I am grateful to the editors of Perspectives on Politics both for publishing my Reflections on how the professionalization of political science has squeezed out policy-relevant parts of the discipline such as security studies and also for inviting five colleagues with different perspectives to comment on it. Despite the editors’ generosity, my original piece was limited to 11,000 words and my response to the comments has to be even shorter which means I could not, and cannot, address every important issue they raise here. Fortunately, I am writing a book on this topic in which I go into greater detail about the causal mechanisms I think are at work and provide even more evidence that they are having the effects I suggest, particularly in the changing relationship between security studies and our discipline.

Before responding to some of the specific points my colleagues make, let me reiterate my core argument: The decreasing policy-relevance (narrowly defined as the willingness of scholars to offer concrete policy recommendations) is the direct result of the professionalization of political science. A number of internal disciplinary dynamics tend to privilege method over substance but war or periods of heightened threat can counteract them, at least for a time. Regarding the objective of professional social science, the problem is not so much any specific methodology as the privileging of some techniques preferred for internal disciplinary reasons over broader relevance. I illustrate these dynamics through with the changing disciplinary fortunes of national security affairs.

Steve Walt asks whether the security environment really plays the role I think it does. We could trade anecdotes back and forth about the post-Cold War health of various policy-relevant academic organizations and I would point out that at his home institution only the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center remains of the once rich policy-focused community at Harvard, with the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies now defunct and the Center for International Affairs evolving into a more academically-focused research center than it was in the past. But rather than trade war stories, let’s look at the data: The policy relevance of scholarship in leading political science and sub-field journals has decreased markedly after spiking during the First and Second World Wars and the early Cold War.

Vietnam hardly undermines my argument because it was precisely the fact that many scholars came to believe that a Communist victory there would not seriously threaten U.S. national interests, as Kenneth Waltz among others famously argued, that makes it difficult to suggest that this was a high-threat period that justified the continued mobilization of the professoriate. Finally, after ten years teaching in professional schools, I am less sanguine that they will continue to serve as bastions of relevance in a sea of disciplinary navel gazing, a point recently made by James Pierson, a former foundation executive who played a key role in supporting policy-relevant security studies during its last “Renaissance.” ^{Footnote 1}

Erik Voeten is one of a new generation of younger scholars trying to recreate a different Golden Age in which cutting-edge social science techniques were regularly and successfully brought to bear on policy questions. Heirs of Charles Merriam, these “New Progressives” have taken to cyber-space through blogs and new on-line journals to broadcast their research to the wider world in a shorter and more accessible fashion than traditional scholarly journals. Like a recent American Political Science Association task force, their assumption seems to be that all we need are more adroit communication strategies and mechanisms to bridge the Ivory Tower/Real World gap. ^{Footnote 2}

I wish these New Progressives well but I think that the tensions between science and policy are much deeper than they acknowledge. This is why the history of previous efforts to find a durable balance between broader relevance and disciplinarily defined rigor is not encouraging. In the late 1930s Robert Lynd chronicled the death of the original Progressive attempt and in the 1960s David Easton acknowledged the failure of the Behavioral Revolution to permanently reconcile cutting-edge methods and sustained practical engagement. ^{Footnote 3}

This brings me to Ido Oren’s critique. Reading it I found myself agreeing with large parts of it and so wondering where he and I actually disagree. As I pointed out in my original piece, wartime often fosters optimism about the reconcilability of cutting edge-techniques with policy-relevant work. As Oren notes, government support often contributes to the former’s development. He mentions many examples to which I would add the development of Econometrics and Game Theory at the U.S. Air Force-sponsored RAND Corporation during the 1950s and 1960s. ^{Footnote 4}

But U.S. government support does not always have the pernicious effects he posits. For example, it played a significant role in the development of Area Studies as a policy-relevant interdisciplinary enterprise during the early Cold War. ^{Footnote 5} But despite that Government “demand” for the work of Soviet and other regional specialists, methodological developments within political science left behind that approach based upon deep historical and cultural knowledge of particular areas of the world, marginalizing one of the parts of our discipline that policymakers find most relevant. In other words, one can accept (and I do) Oren’s history without accepting his conclusion that we scholars should widen, rather than narrow, the gap.

Helen Louise Turton questions whether my theory of the waxing and waning of policy relevance has “legs” (or better, fins) and can travel across the Atlantic. Arguing that because European international-relations scholarship eschews quantitative techniques and formal modelling yet is still largely irrelevant to British policymakers, she questions how general my theory is. If my argument was that the problem was just math and models, she would be correct. But what I object to is not particular methods but rather the privileging of methodology and other internal disciplinary-driven research agendas over broader problem-oriented work. I am not by any means an expert on the various Continental academic approaches to international relations and security studies but much of it that I have read substitutes the methods and jargon of the humanities—which are suffering their own well-document crisis of relevance—for those of American social science with the same result: a privileging of preferred disciplinary approaches over broader relevance. ^{Footnote 6} Given that, Turton is mistaken about the irrelevance of my theory to developments across the pond.

Finally, Turton, Voeten, and Laura Sjoberg all make an important point about policy-relevance involving much more than just being of use to government policymakers. I agree with this point even though it may not have come through in my original piece, given my focus on the clearest manifestation of policy relevance: offering policy recommendations that ultimately influence government policies. There are certainly other forms of policy relevance beyond that. Indeed, especially in a democratic political system a scholar’s vocation for politics can involve educating students and informing the wider public about pressing issues of policy. An engaged scholar could also serve with non-governmental and private organizations rather than just through government service. To do so, however, he or she will have to rise above his or her narrow and parochial disciplinary perspective and embrace an approach that is problem-, rather than method-, driven and that defines rigor as providing the best answer possible to substantively important questions rather than using the academic technique du jour.