Securing financial support for political science research is difficult and getting harder. University budgets are tight and government sources are drying up. Making matters worse, private foundations have cut back on their funding after the stock market declines of the past three years. Further ratcheting down the support for research, many private foundations are turning to “impact giving,” shifting their grants toward programs that offer the promise of quick, measurable real-world impacts.

One of the few bright spots in the consistently dreary news on support for political science research is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's programs for young and more established political scientists. If you don't know about these programs or have heard about them and haven't applied, you may be making a mistake–a costly one.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (the largest foundation devoted exclusively to health and health care) made an unusual calculation about a dozen years ago: health care represents one-seventh of the economy and yet those who were card carrying political scientists and studied health policy and politics could fit in a conference room (and a small one at that). The Foundation (or RWJF for the au courant) decided that generating innovative analysis to explain critical puzzles in health policy–from the failure of National Health Insurance to the difficulties in containing national health care expenditures–required a significant expansion in political science research and investment in human capital within the discipline.

Don't stop reading, even if you've never studied health care policy and politics. RWJF realizes the need to recruit political scientists with diverse academic backgrounds who have no significant experience in health policy or politics. The Foundation's objective is not to seduce political scientists away from the profession; just the opposite. Its aim is to encourage the most promising and accomplished researchers to remain or become leaders within political science and to use health policy and politics as one of their main sites of research.

RWJF launched in 1992 two programs–Scholars in Health Policy Research and the Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research–that represent one of the most ambitious and effective efforts by a private foundation to encourage new research ever seen in the political science profession. To date, the Foundation has supported the education and development of 117 Scholars and has presented Investigator Awards to 118 individuals involved in 95 different research projects. In both programs, political science is one of three social science disciplines targeted for particular attention; economics and sociology are the other two.

The purpose of the Foundation's funding is extraordinarily broad and enabling: build long-term intellectual capacity in the analysis of public policy and, specifically, the policy and politics of health and health care. The Investigator Awards and Scholars Programs do not insist on projects targeted to narrow topics using a predetermined methodological approach. Rather, the aims of these programs are to recruit new blood, broaden the range of topics, avoid the slide into narrow methodological disputes, and introduce clearer vision to increasingly hermetic and self-referential debates within the orbits of health policy and political science research. In a remarkable move, the Foundation has defined success (as David Colby noted in a recent RWJF Anthology) as “creat[ing] public intellectuals whose works are read by a broad audience and whose influence extends beyond a narrow academic readership.”

Here are some brief details (more information on both programs can be found at www.RWJF.org).