conversations with those of similar training and expertise.

Moreover, as platforms like Facebook are increasingly where people—particularly younger people—receive a significant share of their political information (Mitchell et al. Reference Mitchell, Gottfried, Barthel and Shearer2016), we also have seen them become vulnerable to so-called fake news—that is, stories that have no factual basis.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, I decided that it was my civic duty to weigh in on people spreading fake posts, to address falsehoods, and to identify better sources. As a middle-aged academic, I have a Facebook feed full of friends from college and graduate school. Although there is methodological and theoretical diversity among those friends, they skew center left. Given the abundance and fragmentation of media, the critique—from Chris Hayes and others—is that we all live in cocoons of like-minded individuals, where we increasingly receive “news” and information from like-minded sources. This can have a deleterious impact when lies and falsehoods are circulated by ideologically inclined sources.

Having grown up in Texas, I also have a large contingent of high school friends, including many conservatives and some representative of the anarcho-pacifist left. Therefore, I had an opportunity to take part in and encourage cross-ideological conversations. From the far-right corners of my Facebook feed, I have seen inflammatory posts such as the burning of Korans. From the far-left corner, posts often come from outlets such as Russia Today and Alex Jones and Infowars. In both corners, I found many posts to be untrue and from untrustworthy sources.

In deciding to weigh in on posts that I found problematic, I was not convinced that the writers would change but I believed their audience might find my contributions persuasive. I thought our shared history of growing up together would give me a fount of goodwill on which to draw. I thought they (and their readers) might take me seriously if my tone was respectful.

I was not guided initially by a sense of efficacy. Later, I read about work on social media and political participation by Katherine Haenschen, a recent PhD in communications from the University of Texas. She conducted experiments on Facebook that suggested that reminders about elections could boost voter turnout (Haenschen Reference Haenschen2016). Emerging studies like these suggest the persuasive and political power of peer-to-peer online engagement.

My sense is that we are in the early stage of knowing how substantive views are affected by online engagement (Anspach Reference Anspach2016); the role of motivated reasoning in people’s willingness to embrace fake news (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler Reference Flynn, Nyhan and Reifler2017; Kahan et al. Reference Kahan, Landrum, Carpenter, Helft and Jamieson2017); and whether there are antidotes to such reasoning processes (van der Linden et al. Reference van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Rosenthal and Maibach2017).

However, as a citizen and professional political scientist, I did not wait to see what the body of research said about the efficacy of online interventions. Rather, my purpose was to engage in person-to-person exchanges—the idea being that if I led by example, then others might come forward and hasten a new ethos of cross-ideological conversation online. At the same time, these efforts might encourage people to be more discerning consumers of online content. I did not have any illusions that it would succeed, but I felt compelled to act.

I also connected this to a wider public purpose: what I thought was the gravest threat to the United States that I had ever witnessed—the rise of Donald Trump. In my mind, his incivility and lack of respect for democratic processes and institutions constituted a mortal danger to the American experiment. I state this not as a partisan but rather as a citizen. I was concerned enough at the prospect of his election that I voted for Marco Rubio in the Texas Republican primary.

The dynamic in which a major-party political candidate and now sitting president is perceived as a fundamental threat to democracy is challenging for academics. How can we differentiate between what might be partisan disagreements over substance and goals from wider threats to the political order? Partisan attachments must stay out of the classroom and our academic writing; however, concerns about the country’s democratic project and the wider international order are not the preserve of one political party. I continue to wrestle with that conundrum, but it must

be part of the conversation.

In the aftermath of the election, I have reflected on whether my time was well spent. On one level, my approach was informed by my work on framing and social movements, in which I found that persuasive appeals are more effective when attached to value commitments in which target actors already believe (Busby Reference Busby2007; Reference Busby2010). In my online engagement, I relied on shared history and a respectful tone as a way to foster openness to my messages.

However, I often appealed to facts by hyperlinking articles based on news sources that I believed to be accurate. To my dismay, findings from political psychology suggest that fact-based argumentation potentially can backfire and reinforce misperceptions (Nyhan and Reifler Reference Nyhan and Reifler2010; for contrary findings, see Wood and Porter Reference Wood and Porter2016). Insights like these have increasingly led me to believe that appeals to reason alone are not likely to work. Going forward, values-based and emotional arguments rooted in faith and democratic norms may be as potent, if not more so, forms of engagement.

With social media becoming a more pervasive part of our professional and private lives, we must determine how best to make use of our time as the era of hyper-nationalism and fake news unfolds.